Which means potentially lower county taxes for city residents!

At tonight’s Decatur city commission meeting, Mayor Bill Floyd took a minute at the end of the hour to note the Georgia Legislature’s recent passage of House Bill 1508 during the just-concluded legislative session.

The bill requires that DeKalb County calculate the “particularized millage rates” of four specific district services: basic police services (traffic unit, patrols, etc), non-basic police services (SWAT, bomb squad, K-9 division, etc), parks and recreation, and streets and road maintainable.

Each “special services tax district”, which basically is either a DeKalb city, the county, or “Atlanta in DeKalb”, then has the ability to say “no” to any of these services by sending a certified letter to the DeKalb CEO and commissioners by September 2010 and thus not pay the associated tax next year.

The mayor did not mention which specific services Decatur might “opt out” of (My guess would be basic police and parks and rec), but did say that the planned action by the city would probably knock 1 1/2 points off the county millage rate for City of Decatur residents.

Hooray for not paying for things you don’t receive anyway!