Council Rejects Demolition Moratorium, Rewrites the Policy the Same Night

The Notcross City Council took up four items at its policy work session on Monday evening: a proposed moratorium on the demolition of pre-1950 structures, the fiscal 2027 budget, the property tax rate, and a set of code and zoning map amendments removing parking minimums in the downtown district.

It decided all four.

The meeting ran three hours and forty minutes. Staff have described it as long. They have also noted that under previous practice the same four items would have been distributed across a work session, a rescheduled work session, two regular meetings and a called meeting, and that at least one would have returned in the spring.

The moratorium

Council voted 4–1 against a six-month prohibition on demolition permits for structures built before 1950.

"A moratorium is a decision not to decide, scheduled," the Council Member for Ward 2 said during discussion. "We already review these applications one at a time. What this proposes is that we stop reviewing them for six months and then review them, presumably in the same way, with the same information, having lost six months."

The member who introduced the ordinance did not defend the pause so much as the reason for it. The Ward 4 member said that in eleven years on the Council she had voted to approve every demolition that came before her except one, and that she had done so without ever having been given a written standard.

"I want to be clear that I am not describing a failure of nerve," she said. "I am describing a failure of paperwork. Nobody ever told me what I was supposed to be measuring."

Council did not pause demolitions. It directed staff to produce the standard.

Under a motion adopted the same evening, the Historic Preservation Commission will return within thirty days with written criteria for evaluating demolition applications — building age, integrity, structural condition, contribution to the district, and documented cost of rehabilitation against replacement. Until the criteria are adopted, applications continue to be heard, and the Commission's recommendation on each must state which of the five factors it turned on.

"The problem was never that we were tearing things down too fast," the Ward 2 member said. "The problem was that we were doing it without a reason we could write on a page."

Parking minimums

Council adopted the downtown parking amendments unanimously, eliminating minimum off-street parking requirements for commercial uses in and around the historic district.

The reasoning turned on a fact the City has only recently been in a position to state. Notcross built 212 public parking spaces between 2025 and 2026. Having built them, the City is no longer in a position to require that every business build its own.

"We spent twenty years telling businesses that parking was their problem, and then we solved parking," the Ward 1 member said. "It would be strange to keep charging them for it."

Staff noted during discussion that the South End development, completed in May, was permitted under the old minimums and constructed sixty-two spaces it has never needed. Those spaces are now signed for public use.

Budget and millage

The proposed fiscal 2027 budget totals $58.4 million across all funds, with a general fund of $21.9 million. The property tax rate holds flat at 5.918 mills, below the rollback rate, so no public hearing is required. Homestead exemptions remain at $50,000 for homeowners under 65 and $100,000 for those 65 and older.

The one item that drew extended debate was staff compensation. A proposal to reduce the budgeted increase from five per cent to three and a half was raised, discussed for forty minutes, and withdrawn.

"Everything we have done in the last eighteen months came down to somebody answering a telephone," the Mayor said. "That is the whole programme. I am not going to fund the programme by underpaying the programme."

The increase stands at five per cent. The difference was found in the professional services line, which has been reduced by $180,000, principally in consulting.

Entertainment and open-container districts

Council directed staff to redraw both district boundaries to centre on the historic downtown rather than the highway corridor, and set the amendments for adoption at the next regular meeting. No further work session was scheduled, on the grounds that one had just occurred.

The full agenda packet, the adopted motions and the recording are posted on the City website, as they have been the Friday before every meeting for seventeen consecutive months.