This evening seven fairly intelligent people sat around a table for six and a half hours going over the expected City of Dunwoody revenues and expenses. Come this evening at 7 p.m. when five of us are sworn in, we will then be subject to open meetings and everything from that point on will be discussed in the open.
Rooms are being obtained for our first couple of meetings and when finalized I will be posting our first meeting details and will provide the agenda on my site when available. To answer a comment on my blog, I am not the official City website but I will do what I can to keep people informed. The official information will be provided to various news services and I have asked to be one of those venues. Eventually an official website will be obtained and I will be looking for the city to post everything possible on line in a timely fashion. Until that happens, I will strive to post notices of both regular and working meetings in advance of the meetings. I will strive to post agendas, budgets, and and provide all materials on line prior to the meeting so that you can be informed.
Let me be the first to tell you that money is very tight no matter how the city decides to go forward, there are many unknowns in this intial process but we attempted to set a reasonable (yet conservative) budget for the city. There will be growing pains but my goal is provide the Citizens for Dunwoody the very best services that we can afford while still striving to keep the taxes under check.
Effective tomorrow, I will be stepping down as President of the Dunwoody North Civic Association so that I may properly represent the entire City of Dunwoody on the newly formed City Council. It has been my honor to serve my immediate neighborhood in that capacity and I am leaving the board is in very capable hands. Thanks to my wonderful board members who I have had the pleasure of serving with; we made a great team. I'm not going away but instead I will just be serving my community in a different capacity.
The Crier had a couple of good articles showing what we the city are up against and I have posted the links below.
http://www.thecrier.net/articles/2008/09/23/front/acouncil.txt
http://www.thecrier.net/articles/2008/09/23/columnists/in%20the%20house/weber.txt
3 comments:
I have to say this is a most disturbing Blog entry. You say:
"This evening seven fairly intelligent people sat around a table for six and a half hours going over the expected City of Dunwoody revenues and expenses. Come this evening at 7 p.m. when five of us are sworn in, we will then be subject to open meetings and everything from that point on will be discussed in the open."
Is that to say, that right up to the very legal limit that the Citizens for Dunwoody have been operating outside the spirit of the open meetings law? Yes, I know they were not compelled to operate under that law until sworn in, but this leads to an even more disturbing part of the entry:
"money is very tight no matter how the city decides to go forward, there are many unknowns in this initial process"
Many unknowns? In communication with Fran Millar (wherein I asked him about his statement that this was done "the right way") I was told: "by delaying this one year to try to get the best data for people to make a decision (unlike Milton, Johns Creek) I do think it was the right way."
So we made this amazing transition from "financially viable" and "same or better services with no increase in taxes" to "money is very tight" and "there are many unknowns". So what happened? Did we squander the whole year? And what caused this transformation of reality? I know the answer to that one: the referendum passed.
The entire six hours was dealing with one document which will be published.
Many unknowns includes negotiating with the county for continued police services until ours begins, transfer of properties from DeKalb, and many other variables where we have little control.
Have you heard about Tuesday's DeKalb BOC meeting? Dealing with them will be a joy.
I'm so very concerned with Oliver Porter's continued insistence that CH2M is the way to go. Does he get a "cut" of whatever business he throws their way?
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