Dunwoody Mayor Talks Election Results, Intersection Improvements and Project Renaissance Overruns

Mayor Mike Davis gave Dunwoody Patch his take on common concerns that arose during the City Council election season.  

Did the election results make a statement of any kind?

Two of our incumbents won and the open seat went to the group that was making a lot of noise.  I think that most our issues that a group of people are upset about come out of District 2…But District 1 and District 3 where our incumbents ran, who have been supportive of most of the things we are moving forward with, they won.

What is your take on the close District 3 race between Doug Thompson and Sam Eads, in which Thompson won? 

That district is historically a low turnout area. I can’t really tell you what happens there. I think this is the sixth election out of that district and three of them are non-contested. It’s hard to say when you have a low turnout area, what drives voters or not.

What are some of the issues that residents are concerned about in District 2?

There’s anger about the roundabout in front of [Dunwoody High School].  I should say the proposed/possible roundabout...It’s a proposed answer to a severe problem of traffic. That solution, I like because it takes the least amount of land from the residents and it’s considered a very safe alternative. 

The problem with that intersection is that it isn’t just a bunch of cars going straight through in both directions, every car that comes to that intersection is making a choice of three different directions and you never know which one. So you have a lot of action going on with cars turning in all directions. So a roundabout would be perfect there. But the City Council decided to put it on the shelf. So it’s probably not going to come up for five, 10 years.

The reality is the north metro area has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 40 years when most of our roads in Dunwoody were put in, and the Perimeter has turned into the center of metro Atlanta economically and population wise. And Dunwoody roads built 40 years ago are now bursting at the seams.

Making the roads wider isn’t the answer but at least solving the problems at the intersections, is what we’re trying to do.

Project Renaissance at Georgetown Park is in District 2? What’s your take on the cost overruns?

That’s not unusual. We made the mistake as a city of setting our contingencies too low. Normally you would set your contingencies at 10 maybe even 20 percent on a brownfield site like that…The reality is the overrun was well below 10 percent, but we just didn’t set the contingency correctly and that’s a lesson learned...

A brownfield is a site that had properties on it originally. A greenfield site has never been anything but a pasture or woods.

And so we had some soil issues that are not unusual for a brownfield site. We put contingencies like it was a greenfield site, in truth was a brownfield site.

So the overruns are really in reality not a big deal. And the numbers were very small on top of that. But it was [an election] campaign opportunity to make a big deal out of something that really wasn’t.