Editor’s Note: Candidates running for Brookhaven mayor and city council attended an Oct. 5 forum hosted by the Brookhaven Chamber of Commerce and Rough Draft Atlanta. The event was moderated by WABE’s Emily Wu Pearson and Rough Draft’s Logan C. Ritchie, who recaps the event below. You can watch the complete forum in the videos embedded in this recap.
Candidates for Brookhaven mayor and city council answered questions about economic growth, public safety, infrastructure, taxes, and public school education. Two candidates were not present: Hilerie Lind, running for mayor, and Jennifer Owens, running in the special election for District 2 City Council.
Affordable Housing
District 1 City Councilmember Linley Jones formed Brookhaven’s Affordable Housing Task Force four years ago, resulting in the city’s requirement for 10% affordable housing in new developments.
“We’re going to continue to find creative solutions to let people live in Brookhaven, especially our police officers. Two weeks ago we passed an increase in the allowance for our police officers to be able to live in the city of Brookhaven … that’s the kind of incentive we can provide,” Jones said.
District 1 candidate Michael Diaz said while Brookhaven has done “great things” to incentivize police to live in the city, workforce housing for firefighters and nurses is still needed.
“When I was on the Planning Commission one of the things that we tried to do is figure out, ‘How do we get to that missing middle?” he said.
Economic growth
District 2 City Council candidate Blake Beyer said the city should not raise taxes to pay for the new city hall, which will cost $78 million.
“We should be working harder to be more business-friendly. We should lower the cost of getting permits,” Beyer said. “We should be collaborative with our businesses and our residents with code enforcement, helping them to become compliant without … raising the costs of being non-compliant.”
Mayoral candidate Mark Frost said his expertise lies in making businesses successful and will be looking through that lens as mayor.
“I’m a salesman, and we’ve got a great package to sell. We need to sell that to the kinds of businesses that Brookhaven wants,” he said, adding that lower taxes would be attractive to businesses that have been hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic.
City Hall
Mayoral candidate Lauren Kiefer likes the idea of a city center anchored by city hall, but she said the current plan is too expensive.
“Our SSD [Special Services District] is not like a CID [Community Improvement District]. Buckhead CID is one where the business owners opt in. They want to be in it. We have an imposed a Special Services tax district. Business owners did not join that voluntarily … They had no choice. These are the things that we need to do to help our business owners, many of whom are still struggling to recover from COVID, and we imposed another tax so that we can build a city hall,” said Kiefer.
District 1 City Council candidate Alan M. Cole plans to move city hall, if elected. He’d like to “move the city hall to a more feasible spot, like a shopping center where you can build an office that will accommodate all the offices of the city, not some. I don’t understand why we’re trying to tie in MARTA. I would work to stop it and come up with a new facility.”
Education
One of mayoral candidate John Park’s proudest achievements while on city council was the brokerage of land to build John Lewis Elementary School that “alleviated the horrible overcrowding of schools,” he said.
“We will partner with the DeKalb school board to do anything we can to provide smaller class sizes, and the best education possible for every student including the immigrant children,” Park said. “I myself came to the states when I was six years old. I remember what it was like not being able to speak English, not being able to communicate, and not feeling welcome. And I want to change that.”
