Nice neighborhood

"This is a nice neighborhood," Mayor Alan Baxter says. "We've got trash pickup, police who arrive in five minutes or less and great city services.

The lawsuits

Then there were the lawsuits and criminal charges against former City Manager Ronnie Cain and his brother, developer Gary Cain, involving money fronted by cloud computing giant Rackspace to pay for infrastructure improvements. The suit and the criminal charges are pending.

The city laid off some staff and hired contractors for certain jobs, just as inspections and information research, to make the work cheaper and faster. The city's Web page is the gold standard for easy access to near every piece of official business the city does.