Sometime in 2019 the City of Decatur, Georgia, deleted from the municipal website its 2009 citywide historic resources survey and all of the study’s supporting materials: a comprehensive narrative report, maps, and forms for all of the properties surveyed. Visitors to the city’s website can read and download the 1982 Decatur Town Center Plan, a 2004 Greenway Plan, a 2002 MARTA Station Study, city council meeting agendas and summaries, and lots of colorful publications touting everything that makes “Decatur Greater.”
What visitors to the city’s website can no longer read and download is the costly study completed in 2009 that fully erased the city’s Black experience along with every single historic property important to Decatur’s African American community.
It may be that Decatur city officials are embarrassed by the racist survey. I doubt that’s the reason — city officials have vigorously defended it since 2012 when I began writing about the survey’s shortcomings.
February 22, 2012 email from then-Decatur Historic Preservation Planner Regina Brewer to David Rotenstein.
City officials may be embarrassed that the survey failed to meet even the most basic requirements for such surveys established by the Georgia Historic Preservation Division, the state historic preservation office. Though city officials never informed residents and taxpayers, the 2009 citywide historic resources survey couldn’t even be entered into the state’s master survey files because the city’s consultant completed, and the then-historic preservation planner approved, a deficient product.
January 2019 memorandum requesting that the Decatur City Commission approve an application for federal grant funds to complete a new historic resources survey.
Details about the deficient 2009 survey were revealed earlier this year when the city’s new historic preservation planner requested approval to seek federal grant money to fund a new citywide historic resources survey. The Decatur City Commission on January 22, 2019, voted unanimously to submit the grant application.
Buried deep inside the grant application that the City of Decatur submitted to the state, which administers the federal grant program for the National Park Service, is the admission that a new survey is needed to correct the deficiencies in the 2009 study: “The City of Decatur’s previous historic resources survey in 2009 did not use Georgia Historic Resources Survey Forms, so HPD does not have copies of the collected data. At that time, HPD requested that the correct forms be used in order to integrate the information into their inventories. That is the City’s intent with the updated survey.”
City of Decatur’s 2019 Historic Preservation Fund CLG Survey & Planning Grant Application. Copy received from the City of Decatur under Georgia’s Open Records Act.
The City of Decatur didn’t get the $15,000 it requested in its application. According to the same document, city officials expect to spend $55,000 on the new survey.
In September, I wrote to the city’s new historic preservation planner after I received a copy of the grant application. I asked, “Can you tell me if HPD approved the application?”
“They did not,” she replied.
Curious about updates to Decatur’s historic preservation planning documents, I visited the City’s website. Previously, the complete 2009 historic resource survey documents had been posted in the Historic Preservation Commission’s “Historic Decatur” page. I wrote to City Manager Andrea Arnold asking why they had been deleted. I received no response.
City of Decatur website screen capture, “Historic Resources Survey.”
Perhaps some Decatur residents or local journalists might have better luck getting answers from city officials regarding the deletion of the 2009 historic resources survey.
UPDATE:
More than a year after first emailing the Decatur city manager about the survey I tried again. Here is her reply:
Here we are rolling up on three years since the survey disappeared and two years after the city manager wrote that the survey would be restored to the city website and it’s still MIA.
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