Jail authority votes to authorize bond issuance for $1.3B Fulton jail project
The board of a little-known jail authority controlled by current and former officials from Union City and Palmetto approved Fulton County’s $1.36 billion financing plan to overhaul the county’s jail facilities.
In a 3-2 vote on Monday, the South Fulton Municipal Regional Jail Authority approved a resolution authorizing itself to issue bonds for the massive project that could take a decade to complete, despite two board members’ concern that the vote was called too hastily.
The project has been debated by county commissioners for years.
Under the financing plan, the jail authority will issue bonds periodically, and the county will use revenue from its general fund to pay the principal and interest on the debt through the authority.
The project involves building an 1,800-bed “special purpose facility” for inmates with mental health or other medical conditions, and renovating the troubled Rice Street jail. Once complete, that facility will initially hold general population inmates while the Rice Street jail is refurbished.
The funding also could include building another detention facility with 400 to 500 beds to absorb detainees from a city-owned detention center that leases space to the county, if that lease is allowed to expire on schedule in December.
Fulton County Manager Dick Anderson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Monday that the city of Atlanta offered on June 1 to sell the Atlanta City Detention Center, as the facility is known, to the county for $80 million.
That offer, which is still on the table, also would require the county to support Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens’ plan to extend six of the city’s Tax Allocation Districts, giving up incremental tax growth in those areas so the city can invest it in underserved neighborhoods. The deal would also require the county to commit $200 million toward a hospital that would serve residents in the southern part of the city, Anderson said.
Anderson noted the county already has committed $300 million for a medical center campus that Grady Health System plans to build in Union City; the county commission voted to oppose the TAD extensions last week.
It is unclear if the county is seriously considering the offer.
Moving forward with Dickens’ sweeping Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative, funded by the TAD extensions, hinges on the participation of at least one partner, in either the county or Atlanta Public Schools. APS has not indicated if they will go along with the extensions.
County officials have said that as TADs expire, the property tax revenue will then go to the county’s general fund and could be used to pay expenses, including the principal and interest on the debt for the jail project.
A spokesman for Dickens could not immediately be reached Monday night.
Earlier this month, the jail authority’s board deadlocked with a 2-2 vote on the bond issuance in the absence of Union City Police Chief Cassandra Jones. She voted in favor on Monday, along with Board Chair J. Clark Boddie, the former Palmetto mayor, and former Palmetto councilman John Farr.
Palmetto Mayor Teresa Thomas-Smith and Union City Mayor Pro Tem Angelette Mealing voted against the resolution again on Monday.
Thomas-Smith asked to postpone the vote, in part, because at least four of the seven seats on the commission will be under new leadership next year. Approving the resolution now could limit the new commissioners’ options from changing the jail plan if they want to do so, Thomas-Smith said.
“This is less than five months away that these new (people) will be in their seats,” she said. “So does this hamstring them in any kind of way?”
The bond attorneys for both the county and the jail authority told the board that the Fulton Commission will have to agree each time bonds are being issued for the project.
“The incoming commissioners would be voting on subsequent phases of bonds at that time, and they could choose not to ask y’all to issue bonds at that time,” said Thomas Ratchford, bond counsel for the jail authority. “So it’s not committing them to issuing everything at this time. It’s providing the parameters within which bonds can be issued in the future.”
Boddie, chair of the jail authority’s board, noted the county commission unanimously approved the financing plan and said it was the job of the jail authority’s board to approve the financing, not debate the project itself.
“The only thing we’re dealing with is the financial portion of this,” he said.
County officials expect the $734 million special-purpose facility would be built and occupied by 2031. It must be finished before the $489 million renovation of the Rice Street jail can start, so the county has space to hold inmates while entire towers are renovated, officials say.
Fulton County commissioners have debated the jail issue for years — through overcrowding, understaffing and deterioration of the Rice Street facility. Building an entirely new jail was one of the options debated and rejected by the Fulton commission.
The issue has taken on new urgency recently after a Department of Justice investigation found conditions inside the Rice Street facility to be dangerous and unconstitutional. The county has entered into a legal agreement, called a consent decree, with the DOJ to improve those conditions.