Originally, I had no plans to publish this email exchange. It was just me as Joan Q. Public, sending an opinion on a budget allocation to His Honor and to other DeKalb city council members I thought might be receptive. I expected a generic “thanks for the input” response, which would have been fine. But…
Tag: city council
College Town Partners Agreements are Kind of Cray, but Still Important
I’ve read the College Town Partners documents that were leaked to the Preserve Our Neighborhoods (PON) group. (Want copies? Send an email to preserveourneighborhoods@gmail.com.) The agreements, which were never signed, lay out a corporate partnership between City of DeKalb, NIU, a local developer and two banks. They strike me as kind of nuts, actually, being…
Pension Discussion Reveals Council’s Dysfunction
I am loving the budget talks, mostly. They make me feel like the city is in much better hands than it used to be. For example, in response to a question from a Financial Advisory Committee member last Saturday, the city manager confirmed: Revenues that for the previous year had been spent out of (off-budget)…
A New Community Development Department
The special joint meeting between city council members and the Financial Advisory Committee (FAC) on Saturday filled in a lot of blanks, even for — or maybe especially for — folks who have reviewed the FY2015 City of DeKalb budget including its excellent Transmittal Letter. One of the changes proposed by city manager Anne Marie…
Strategic Planning Docs & Thoughts
Last Saturday I attended a “strategic planning retreat” of DeKalb City Council, department heads and a couple others. Here’s a slideshow of the agendas, planning guide and timeline.
Permit & Inspection Fees on DeKalb Council Agenda Tonight
I’ve isolated the comparison charts for you and put them after the jump (or you could teleport to the agenda instead and go to page 5 of the PDF file). First, though, I’d like to spend a minute on city staff members’ reasons for requesting approval of new fees and fee hikes: The changes of…
The Manning Numbers
A request made by Brad Manning Ford came up in the last DeKalb council meeting agenda: The dealership says it can get $400,000 from Ford to put towards the [$2.3 million expansion] project, but that it still can’t foot the rest of the bill. The $110,000 that it is requesting from the city represents about…
Update on the Search for DeKalb’s Next City Manager
The city manager, not the mayor, is the chief executive officer in DeKalb’s council-manager form of government. Ideally we should be paying as much attention to selection of the city manager as we do the mayoral election — especially these days, when the city council declines to put expiration dates on their managers’ contracts and…
Baker Says City Employees Were Terminated for Conducting Personal Business on City Time
**Update September 15: Here’s the link to the full, 56-minute Housing Bureau discussion (HT M.C.)** The City of DeKalb and the Chronicle recently made a big deal of a Housing Bureau employee’s using city email in negotiating her rent. But now that looks like the tip of the iceberg. For adequate context, I recommend watching…
Video Excerpts from August 12 Council Meeting
*Update 8/22: City IT director Jeremy Alexander notified me early this morning that an encoding error is the cause of the audio glitch. They expect to have the problem corrected before the end of the day.* It has come to my attention that the audio portion for much of the August 12 city council meetings…