In an effort to more frequently monitor changes and react accordingly to city finances, Dunwoody officials will now review and amend its budget quarterly.
“I do think government finances can be really confusing, and sometimes headlines [in news stories] can tell a story that’s not totally accurate,” Mayor Lynn Deutsch said at the April 29 city council meeting. “Sometimes people read the headlines and not the articles.”
Deutsch said she is “particularly disappointed that the language used in government accounting has been abused in public discussion. For the record, we are not out of money, and we aren’t even close.”
“One of the things we are thinking of changing is that we budget revenues much more conservatively than we project expenses,” she said. “In other words, we take in more money than we project, and we spend less money than we project. The budget I present this summer may look differently.”
Dunwoody Finance Director Richard Platto said the move to more frequent reviews comes from discussions during this year’s council retreat.
Platto said that $280,000 of the increased $2.6 million in revenues will be applied to fund the city’s May 30 employee pay raises, and the rest will be allocated so that the original funding of $3 million from reserves to balance this year’s budget will now be reduced to a $700,000 contribution.
With these changes, the city will still have more than nine months of reserves in its account, significantly more than the four-month reserve that the charter requires.
Responding to public comment speakers who complained that money spent on sidewalks and other improvements should be directed to the police department, Council Members Tom Lambert and Joe Seconder said sidewalk improvements and other improvements are funded by a Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax or federal funds and cannot be used to hire police personnel.
In other action, the city council recognized its sustainability heroes for 2024, including Jason Metzger, a longtime member of the city’s sustainability committee, and Oak Avenue Landscaping, an all-electronic equipment lawncare company.
The council also recognized Girl Scout Troop 19443, 12 Dunwoody fifth-graders representing nine area schools, who worked together to build bird houses and create a bird sanctuary, which they installed at Vermack Swim and Tennis Club.
Safe Streets Program Manager Jonathan DiGioia updated the council about upcoming safe streets initiatives, including continuing to implement short-term project opportunities to improve safety, conduct speed studies to identify opportunities to reduce speed limits where appropriate, and monitoring high-injury network corridors as identified in the Road Safety Action Plan.