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Sustaining Our Natural Environment, Connecting Citizens to Parks and Recreation and Leading with Excellence) which was developed by stakeholders throughout the community.

“I like to think of them as a giant coffee filter,” Canton City Manager Billy Peppers said. “Everything that we do as a city goes through that.”

Peppers said everything from employee evaluations and developer requests to annual budget discussions and city policy discussions is looked at through the lens of those guiding principles.

Canton’s Roadmap for Success won it the Visionary City Award from the Georgia Municipal Association in 2022 and is the reason why Dunwoody Mayor Lynn Deutsch and other leaders were so excited to visit the city.

Deutsch said even though Dunwoody does plan for the future, by setting a longterm strategic plan and integrating it into the daily operations of the city, Canton is going far beyond simple planning.

“Canton is not just looking at today or yesterday or tomorrow, but acknowledging that we might need 15 years to get to where they want to ultimately be,“ she said. “I think we have core values built into some of our plans, But maybe in isolation. So how do you connect it all.”

“This is a huge project we did here. With many big projects, certain little items linger longer than we all would like, and this is one of the last if not the last one,” District 1 Councilman John Paulson said. “So, I’m glad it’s here, let’s take care of it.”

In a presentation to the City Coun- cil, Sandy Springs Director of Facilities Dave Wells said the city went back to the drawing board several times to design the water diversion system in the most cost-effective and least intrusive methods possible.

“Due to the complexity, as well as mitigating the project cost and disruption to the site, staff had to redesign the project to take into consideration existing site conditions, construction costs and site availability,” Wells said, adding that the project will require coordination with events scheduled on City Green during the summer.

Wells said the project will run pipes around the cistern, allowing stormwater to bypass it so the 300,000 gallons of water can fully drain over a two-week period. And because a bypass wasn’t built into the original designs and the time the cistern takes to drain, they’re unable to determine whether previous waterproofing attempts have been successful.

“Once we get a little bit of rain in there, we’ll probably like a quarter of an inch of rain on the roads but we get about six feet of water in the cistern,” he said.

As part of the project, he said they will also need to clean or replace pumps in the cistern that feed the irrigation system and fountains, which are currently being fed by municipal water.

Once the project is complete the city can begin reusing stormwater for everyday tasks, which was an initial priority with the City Springs campus design, Mayor Rusty Paul said.

“It’s an environmental thing,” Paul said. “One of the things when we built this facility, we wanted to make it as sustainable as possible. That meant we made this building as highly energy efficient as we possibly could, and we wanted to capture the water on the site for reuse.” growing and diverse community. Over the past decade, Dunwoody’s population grew by more than 12 percent, including significant changes in the city’s Asian and Hispanic populations and a downward shift in the city’s average age.

To fund the project, Wells said the city will have to modify its 2023 budget and reallocate $380,000 from a different city project. Councilmembers unanimously approved the budget amendment and funding reallocation at the meeting.

As part of a pending lawsuit against City Springs project designers over the cistern’s designs, Paul said Sandy Springs will attempt to recoup the project funding.

“We’re expecting to be reimbursed for a major part of this, if not all, after that litigation is concluded,” he said.

Those demographic shifts will require Dunwoody officials to change how they are reaching and engaging with residents, Deutsch said.

“We're getting younger, while some of the North Fulton cities are getting older,” she said. “We aren't the same community we were when we became a city, we all experience it on a daily basis.”

Dunwoody doesn’t have the same resources that Canton does, as the Cherokee County seat, she said, but there are still many elements they can replicate, like starting to build trust in the DeKalb County schools and doing as much good as they can in underserved communities.

Leaders spent a large portion of their time at the joint city meeting talking about one specific part of Canton’s Roadmap for Success — Celebrating the Diversity of Our Community — which Canton leaders said was a good example of the successes they’ve had after creating the roadmap.

Grant said they had to work very hard to build trust and make connections in the city’s growing Hispanic community. That effort to reach Hispanic community members started small, with interactions in city schools and churches by police officers and other city employees but has since morphed into a vital citywide effort.

“I knew we were making progress when a couple of months ago, I got a call from one of the churches asking me if I would come and talk to their men's group,” he said. “It just shows me that we're slowly breaking down those barriers, and there's so many, but I think we are slowly making progress.”

Like Canton, Dunwoody has a rapidly

“You have to get where they are,” Cpl. Tania Cruz of the Canton Police Department said. “That way, you can bridge that gap and always let them know, we're not immigration, we're not here to lock people up and send them back to their country. So that way, they know it's a safe space.”

After the meeting with Canton officials, Dunwoody City Manager Eric Linton said he plans to begin meeting with city staff soon, to see how they can begin developing their own type of roadmap, using input from the entire community.