DEL.ICIO.USVoters hold key to redevelopment plans
COBB COUNTY
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Despite the drought, the grass is plenty green on the site of what was once the Johnny Walker Homes public housing project in Marietta. But aside from the grass and the antique-reproduction streetlights, not much has come out of the ground on the vacant tract.
A few blocks away, on another former public housing site, sits another depressing, cleared-out landscape of fading dreams. Meeting Place, one of the city’s most ambitious redevelopment projects, was to be a collection of homes, condominiums and apartments within walking distance of the historic Marietta Square. Only one square block of it has been built.
Now, both projects are on hold, victims of a collapsed housing market and tighter lending requirements. They may indeed come back to life at some point and renew the hopes of Marietta officials to get the city back in the redevelopment game. But Meeting Place and other similar projects around Cobb County — which until recently was a hotbed of activity for redevelopment and innovative schemes to finance them — may also live or die by how voters statewide decide a state constitutional amendment in November.
The wording of the referendum provides little hint to the significance of what voters are being asked. Essentially it is this: Do you approve of a plan where all property taxes in certain designated districts can be frozen during redevelopment and, when thawed, used almost exclusively for 15 to 30 years to pay off debt for that specific redevelopment project?
The question shows up near the end of a very long ballot and voters may be tempted to skip it. Don’t. It’s a complicated issue that requires more than a little study, but it will have a big impact on projects such as those in Cobb County. Without it, city leaders and redevelopment experts claim, there is little hope for improving some of the metro area’s blighted and rundown areas.
The Legislature put the amendment on the ballot because earlier this year the state Supreme Court ruled that the Georgia Constitution forbids cities and counties from taking property taxes designated for public schools and using them instead to help private developers build commercial, retail and residential projects.
The financing method, known as a tax allocation district (or TAD, for short) is used widely in other parts of the country. It was all the rage among older suburban communities in metro Atlanta until the Supreme Court ruling. By then, the Cobb County School District had also started to choke on all the TAD requests it was getting.
Among other things, school officials worried — correctly, as it turns out — that the residential market might go bust and take some of the projects with it.
Meeting Place in Marietta was one of about a half-dozen redevelopment projects scheduled to be financed through a TAD when the market collapsed. Jonquil Village in Smyrna was another. Developers of the residential and retail project demolished the rundown strip shopping center that was there and constructed a multi-story parking lot before the Supreme Court ruled.
But the TAD deal was never finalized and now a new developer is trying to move forward on the $181 million project with its own money.
A few miles up Atlanta Road in Smyrna, another project originally designated to be financed with a TAD — the redevelopment of the mostly-vacant Belmont Hills shopping plaza — is also in jeopardy. The developer of that project is working with the city on a different financing scheme that would not include school taxes. That $250 million mixed-used plan faces a rezoning hearing next month.
Virtually all promoters of TAD projects promise the same thing: Once developed, the larger housing, commercial and retail tax base will generate far more revenue for local governments and schools than the blighted areas most of them propose to replace. They just need the bulk of that new money for a few years to get the project up and running.
Passing the constitutional amendment will not mean all the projects sitting idle will magically come back to life. If it passes it only means that the financing mechanism would no longer be considered unconstitutional. Local school boards would retain the authority to say no to using school taxes to help finance a TAD project.
While there is little we can do to get the economy moving again, this vote allows Georgians some considerable say in how far city officials can go with our money in their redevelopment plans. Keep that in mind when you get to the end of that long ballot.
• Mike King is a member of the editorial board.
PROPOSED AMENDMENT 2
To authorize local school districts to use tax funds for community redevelopment purposes.
“Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended to authorize community redevelopment and authorize counties, municipalities, and local boards of education to use tax funds for redevelopment purposes and programs?”
Yes or No
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