Budget Vote Postponed For Another Public Hearing

Another public hearing is being scheduled to discuss Brookhaven's first-ever budget, and the announcement of its date and time is on the agenda for Tuesday night's City Council meeting.

The city council will meet at Brookhaven's new Municipal Court location at 2 Corporate Boulevard, Ste. 125, at 7 pm.

The council is also holding a work session at 4:30 pm Tuesday, at the same location.

The controversy over the city's budget took on a new dimension last week, when two back-to-back robocalls went out to Brookhaven residents on the topic of tax increases.

At around 5:30 pm on Monday, 4, came a call from an unidentified female, claiming that "Brookhaven Mayor J. Max Davis has broken his promise to protect taxpayers by including a property tax increase in new taxes on electricity, land line phone services."

Less than an hour later, came an automated call from Davis himself, claiming "an anonymous, illegal and misleading autocall went out to Brookhaven residents this afternoon. Please disregard this message as it is extremely inaccurate ..."

The week before, District 2 City Councilman Jim Eyre sent out an email blast, claiming that Davis' proposed budget will result in a revenue shortfall for 2013.

"As I see it, we have two options," Eyre wrote. "Accept a tax increase for 2013 with expectations that this increase will be reduced for homeowners in 2014 when all revenues are available to the city of Brookhaven, or further reduce our service levels to better match available revenue with little or no tax increase for homeowners."

Davis countered by saying Eyre's assumptions are based on what DeKalb County decides to do with the HOST millage.

"We won't know DeKalb's HOST millage rate until this summer," Davis said. "There are several facts that aren't in his email, and until we know what DeKalb will do with the HOST rate, we won't have any idea what our city's millage rate will be."

Davis compared Eyre's email to "a piece of propagnda from the NoCity campaign. ""He's making unknown assumptions that are being treated as fact.

"We're not going to be raising taxes or cutting services in Brookhaven."

See Also:

Robocalls Blast Brookhaven Residents

Davis: 'We're Not Raising Taxes or Cutting Services in Brookhaven'

Patch's Complete Coverage of the Brookhaven City Council