December is typically a slow time of the year for the City. With the cold and mostly rainy weather, new building, renovations and community events slow down as holiday shopping and gathering ramps up. This makes for a perfect time to not only reflect but to look forward and plan for the coming year.
As a Council we are always seeking input about priorities from our residents, businesses and staff. In that process we will often commission studies and plans to help guide us in our decision making. Further into this issue of InTucker, you can read up on some of our ongoing plans and studies and how they are coming along.
As an example, for the past six years, we have worked diligently with DeKalb County to make sure that our public works dollars were being spent properly within our City borders. Our role has been to track needed work and act as advocate and facilitator. Part of our effort was to create the Citizen Responder position to be the liaison and advocate for our citizenry and to also be able to track work orders and make sure work was being done well and on time. Another piece we added was monthly public works meetings between our engineering and project staff, the Citizen Responder and their counterparts at the County to have clear communication on our work in progress. Over the past two years we have studied the results of these monthly meetings and as a Council we decided it was time to ask the residents officially if we should take on Public Works and stand up our own department. It was a whirlwind of educating everyone on just what that means for us both financially and what would be under our responsibility. In the end our voters approved the measure with a landslide YES.
The Council, staff and I do not take this lightly. We are grateful for the faith our community has in us and we are looking forward to this new responsibility. We intend to provide stellar service to all who live in Tucker. We have a strong history of responsible stewardship with our tax dollars and as a team we are committed to continuing on that path.
Our deadline for standing up Tucker’s public works department is next July 1. In the time between now and then we will be studying what infrastructure we will be taking on, major and immediate needs, who will be best to staff the department and how it will be managed. The Council and I will take all this into consideration and will set a new tax rate, as we do every year, to best serve our residents for the coming fiscal year.
It is going to be a lot of hard work and I am confident in our staff and our Council as we move forward. But this is not the only project the City has this coming year. We are launching our Economic Development Strategic Plan, we are studying and building out our parks and green spaces to better serve our community needs, we will be exploring better parking solutions for our downtown and a possible Arts Commission to add character to our new public spaces. As the kids say, “Don’t sleep on Tucker”, we are in constant motion and invite you to keep up and involved.
