Decatur has its to-do list for the next decade.

On March 21, 2011, Decatur’s City Commission unanimously adopted the 2010 Strategic Plan, capping a year-long community discussion that engaged a record 1,500 Decaturites. The result is an ambitious update of the City’s Strategic Plan that will guide decision-making for the next 10 years and beyond.

After almost a full year of collaboration -- collecting ideas, weighing trade-offs, measuring applicability to city goals, and evaluating feasibility -- a decade's worth of proposed Strategic Plan projects is now ready for community review. And, as came up frequently during Decatur Next meetings and has been discussed informally around town, a circulating shuttle is among those proposed...

Decatur's march towards a new, ten year strategic plan took an admittedly slow and methodical step forward Saturday, December 4th, during our Open House at Agnes Scott. Over the course of three hours, city residents dropped by to review a rough draft of the plan's Principles and Goals...

With our final Community Academy session behind us, the Decatur Next process now moves on to its third and final phase: Taking all that input, all those ideas, and boiling them down to a coherent framework, with specific recommendations. Why is that important? Because, by organizing all that data as a series of broad principles, detailed goals and, ultimately, a to-do list of projects to be tackled over the next ten years, we end up with something measurable...

Over the course of both the round tables and the Community Academy sessions, a consistent theme has emerged: Higher density development can be a potentially valuable tool towards many of our emerging goals (greater housing affordability, greater choice in housing types, reallocation of tax base, and a thriving commercial core among them), but only if it is reserved for our core growth areas, and designed and built in specific ways...

Let's start with the givens: Decatur is a fairly dense, compact and mixed-use kind of town. And while the definitions of those terms may have evolved somewhat over time, that's what we were historically and that's the basis for who we are today...

The key questions before Decaturites attending the November 4 Community Academy seminar at the Holiday Inn Convention Center were these: Is our current dependency on residential development for 85 percent of our tax revenue the mix we want? Or do we want to encourage more commercial office and retail?

Did you know Decatur’s tax base has a higher residential percentage than most anywhere else around? That means it’s our property owners who foot the bulk of the bill. It's most likely not talking out of turn to assume there'll be increasing pressure over time to maintain or, even better, reduce our individual tax burdens. But how, exactly, does that work? If our revenues don't come from homeowners, where will they come from?...

Matching the commitment of our first Community Academy session, around 60 residents gathered Monday night, October 25, to take on some key "Lifelong Community" goals -- affordability, diversity and choice -- from the round table sessions earlier this year... In short, they gathered to determine how Decatur could offer options for anyone who wants to join our community, and that anyone already here be able to stay as long as they'd like...