Letter from the Watkinsville City Council members

 

August 14, 2020

Watkinsville Residents, Property Owners and Business Owners:

We are writing to you today as fellow citizens. For the past 20 years, city councils and mayors have listened to what Watkinsville residents want and delivered it with minimal drama and maximum efficiency: a safe community with a top notch police force; a healthy downtown with unique shopping and a variety of restaurants; a thriving arts community; pedestrian connectivity and improvements; new and improved greenspaces and parks; a welcoming small town feel; preservation of city funded garbage and leaf and limb pick up; improvements to traffic and more.  We are proud that Watkinsville is welcoming to all and has something for everyone.

Last month many of you received a letter from Mayor Bob Smith that accuses the council of being uncooperative, of taking illegal actions, and of wastefully taking money from the taxpayers.  This letter contained significant inaccuracies about your community and we felt compelled to respond and provide an update on the state of the city. 

• City financial situation: The financial position of the city is the envy of many municipalities in the state. Our undesignated reserves (rainy day fund) exceed our total budget. Our annual budget was $1.973 million in 2020, and we held the line for 2021, including no property tax increases in 2021. We are in this sound financial position due to conservative financial management for many years, and we continue to take that approach as we move forward.  Over the past two years we have developed plans on how to carefully allocate portions of our revenues and reserves to upgrade technology and equipment for our law enforcement officers, improve our parks, install transportation upgrades, and do more while still maintaining a healthy fund balance. Despite the COVID situation, we do not anticipate a dramatic revenue decline due to our diverse mix of revenue sources and the strong property tax digest in Oconee County. Unlike the state government or even a real estate business, we are not overly dependent on any one revenue stream.  The Watkinsville fund balance functions as an insurance policy to ensure we can avoid dramatic cuts that might impact you directly due to COVID issues. 

• Budget process: We have an experienced Finance Director in Julie Sanders Klein who has carefully managed the city’s finances for more than 20 years, and our City Manager Sharyn Dickerson has extensive budgeting and operations experience as well; together they have made certain that we have a robust and transparent budget process. This year, that process began in March, and was clearly articulated to the Mayor and Council at the mayor and council’s annual retreat, via email, at council meetings, and was shared online. Despite specific guidance in our ordinances, the Mayor chose not to work with the Manager on a joint budget by ignoring her requests to meet or respond in any way to the drafted budget presented to him by the City Manager. He simply requested more documents and engaged his own, still unnamed consultant. He did not surface any specific questions during this period and also chose not to meet with the finance director and manager after they presented an initial budget to the Mayor and council, despite repeated offers to do so.  Instead, after three months of opportunity for private and public input - including two public meetings - Mayor Smith chose to request a 12% budget cut on the day before the budget was to be voted on, without providing any specific suggestions. After the city council decided not to accept this last minute request, he attempted to veto key line items in the budget that would remove our police department’s access to the county-wide Emergency 911 system, eliminate funds that would allow our police department to seek state certification, prevent us from maintaining our downtown restrooms and parking area, remove funds that support tourism and local business, cost us our designation as a tree city, impact our ability to ensure quality new development, and require us to fire or reduce the hours of key employees.  All these attempted vetoes were made without a single question to the council or city staff about the specific line items. City council in an abundance of caution overrode these vetoes at its July 15 meeting. We had already taken a hard look at the budget, made cuts to ensure it stayed at the same level as last year, and followed the defined process for developing a budget. This approach ensures our citizens’ priorities are heard and honored, lives are not endangered, and everyone has the opportunity for input.  

• Council Priorities: The city council has worked hard over the past few years to advance priorities that citizens have indicated are of importance. Our police department has been revitalized by Chief Shannon Brock, who is utilizing a mix of community policing, thoughtful training, and new technology to create one of the state’s top small town police departments. An upgraded cityofwatkinsville.com website has detailed information on all city matters and allows for online building application and business license filing. A new sidewalk linking downtown Watkinsville and New High Shoals Road has been completed and connects more than 1,000 neighbors safely together and to downtown. We will soon begin a significant update of Harris Shoals park, starting with a joint venture with Extra Special People (ESP) that will include a new fully accessible city-owned playground, a Miracle League ballfield, and new concession and restroom areas. After that, we will undertake a renovation and upgrade of the existing park facilities at Harris Shoals. Watkinsville Woods is now complete and offers six acres of wooded trails for citizens to enjoy. A citizen-led transportation plan was completed last year that will help us address a variety of road and pedestrian improvements that will slow traffic and provide alternative ways to get around the city. We are squarely focused on the future of this city and making it a place where your quality of life, your property values - and if you are a business owner, your profitability - improves.

As individuals, we are not excited to be sending this letter, but we cannot allow our voices to be silenced by someone with the ability to act independently due to his office and his political action committee. We also cannot allow his attacks on city staff to stand. City staff has been responsive to literally hundreds of requests for information from the Mayor since he was elected in November, including time intensive requests that often keep them from doing the work of citizens and businesses. These include requests about long concluded matters and often require us to engage legal counsel, creating further expenses. 

Our focus has been and will remain on serving the city in a non-political way, by looking at each issue as it comes and evaluating it on its merits. We do not want to see Atlanta- and Washington-style politics in our community.

In this time of uncertainty, if you have questions we hope you will  engage with your city. Visit our robust website at www.cityofwatkinsville.com that includes all of our meeting and budget documents. Follow the City of Watkinsville’s page on Facebook.  Attend council meetings online, or when possible, in person. Watch archived meetings on the Watkinsville website and judge the conduct of the participants for yourself. Call us, email us or stop us on the street if you have questions (our personal cell phones listed below).  

We remain hopeful that the city council and the Mayor can improve their working relationship over the next 17 months.  We will continue to extend olive branches even as we work to protect our citizens and maintain the quality of life, atmosphere, and opportunities that each of you chose when you decided to live or work in Watkinsville.

Sincerely,

Brian Brodrick   Connie Massey Marci Campbell Christine Tucker Dan Matthews

404-983-4384   706-769-5879 706-207-0037 706-369-1987 706-372-1062

*No taxpayer dollars were used to send this letter; it was funded and sent by the signed above as concerned citizens of Watkinsville*