Town Hall, Civic Talk and Budget News

1. The weather doesn’t get much simpler than this: a sunny day with a high of about 92 and little or no wind and an overnight low around 67, according to the National Weather Service. The bad news is that we have a Code Orange air-quality alert for the first time this week.

2. County Fire Chief Sam Heaton and Police Chief John Houser will join county Commissioner JoAnn Birrell for a from 6:30 to 8 tonight at the . Transportation and Mabry Park also will be topics. Northeast Cobb Patch editor Julia Harris will be there to provide coverage for East Cobb Patch.

3. East Cobb Patch will have a report at midday today on Wednesday night’s meeting of the East Cobb Civic Association, at which East Cobb school board member Scott Sweeney was the special guest speaker.

4. Apparently the sidewalk widening along Roswell Road east of Johnson Ferry Road has people confused as a seemingly unnecessary project at a tough budget time. But 11 Alive looked into what was going on: It’s a project specifically approved and funded under the 2005 SPLOST to bring the sidewalk into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

5. Speaking of budget, Cobb County shouldn’t have to dip into fund reserves to balance the current budget after all, Board of Commissioners Chairman Tim Lee told the Marietta Daily Journal on Wednesday after the Board of Tax Assessors finalized the tax digest for the year. The MDJ reports that the total value of real and personal taxable property came in at $29.71 billion, down 5.47 percent from 2010. That’s an improvement from the Tax Assessor Phil Hogsted predicted in April and the county used when balancing a revised budget, which itself was better than the early projections of a 9 percent to 10 percent decline that had the county administration and the preparing for fiscal doomsday. The digest dropped about 7 percent last year.