Days before its official launch as a new city, Peachtree Corners has rescheduled a vote on its first annual budget in the face of mounting concerns about overspending.
The City Council delayed approving a $2.7 million spending plan Tuesday, choosing to revisit the issue at a special-called meeting Thursday — three days before Peachtree Corners starts operations as the first new city in Gwinnett County in 56 years.
In recent days, many residents have blasted city leaders for considering a budget nearly four times higher than projected in a feasibility study used to support incorporation of Peachtree Corners. Mayor Mike Mason explained Tuesday that about $1 million of the budget is start-up expenses and some of the money would go toward building up the city's reserve funds.
"It's been annoying the crap out of me ... (residents) saying, 'You guys are spending gone wild,'" Mason said. "Folks, we're just trying to protect the city in most responsible way that we can."
Peachtree Corners is the sixth new city created in metro Atlanta since 2005 and the second outside Fulton County. It is poised to become the largest of Gwinnett's 16 municipalities, with an estimated 34,000 residents between Norcross and Berkeley Lake.
But the revelry normally associated with the birth of a new city recently has been overshadowed by vocal opposition to the city's budget for Fiscal Year 2013.
More than 50 residents packed into a room Tuesday at Robert D. Fowler YMCA for what was initially scheduled to be a public hearing on the budget. But Mason told the crowd the vote was being postponed until Thursday.
That didn't deter audience members from voicing their displeasure with the city's proposed spending plan. All five residents who spoke publicly during the meeting urged the council to reject the budget and adopt one closer to the figure - $760,917 - proposed by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia.
"I don't think you've done your homework," resident Mike Smith said to council members. "I think you've led people astray."
Smith, like the other four speakers, finished to loud applause.
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