Judd Owen lives in Decatur with his wife and two children.  He has served on the Enrollment Committee and Annexation Committee for the City Schools of Decatur.  He teaches political science at Emory.

The second of a two-part series.

Yesterday appeared my obituary of large-scale annexation for Decatur.  It was an idea that was pushed hard by some of the City’s political leadership without having been adequately evaluated. The most massive blind spot was the impact on the school system (CSD) and on school taxes in Decatur.  The idea was originally presented as being about tax relief, but with scant attention paid to the impact on the larger school side of residents’ tax bills.  Once CSD got involved and its own evaluation of the proposal replaced the deeply flawed one of the City’s paid consultant, it became clear that the residential annexation would not be offset by the commercial annexation, resulting in a massive financial loss to the schools and the Decatur tax-payer.  CSD opposed residential annexation (while favoring commercial annexation), but the final revised plan for commercial-only annexation died in the state legislature owing to lack of sponsorship.

A fitting end.  But the whole experience did bring with it some genuinely beneficial results.  First it made many people (myself included) aware of how important is for City and CSD officials to collaborate and communicate.  Improved collaboration between City and CSD has been a topic of conversation in subsequent elections for City Commission and School Board, and the process for evaluating the impact of annexation on CSD was vastly improved the second time around.  CSD formed an annexation committee, with representatives from CSD, the City Manager’s office, and the Decatur community.  That committee recommended “continued collaboration in development of an annexation plan that benefits the schools and students.”

A complete obituary of annexation, however, would have to admit that it’s not entirely dead.  The City Commission just last week approved the annexation of five single family residences.  So far as I have been able to confirm, it was approved with no consultation of CSD.  It was approved with no discussion of CSD by the Commission at the time they voted—with no discussion at all, or even the hearing of the City Manager’s report, which in any case did not mention CSD.

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Judd Owen lives in Decatur with his wife and two children.  He has served on the Enrollment Committee and Annexation Committee for the City Schools of Decatur.  He teaches political science at Emory.

            Decatur Metro directed readers last week to a brief story in the print edition of the AJC reporting that Decatur City Manager Peggy Merriss had said that “potential annexation of two heavily commercial areas outside the city limits has apparently died quietly in the legislature.”  I have been keenly interested in the push for large-scale annexation that has just died, and I’ve followed it closely since I first learned of it in October 2008. So I decided to write an obituary.

I have tried always to be even-handed and objective, but it will come as no surprise to anyone that has talked to me on the subject or seen what I’ve written when I say, “Thank God it’s dead. Rest in peace.”  Before going any further, I eagerly say that I have great respect for the City’s leadership that has built the wonderful city that attracted me several years back. They have clearly done an amazing job with foresight and will and intelligence. Decatur is not the great place it is by accident, and I’m grateful.

In returning to my obituary, however, and because it is an obituary, I will let myself be blunt.  Large-scale annexation was ill conceived from the start, and it deserves the fate it got.  The poor conception of the idea was out of all proportion to the effort and political capital that was spent to make it reality.  On June 26 2008, the AJC’s April Hunt quoted Mayor Bill Floyd as saying that, as home values plummet, more income from taxes on additional commercial and industrial real estate would help stabilize property taxes. Floyd said: “Quite honestly, you’re talking about our survival as a city, when 60 percent of our income comes from property tax.”  A consultant from UGA was hired to conduct a study.  The City Manager’s office spent many hours preparing a large-scale annexation plan.

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