Shortly after the Shining PATH Bond failed we were warned that folks addicted to endless taxing, spending and bureaucratic bloat, some of whom count themselves amongst the original evangelists of citihood, are now trying to market a workaround to violate all the promises made when they asked for our votes. It makes you wonder if they knew this all along with no intention of hewing true to the stories they used to herd the sheep. And that original promise? Fiscal responsibility. The promise, backed by the CVI study, that the city could provide services superior to the county on an $18M annual budget, which adjusted for inflation (42% over that period) is less than $26M. That was the promise, and to calm any fears and mistrust of future greeds, the millage rate was capped. In the early years city bloat was satisfied with back-door tax increases due to rises in property valuations, but bloat has a way of snowballing and millage rate increases were required to feed the beast.
Now even that cannot satisfy current bureaucratic bloat and the sales pitch is neither unexpected nor clever. Riddled with political speak and equivocations, it attempts to conflate wants with needs. It also speaks from the rather odd perspective that the failure of the Shining PATH Bond means that Dunwoody voters will not approve any referendum, when in fact it is more a statement that the community does not want these cult-like paradise pavers desecrating our city. This is further ignored when we are treated to a false dilemma: do we want reduced services like police, road paving, and parks/sidewalk maintenance (note there is no mention of Shining PATHs), or do we want higher taxes? Assuming a tax referendum would fail, the proposal is to bypass any millage rate referendum in favor of "special tax districts," creating another form of back-door taxing. Again, we were warned.
Is this a serious proposition? Really?
How about you, the royal you, live up to your original promise? Wouldn't that be a breath of fresh air? And just how are we to believe promises made now, often by the same folks who made these broken promises, that somehow this is different, that we should place any trust in them? Or how about this: how about instead of more, and more expensive policing, we put in place a department, within a sound city organizational structure, that is well managed and doesn't cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in doomed, self-inflicted legal battles? Or maybe we realize that crisis funding, known to be temporary, isn't an opportunity to permanently bloat the bureaucracy? Or maybe the tax base would not be, or would not have been, on a downward trend had they not handed out tax "incentives" like mardi gras beads and maybe, just maybe, imposed impact fees on developments that everyone knows were going to happen anyway? That all sounds like fiscal prudence, doesn't it? And that is exactly what we were promised, so if they'd like to withdraw that promise, that commitment, how about we dissolve the city charter first? Maybe we were better off as a part of unincorporated DeKalb, because that seems to be the underlying truth of what they are saying now.
And think about this: the current DeKalb CEO is far, far, better, by any measure, than the current Dunwoody City Manager, and we get to elect the CEO.
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