At the next city council meeting, the issue of closing Doraville bars earlier than 4:00 a.m. will probably come up. I think it is imperative that we do this. The case of the nineteen year old boy being shot at El Mustachios over the wearing of a cowboy hat probably wouldn’t have happened if the bar hadn’t been open in the wee hours of the morning to profit off the all-night drinking of lonely boys too far from home. I’m all for individual freedoms, but let’s keep our ordinances in line with the areas around us. These bars should be serving food as well as booze and they should be held to the same standards as Chamblee’s (Does Chamblee have bars?) well- other areas nearby – Buckhead, Brookhaven, etc. We have a choice. 1. Keep the bar owners happy because they don’t have to sink any money into their establishments or 2. Save a few lives. The choice is ours
DoraBlog
Small town politics, deep in the heart of metro Atlanta
Karen Pachuta asked me to post this:
Neighbors – Something for us to watch – I’ve heard a rumor that General Motors wants to de-annex itself from Doraville and become part of unincorporated Dekalb County. Currently, in order for GM to de-annex, it would need the permission of Doraville. HOWEVER, there is pending state legislation that would take that power away from a municipality. HB 123 and SB 110 did not succeed this session, but are still alive for 2008. Both bills would permit a landowner to de-annex itself from a city by just having the county pass a resolution consenting to that property becoming part of the un-incorporated area. With all the concern about whether the Doraville annexation bill would pass, I’m surprised that I never heard about either one of these bills! This is definately something to carefully watch.
Losing the GM property to unincorporated Dekalb would be a huge blow to Doraville and we need to be pro-active in preventing that from happening – including passing new zoning ordinances and generating a plan for the GM re-development!
Below is the video from Doraville City Council’s June 4, 2007 meeting. John Noonan recorded it, so thanks to him to getting that taken care of. Uploading this video took quite a while and is more than my bandwidth can really handle on a regular basis. If you have a high-speed connection and would like to help with uploading city councils to a web server, please let me know!
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
Part IV:
Part V:
Part VI:
Yesterday, I received some feedback (from a couple of different people) about the following three things.
- A general negativity on Dora-Blog
- Disappointment that a controversial individual was granted front-page posting rights
- The use of an image that is similar to the Doraville City Seal in the header.
I will address each issue as best I can.
- Negativity: Overall, I agree that a lot of the comments, and some of the posts on this blog have a negative slant. I’m not sure that there’s anything I can do about that. I don’t want to curtail people from expressing their feelings in the comments (as long as they try to be moderately respectful and don’t use multiple screen names), and a lot of the stories about things going on behind the scenes in the city are just not positive. My solution to this is to request that those of you with “positive” stories to tell, please contact me and ask for front-page posting rights.
- Disappointment with front page posters: When I started this blog, I wanted it to represent a wide-array of opinion about goings on in the city. I’ve tried to recruit people with viewpoints different from my own. For whatever reason (time constraints, disliking the idea of a “blog,” disliking me, etc) only a few people have taken me up on my request for contributors. I’m not going to turn away one of the people who has stepped up to post here, just because he or she is a controversial figure. Again, if you don’t like what’s being said, request front page posting rights, and give folks an opposing view!
- Use of the city seal: I have a couple of points to make about this. First of all, I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone reading that this website is not run by the city. Second, what I’m using in the header of this blog is actually not the city seal, it’s a piece of art that’s based on the seal. Take a look at an actual image of the seal and look at the one above. While similar, they are also quite different:
Thanks to those people who gave me feedback, hopefully you will understand where I’m coming from. Also, I really do want other front-page contributors, and many different opposing views–so if you think your voice should be heard here, please contact me.
There’s an article in Wednesday’s AJC about the controversy that the proposed Super-H Mart–a large chain supermarket catering to Asian consumers–has generated throughout the city over the past couple of months. Specifically, it mentions a petition that was passed around in May, asking the city council to reject the project because we need some “American” businesses to balance out all the Asian and Latino ones:
Kay Bird, who has lived in Doraville off and on for the last 47 years, said she welcomes diversity but also wants stores that sell “traditional American food” and offer an atmosphere that longtime residents enjoy.
“We have a large number of Americans of different races who have been here a long time,” she said. “They’re accustomed to shopping at Kroger or Publix, where they can find things you can’t get at an Asian market.”
[...]
A supermarket such as Kroger or Publix “would start to restore ethnic balance to the Doraville shopping district, help build a sense of community among long-term residents, and help maintain or improve residential property values,” the petition says.
I understand the frustration that some folks in the city feel about having to drive a few miles if they want to go to Kroger or Publix. I think, though, that the advocates of this petition have things backwards. Kroger and Publix will open locations in Doraville when there is a critical mass of people living in this area who would shop there. That’s probably not going to happen until the city starts attracting new residents. The city government cannot & should not legislate where stores catering to particular ethnicities can be opened.
Doraville’s best bet for attracting many new residents in the numbers that would support these supermarkets is high density, mixed-use development in the area where the GM Plant currently stands. By bringing a lot of new residents & valuable new real-estate to the table, the city would give large supermarkets much more incentive to move here. It would also most likely raise property values in the rest of the city–which I think most homeowners would appreciate.
Instead of cobbling together petitions that are doomed from the outset, citizens would probably do better to look at the next slate of candidates for city council, and elect those people who would work for the kind of smart growth the city needs. That’s probably the only way this town will ever get a Kroger or a Publix.