The City of Decatur along with 9 other local governments throughout the US are acting as pilot sites for a program called “Open City Hall”.  The idea behind the project is to provide a way to         increase and diversify citizen engagement in important community issues.  “Open City Hall” will provide feedback through a specially structured internet-based service that will present position statements followed by “Yes/No” questions and an opportunity to comment.

If it works, we would hope it would augment and diversify civil, civic engagement, and more specifically: (a) facilitate easy and convenient participation in community issues, (b) impede a single voice from dominating the public discourse, and (c) improve the efficiency of decisions makers to synthesize large amounts of diverse feedback.

The goals of this Open City Hall Pilot program are to assess the extent to whether this suite of services can:
Assist local governments in addressing important problems with the key stakeholders;
Increase and diversify the amount of public participation on important community issues;
Augment the tools that government leaders and decision makers use to analyze and synthesize the opinions of citizens; and,

Improve the quality of citizen participation and the public’s perception of government-led decision processes.
We will pilot the program for approximately three-months.  There will be a link from www.decaturga.com to the site.  We will be able to get reports that synthesize and collate the results and provide a geographic map of responders.

The Governor has demonstrated once again that he apparently doesn’t understand how local governments work, what their purpose is, how their budgets are established, and how the decisions about revenues and expenditures are decided. He seems to be following closely in the footsteps of Speaker Richardson who proved last year, without any doubt, that he doesn’t understand or have a regard for local governments, nor does he care to. The Mayor of Atlanta gets hammered for a shortfall in revenue and she is vilified, but now, less than four months after the Governor signs his approval of the state budget, his revenue estimates are off by almost 2 billion dollars, that’s with a B, and there is no outcry. It looks to me like someone should ask how that happened. Was the economy not in trouble in March? Should not the buck stop at the governor’s desk? But then the governor says it’s not his fault; it’s those incompetent city and county folks who have messed everything up.

The administration strategy has become very clear. Although I’m a little slow, it has now become obvious even to me. They begin to cut, not their expenditures, but the funds they direct to local governments. The focus of those cuts in the last few years has been education, but beginning last year they shifted their focus to all local governments. Case in point, funds they were collecting and returning to our citizens under the homeowner tax relief grant program are now being withheld forcing local governments to either cut more expenses or increase revenues with a tax increase.

How does this work? An example; they cut state funds to education, then when we, as a community, decide we want to keep our Spanish classes or music and arts or whatever, and decide to raise our taxes to compensate for the shortfall, they point the finger at us and announce our budgets are out of control. We are accused of incompetence concerning managing or deciding how we should spend our money. As the Governor stated “(local governments) have never approached it from the standpoint that they have to tighten their belts”. I invite the governor to come to my community, stand in front of our citizens and tell us we don’t know how to manage our budget. We carefully plan our budgets every year and make hard choices, in front of citizens (not in some back office at the capital), about cuts and tax increases. If we get out of alignment with our constituents, there are two opportunities every month (our council meetings) and an election every other year for us as citizens to straighten it out. And we can’t hide in China or on a plane to Spain. Our mayor’s office is out on the street corner.

So I ask the governor to work with us, not blame us. The solutions to our problems are not under the gold dome, they are out here on the streets with us. I ask the Governor to join us in Decatur for a forum to address this divisive approach. Let’s talk, not point fingers.

It appears that state revenues for the year will be as much as one billion dollars below projections. Times are hard and we are all struggling and wondering when will it end. So the State of Georgia, with the responsibility to the Governor must find a way to cut expenses. A few years back the state created a program where it would collect taxes from us and redistribute them to local governments (cities and counties) in the form of a Homeowners Tax Relief Grant(HTRG). Great idea. We as homeowners get some relief from property taxes, which incidentally is the major source of revenue (school’s and city) for the City of Decatur. Now how do get this relief? Local governments issue a tax bill with an item shown as HTRG which reduces our tax bills (about $251.96 for me). Most governments in Georgia have already issued tax bills and listed the credits. Local governments get this money from the state by sending a bill later in the year. Now the state says, “Whoops, no money!” so we as a local government will not receive these funds. How much is it for Decatur? General Fund $370,000, Capital Fund $36,000, DDA Fund $14,000 and the school fund $683,000. For the city of Decatur a total of $1,103,000 (estimated for 2008). Now we have already made and approved our budgets so we how do we make up this lost revenue? For Decatur, we have a second bill yet to issue so we remove the credit on our 2^nd bill and show it as an increase of (in my case) $251.96, or we have keep the credit and cut services. So, the state makes a choice to cut expenses for lost revenue. Oh no, wait, it was not the state that had to cut services or increase taxes, it was your local government. Pretty easy choice for the governor; just take it from someone else.

Last year we fought hard against a proposal for the state to collect a sales tax and redistribute it to us for property tax with a promise that they would always try hard to keep our revenues at the same level. And we said, “We don’t trust you,” and they wondered why!!!! Some relief program: it’s dropped at the first sign of trouble because it is easy for them to do.

