If you go:
What: Public hearing on establishing new taxes and fees to pay for the Atlanta Braves stadium
Where: Cobb County Administration Building, 100 Cherokee St., Marietta
Time: 7 p.m.
Speakers: each get 3 minutes
Other hearing dates: Feb. 11 and 25
Sources of revenue for Cobb’s contribution to the Braves stadium:
- Rental car tax: $400,000 *
- Cumberland district tax: $5.15 million *
- Cumberland hotel-motel room fee: $2.74 million *
- Existing property tax: $8.67 million
- Existing hotel-motel tax: $940,000
* Subject of the public hearing.
Cobb County residents have their first chance Tuesday night to comment on proposed taxes and fees that could be implemented to cover the county’s $300 million contribution to a new Atlanta Braves stadium.
The 7 p.m. meeting will include the first of three public hearings that commissioners will hold on a proposed rental car tax, a new per-night hotel room fee and a new property tax on businesses around the site of the new ballpark.
The taxes and fees will almost certainly be approved by commissioners in February, regardless of what they hear from the public. That’s because commissioners on Nov. 26 approved the sources of revenue and the amounts from each in a preliminary agreement, called a Memorandum of Understanding, with the Braves.
The revenue amounts to $8.3 million a year, or just under half of the county’s $17.9 million annual debt service payments on the ballpark.
Commissioner Helen Goreham said Cobb County Attorney Deborah Dance advised commissioners to hold the hearings.
“Apparently, she feels this is the legal, the proper way to go about forming those special taxing districts,” Goreham said.
The rental car tax will be in unincorporated areas of the county, because most of Cobb’s six cities already have such a tax. But the hotel room fee — $3 per room, per night — and the 3-mill property tax on the 180 businesses in Cumberland area are confined to the geographic boundaries of the Community Improvement District. Apartment complexes in the CID also will be taxed.
Goreham said that’s appropriate because those businesses stand to benefit the most from the Braves move.
Tad Leithead, chairman of the Cumberland CID, has said that the businesses in the district all approve of the tax. During a town hall meeting in November, Leithead said the tax will “serve our purpose, which is to increase property values, maintain mobility and maintain quality of life.”
The other major source of revenue to pay for the stadium involves property taxes — $8.67 million a year that is currently being used to pay bonds that were used to buy parkland. Those bonds expire in 2017, and the revenue from them will be redirected to the stadium without a public hearing.
Likewise, the county plans to use nearly $1 million of existing hotel-motel tax revenue for stadium debt service and will not entertain public comment on that change.
County spokesman Robert Quigley said the meeting could be rescheduled if roads become hazardous because of snow that is forecast for Tuesday. That decision will be made Tuesday afternoon, he said.
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