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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Mayor Franklin makes case for TAD amendment
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The event was the annual Urban Design Commission awards Thursday evening.
The place was the new Hilton Garden Inn along Luckie Street across from the Georgia Aquarium.
After the ceremony, developer David Marvin took Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin to the hotel’s spectacular top level with floor-to-ceiling windows and an outdoor plaza overlooking the aquarium, the new World of Coca-Cola and Centennial Olympic Park.
(Marvin envisions that space becoming an upscale restaurant and bar. The hotel also has a helicopter pad on its roof).
The mayor asked Marvin whether he received financing from the Tax Allocation District in the area. TADs allow communities to help spark the redevelopment in an area by leveraging potential property tax increases for a number of years.
Atlanta’s TAD for the Beltline suffered a legal loss earlier this year when courts ruled that taxes for public schools could not be part of that TAD. The Georgia General Assembly agreed to put that issue as a constitutional amendment before voters in November.
“Before TAD financing, this wasn’t possible,” Marvin told the mayor. The Hilton Garden Hotel received $4.4 million in TAD dollars to help finance that development.
To reinforce her point, Franklin surveyed the view and began ticking off all the developments that had received TAD financing: The World of Coca-Cola, the Museum Tower, the Ernst & Young high rise, Centennial Towers among others.
She also identified several other projects that received some kind of public financing to become reality, such as Centennial Place and Centennial Olympic Park.
Franklin then asked a group of observers whether they remembered how the area looked before the 1996 Summer Olympics. The view then included Techwood Homes, a bunch of surface parking lots and vacant non-descript buildings.
“There’s been a transformation,” Franklin said of that part of downtown. “You come here now and think this is a community that doesn’t need stimulus to develop. But if you walk through here, you can’t make a case that this would have happened in 10 years without the TAD financing. It would have taken 30 or 40 years for this area to develop.”
And to reinforce her point about the proposed constitutional amendment: “I’m voting ‘yes’ in November.”
An addendum:
After she left the event (to go to a Neighborhood Planning Unit meeting), Mayor Franklin sent me an email from home at 11:47 p.m. to share some more thoughts.
Here are excerpts from her email (minus a couple of typos plus people’s first names):
A few additional thoughts:
This latest investment makes real the promise of Centennial Olympic Park as a catalyst for downtown investment, creation of new jobs and economic vitality for the inner city.
Billy Payne, Zell Miller, Bill Campbell, Bill Dahlberg, Sherm Day, Dan Graveline, Atlanta Chamber and others believed it could happen, took risk of the investment of public and private dollars.
And now the energy from the gift of Bernie Marcus, AHA//Renee Glover/Marvin Arrington and Egbert Perry, World of Coca-Cola, GWCC expansion, hotels and condos make real the dream.
Look backward 20 years, then 10, and then look forward 10 years with multi-modal (station) and commuter rail and bus interconnectivity, Beltline and streetcar. Dozens of leaders have pitched in, led and collaborated to accomplish as much as we have.
More to come, financial support from state is more likely now.
Sorry to bother u.
SF
