Heneghan’s Dunwoody Blog: Recap of the 2022 Dunwoody City Council Retreat, City Finances and a lot of other stuff were discussed. Electronic documents are available.

Earlier this week the City of Dunwoody hosted a two day Council "retreat" talking about operations, finances and future plans. We stopped in Suwanee for a walking tour with their City Manager to discuss Public Art and as that happened I also chatted up the Asst. City Manager to discuss the highly successful Suwanee Beer Festival that just occurred as I want to bring the Dunwoody Beer Fest back to Brook Run Park in the Fall.

After lunch, we ran up to Dahlonega to hold the rest of the meetings. If you read my March 22nd Blog announcing the retreat, my guess of topics were spot on with the main issue being long-term funding strategies moving forward. One thing to know about a "retreat" is that no official votes occurred and that everything discussed at that meeting will be discussed again and even more fleshed out with a great deal of more detail. A retreat is a place to raise questions to discuss options and data but the fast pace of the conversations really just give staff an idea as where we were individually as council members but with no details to the specifics, there are a lot more discussions to be had.

Below are all the documents that were placed in the City Council binders and though we didn't get to everything, I can say that we spent most of our time on financing strategies for everyday operations and the financing of capital needs. As I explained last Monday, Dunwoody's financing mechanisms are different than surrounding municipalities as we have locked in taxable valuations and an automatic 1 mil rollback to homeowners therefore, creative options need to be offered, and Mayor Deutsch is doing just that with a possible parks special tax district for the entire city. At incorporation, the parks committee to start the city said we needed $300K to run the parks and we are now averaging $3 Million per year therefore this is an idea being floated to lower that delta.

Besides finances, we discussed pedestrian safety, traffic calming, sidewalk construction, crime statistics, police retention and pay, and a few tweaks to our mission statement and council meeting rules. All documents presented to Council for discussion are linked below.

 01a 2022-03-21 City Council Meeting Agenda.pdf
 01b 2022-03-22 City Council Meeting Agenda.pdf
 02 2022 Retreat Topics Slides.pptx
 03 2022 City Council Retreat Day One Finance.pptx
 04 2022 Council Retreat Pedestrian Safety.pptx
 05 Edge City Retreat Slides.pptx
 06 Dunwoody Village Retreat Slides.pptx
 07 Resolution Amending the Rules and Procedures for City Council Meetings ORIGINAL.docx
 08 Dunwoody Council Training 1-31-2022 Final.pptx
 09 SLFRF-Final-Rule-Overview.pdf
 10 Capital List Unfunded 2021.pdf
 11 Police ARP and Exit Trends.pptx
 12 2014-05-09_PedSafetyStudy_FinalReport.pdf
 12 2016.12.12 Traffic Calming Policy Final Approved.pdf
 12 Complete Streets Policy.pdf
 12 Sidewalk_Program_edited 2015.07.08.docx
 12 Vulnerable Road User Ordinance.pdf
 13 Mission and Vision 2022 Retreat V2 (002).pptx
 14 Police Annual Report.pdf
 15 2022 Pay v CPI-U.xlsx
 16 How We Make a Difference ARP.pptx

Kudos to the Dunwoody Crier and reporter Sydney Dangremond for joining the Council at the meeting and writing a nice recap as linked below.

After two days of meetings up in the mountains, Wednesday morning found Councilman Lambert, Public Works Director Michael Smith and I downtown talking to GDOT about the proposed express lanes on 285, but I guess that is a story for another day.