Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Dunwoody Update, Boyken Approved, Alcohol Discussed, and a City Manager to be named next week.

At last night's Dunwoody City Council meeting we moved on a number of items, approving our Municipal Court Ordinance and our Ethics Ordinance with a couple of minor edits. We approved Boyken International as our start up, project management consultant and the Mayor announced that he will be calling a Special Meeting for next Monday to review his choice for City Manager.

We have decided that the City will be collecting our own taxes (Business, Liquor, etc) and that an intergovernmental agreement will be put in place for the DeKalb County Tax Assessor to collect property taxes as is routinely done elsewhere. It was also decided that our normal meeting location for future meetings will be changed from Peachtree Charter Middle School to Dunwoody United Methodist Church.

Finally the big topic of the night was our proposed Alcohol Ordinance that has now gone through a number of revisions since it was first proposed. The big issue is that the city is proposing to roll back the serving hours from 4 am to 2 am. The City Council was initially informed that this change would only affect two establishments but as it turns out the ordinance will be affecting many more establishments like Cafe Intermezzo, McKendrick's Steakhouse and many of the city's hotels.

Prior to the City Council meeting, I met with the Dunwoody Chamber of Commerce who opened my eyes to a number of technical problems with the ordinance outside of the 2 am issue. That being the case, a committee of residents, liquor license holders and members of the City Council is now being formed to go line by line through the document in order to hammer out the technical issues so that middle ground can be obtained.

The City of Dunwoody has also announced a number of positions available, Police Chief, City Clerk and Finance Director.

The audio of the meeting is here (60 MB) and I will be attaching a number of documents tomorrow regarding the Boyken proposal as well as the contract that will be signed in the morning once a few minor technical edits are made.

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