Congratulations to Commissioner Burrell Ellis on his victory in Tuesday’s election. I was an active supporter of Commissioner Ellis and believe that he will do an outstanding job as CEO. We had some great candidates this year but I think we, as voters, selected the best for Dekalb. It will certainly be a different type of governing than we have been accustomed to over the last few years. If we are to move this county forward, our focus must be on cooperation and not conflict. Our tax money should be spent on things that improve our quality of life and not on law suits. Since the HOST lawsuit began in 1999 the city has spent over $700,000 of taxpayer money on that particular lawsuit. Someone should ask Dekalb Countyhow much they have spent. I would be willing to wager it has be 4 to 5 times that amount and that is my tax money also. For the past eight years, we as residents of Dekalb have found it difficult to have a meaningful conversation with our top elected official. While we will probably not be able to agree on every issue that comes up, we can agree to talk and we can agree on one thing: we all want a better Dekalb. Dekalb County is a great place to live and work, not in spite of our cities, but because of our cities. Welcome to our new CEO; January can’t get here soon enough. Let’s talk!

The 2007-2008 city budget has been adopted and goes into place July 1. While it is a realistic budget and tight, it does allow the city to continue to move toward its goal of a clean, vibrant and active city. There are significant changes in the way we recruit, hire and pay police officers in an effort to reach a fully staffed force. In November the city will make the last payment on the bonds for the conference center and parking deck which will lead to a decision of whether we continue in that business or sell the facilities. The money we collect from the hotel-motel tax goes toward that debt and when the bonds are paid we will install a tourism board so that we can legally continue to collect the tax. The funds will then be used for maintenance and upkeep. There are funds for a marketing study to look for ways that we can support our existing businesses and restaurants. In these tough times we must continue to look for ways to help our local economy. There are some other key items in this year’s budget which I will address later. As tight as this budget is, it continues to put pressure on us financially through property tax. We continue to look for ways to lower our property taxes and one way to help keeps popping up - Annexation. It is obvious and will make a significant difference in all of our property tax bills. More later. I know I haven’t written much lately but that will improve. Thanks for your interest and patience. 

Tuesday evening I had the opportunity to attend the Siemens Science Teacher Awards Dinner at Fernbank.  Siemens is a world wide company with over 400,000 employees who has created a foundation that provides nearly $4 million annually in support of math, science and technology education from grade school through graduate school in the United States. They were ten winners of this award this year in the metro area and two were from Decatur. I congratulate Susan Brooks of Renfroe Middle School and David Schaar of Decatur High School who are this years winners from Decatur. Congratulations on a job well done. Teaching is the worlds hardest job, lowest paid and yet the most important, and not for everybody. It takes special people to do it right and we don’t thank them enough. We are proud of our school system in Decatur and it is great to see them recognized for there work. THANKS GUYS!!!!!!

I was privileged to join the Atlanta Regional Commission ”links” trip to Denver last week along with several others from the metro Atlanta area. It snowed and was cold, but other than that it was a very informative trip. We had the opportunity to hear of Denver’s public health system (their Grady that actually makes money with out state assistance). We rode the light rail system from downtown Denver to Englewood and back and listened to them tell how they weathered a drought worse than ours. As with any region they certainly have their own issues and problems to deal with, but it does help to see what they have done that has worked for them and see if there are lessons to be learned for the Atlanta area. It became apparent toward the end of the trip that most everyone felt that transportation and water are our greatest challenges here in Atlanta. There were a number of Decatur residents on the trip and all seemed to think it was worthwhile. As one said to me as we were departing Denver “We certainly are not perfect, but we ain’t so bad either”.  

Visit http://www.elifemagazine.net/ , click on The Elizabeth Wilson Story and see one of Decatur’s real hero’s.

Sorry about the comment problem. I can’t figure out how to allow comments either so I have called for tech help and will have it fixed as quickly as possible. Please be patient. Thanks

I believe the comments are working now. thanks for your patience.

GDOT announced at a public meeting in late Feb that the sidewalks scheduled to be improved and in some cases installed new along Scott Blvd had been dropped from a proposed project due to funding. The project, in play since 2001, was to improve the sidewalks along both sides of Ponce de Leon and Scott Blvd from Moreland to North Decatur Road approx 3 miles. The anticipated cost and the funding established in 2001 was just less than 1 million dollars and it has now risen to an estimated cost of 5.0 million, thus cut backs. Now they propose to do just sidewalks in the Fernbank - Deep End Park area. But after discussions with our GDOT board members (Emory McClinton and Robert Brown), Rep Mary Margaret Oliver and Stephanie Benefield and Bryant Poole, GDOT District Engineer and a neighborhood meeting at Westchester on Tuesday night (April 1), they appear to be receptive to doing some work along Scott Blvd within the city of Decatur. The decision on our part, the community, will be to decide between improvements to existing sidewalks or new sidewalks where there are none (south side of Scott across from Westchester, Lamont to Clairemont). I don’t need to mention to any one the danger of walking or riding a bike for that matter, along Scott. Which choice would you prefer? New or repairs?  I would love to hear from you.