DeKalb may vote on troubled Sembler project Thursday morning

A developer with a major project in north DeKalb County might get a $52 million tax break from taxpayers Thursday.

At 8 a.m., the DeKalb Development Authority will meet in downtown Decatur and discuss, and possibly vote on, the request by Florida-based Sembler Co. for a public subsidy at its mixed-use development on Peachtree Road near Oglethorpe University.

The company wants an unprecedented 100 percent waiver of property taxes for the next 20 years on most of the acreage of the 54-acre development known as “Town Brookhaven.”

Company President Jeff Fuqua told the authority last month that the project requires public financing because banks have cut back their lending to developers.

His company claims the development will generate as much as $181 million in revenue from taxes and fees during the two decades of the subsidy, while costing the county and the school system $22 million in services.

The authority, whose property goes untaxed, could grant the tax break by taking a deed to the development and leasing it back to Sembler. County officials say they can’t remember the county ever giving such a generous tax break before.

Authority Chairman Eugene Walker said the county commissioned an independent analysis of Sembler’s revenue claims, but the report wasn’t available to the public Wednesday.

One local tax expert questioned the public value of a property tax abatement for a retail project. David Sjoquist, the director of the fiscal research center at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, said new retail outlets “cannibalize” older, nearby stores in the absence of a growing economy.

They don’t cause people to shop more, he said, and don’t generate new sales tax revenue and jobs so much as move them around.

“The common argument is that you should not subsidize retailing,” he said. “From a regional perspective, it does not make any sense.”

Sembler says the project would create as many as 1,100 jobs. Documents the company submitted to the authority last year said they would be primarily “support and service jobs” such as restaurant and retail positions and would pay an average of $25,000 annually.

The California company Smith & Hawken, a luxury garden retailer, also has expressed an interest in moving about 120 presumably higher-paying jobs to the site as part of a possible corporate headquarters relocation.

The authority’s meeting is open to the public. It will be at the county’s Office of Economic Development, 150 East Ponce de Leon Ave., Suite 400, in downtown Decatur.