Marietta city council will vote Wednesday on a preliminary agreement with Arthur Blank’s professional soccer team for a new development that will include the team’s headquarters and six lighted practice fields off Franklin Road.
Council members discussed the Memorandum of Understanding for more than two hours in a closed-door executive session on Monday, before coming out and unanimously voting to place the agreement on Wednesday’s regular meeting agenda.
Mayor Steve Tumlin will hold a town hall meeting Wednesday to go over the terms of the agreement with the public. That session will be from 5-6 p.m. in the council chambers.
The city will provide Atlanta United FC with a 32-acre site, cleared of buildings and contamination. The agreement calls for a standard 10-year property tax abatement, which would be provided through the Cobb County Development Authority. The team will be responsible for all construction costs associated with the development, and will keep all revenue from it. The agreement would run for 20 years with two five year options.
Tumlin said the agreement will be amended to require a minimum $20 million investment by the team, but the mayor said team officials have told him the total investment could be upwards of $58 million. Meanwhile, the team will pay rent of $1 per year for the first 10 years, then pay rent of $10,000 per acre — or $320,000 a year — for the rest of the term.
Tumlin said there were no “substantive” issues debated in the long executive session. Then what took so long?
“There are two too many lawyers on this council, and I’m one of them,” he said.
Atlanta United had entered into an MOU agreement with DeKalb County, but announced Friday that it was walking away from that deal because of higher-than-expected costs for site preparation.
The DeKalb plan had Atlanta United building a 3,500-seat stadium, a corporate headquarters and three practice fields that the team planned to open before its inaugural season begins in 2017. DeKalb commissioners voted to offer the team more than $12 million in incentives – including the $5 million for land preparation.
The Marietta deal will not require construction of a stadium.
Speaking to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before the meeting, Tumlin said the public money in the project is part of the city's $68 million bond issuance, approved by voters in 2013. All but $5 million of that money has been used to buy run-down apartment buildings and clear the site on Franklin Road.
Earlier this year, Home Depot opened an Internet Technology center in what is now called the Fanklin Gateway Revitalization Project.
“We did our work on the front end,” Tumlin said. “We had already torn down the apartments, addressed moving the people out and remediated asbestos.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in September that Marietta was the soccer team's choice if the DeKalb County site run into problems. The team continued evaluating the land in Marietta, while also performing soil tests on 41 acres in DeKalb, near Memorial Drive and the county jail.
“We made the decision to concurrently complete our land due diligence on the Marietta site, but only as a backup in the event that the due diligence process in DeKalb County does not reach a successful conclusion,” a team spokesman said at the time.Tumlin said Home Depot brought a traditional redevelopment, a large building and upwards of 1,200 jobs. The soccer complex will be complimentary in a way that the mayor says will be exciting.
“If the youth soccer develops and they have tournaments, you’ll see a lot of people on the ground on Franklin Road that we could have never imagined,” Tumlin said. “That’s a halo effect that I just never dreamed about. We’ve already received calls about the 18 acres that are adjacent to it.”
The city has cleared two 25-acre lots. Atlanta United would take one of those lots and eight-acres from the other, Tumlin said.
“That leaves 17 acres on Franklin Road, backed up to the interstate, which is a dream,” Tumlin said.
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