Georgia World Congress Center Authority officials have an offensive strategy in their negotiations with the Atlanta Falcons: hire sports-team big guns.
Instead of relying on dealmakers who usually work for municipalities, the GWCCA is being represented by the law firms Greenberg Traurig and Winstead PC, heavyweights that struck deals for the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Texans.
The idea is to have leaders who can anticipate what the Falcons may want and avoid having taxpayers pay too much, the GWCCA says.
“This team of attorneys and consultants assembled by the GWCCA have been brought together to provide authority leadership with the best advice and guidance as the authority seeks to secure the best business deal possible for a proposed new stadium,” said GWCCA spokeswoman Jennifer LeMaster.
Critics, however, are wary. They say municipalities lose because they are putting money into a private enterprise that should be paying for itself.
“If you want to sell a deal to the public this is a useful way to spin,” said Heywood Sanders, a University of Texas at San Antonio professor and critic of public spending on sports facilities and convention centers.
The GWCCA and the Falcons are negotiating to build a retractable-roof stadium to replace the 20-year-old Georgia Dome. A cost estimate for the facility, which would be across the street from the Dome or a half-mile north on Northside Drive, is $948 million, but the cost could top $1 billion.
About $300 million of the funding would be raised through hotel-motel tax collections in Atlanta and unincorporated Fulton County. The Falcons would be responsible for the rest.
The GWCCA hired Winstead PC and Greenberg Traurig, who are heading its legal team in the negotiations, after interviewing firms across the country with the help of the Georgia Attorney General’s office, LeMaster said. The firms stood out because their legal teams are led by Denis Braham and Franklin Jones, who collaborated for the Cowboys and Texans in their deals with the cities of Arlington and Houston.
Braham specializes in negotiations while Jones concentrates on transactional law, LeMaster said.
Their focus is to mitigate the GWCCA’s financial and legal risks, ensure the state agency maintains control of legacy events such as the Chick-fil-A Bowl and Bank of America Football Classic, and to block attempts for additional public funds beyond hotel-motel tax collections.
Doug Selby, a partner at Atlanta law firm Hunton & Williams, said Winstead and Greenberg could give the GWCCA an advantage.
The NFL “has a lot of bargaining power, and someone who has worked with them knows where there is wiggle room and points that are negotiable,” said Selby, who advises, documents and negotiates on tax-exempt bond transactions for airports, stadiums, water and sewer systems for Hunton & Williams.
Benjamin Flowers, an associate professor in the school of architecture at Georgia Tech, praised the GWCCA for thinking strategically, but said research has shown that teams generally get their way in stadium negotiations no matter how hard a municipality works to strike a balanced deal.
“Getting a better deal on something you don’t need is not a good deal,” he said.
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