The project ranks high on north Fulton leaders’ gripe list — a $5 million museum at Fulton County Airport-Charlie Brown Field honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, the World War II black fighter squadron, which has no direct tie to the airport.
The 13,000- to 15,000-square-foot facility will be built along Fulton Industrial Boulevard with federal stimulus bond funds, a loan that has to be paid back with interest, and will cost an estimated $350,000 per year to operate.
When commissioners approved it last summer, critics called the museum a boondoggle and a pet project.
“It’s a complete waste,” says Michael Fitzgerald, a Johns Creek resident and member of the Milton County Legislative Advisory Committee.
But what many detractors don’t know is that the $5 million isn’t building a museum at all, at least not the kind they imagine.
The Aviation Cultural Center has evolved from a tourist draw into a community gathering place similar to the nearby Southwest Arts Center or the Abernathy Arts Center in Sandy Springs.
It may have some fixed display paying tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen and notable pilots from the area, but there will be no curator, no gift shop, no turnstiles and no admission fee, according to Fulton Arts Council interim director Michael Simanga, whose department will operate it.
That means the facility, once criticized as too remotely located to draw visitors, has little chance of generating significant revenues.
District Commissioner Emma Darnell, who pushed for the center, said it’s not supposed to. The intent is to use stimulus money to help surrounding communities hit hard by the recession, she said.
“If the only projects we chose were revenue-generating projects, we wouldn’t have much to do here,” Darnell said. “Our job is to provide services, and to do it in a cost-effective way.”
Some of her colleagues to the north, however, said they had a different understanding of what the county was building. Commissioner Tom Lowe, who voted against it, said he thought it would be a conventional museum, and his complaint was that it would sit too close to an airport runway.
“It was represented as a museum,” said state Rep. Lynne Riley, R-Johns Creek, who voted against it as a county commissioner. “If the use is going to change from that, I think the taxpayers need to know.”
How signals got crossed isn’t entirely clear. County documents describe the project being scaled back in the mid-2000s. A memo from Darnell dated the day before last year’s vote described it as a “cultural and community center” offering public education on aviation.
The $5 million was approved as part of a larger $26.4 million bond package. Another county document, a rundown of bond projects from the day of the vote, referred to it as the “Aviation Museum and Community Center.”
During the meeting, Darnell said it was “not quite a museum,” and airport Director Doug Barrett told commissioners a feasibility study had ruled out more ambitious plans.
County planners once had visions of an aviation museum as grand as the ones in College Park, Md., and San Diego, Calif. A consultant estimated in 2002 that one on the level of the Georgia Museum of Aviation at Warner Robins would cost $20 million to $30 million.
Darnell said she’s tired of north Fulton leaders criticizing any use of countywide funds that benefits the south, and that in this case, they have their facts wrong.
“It was sort of unfortunate that the term ‘museum’ was used,” she said.
The county has hired a construction manager, Hill International/Matrix 3D LLC, for $148,000 and issued a notice to proceed with the project last month. Bids are being evaluated for architect and engineering services. The anticipated completion date is late 2012 or early 2013, said general services director David Ricks.
To its defenders, the center is about improving quality of life in a blighted area, fulfilling a 12-year-old promise of a community center to neighborhoods such as Collier Heights and Carroll Heights. The site is currently an empty, grassy lot beside the airport entrance. There’s a $33.99-per-night motel next door, and across the road is a boarded-up bank building vandalized with spray paint.
Simanga said the building will have meeting rooms, performance space and classrooms, providing a place for children’s summer programs and field trips, and exposing them to possible careers in aviation.
Single parent Anita Massey rents a home on nearby Collier Drive, where she lives with four children and one grandchild. She said a new community center could help keep children out of trouble.
“There’s a lot of shooting, a lot of stealing and a lot of fighting,” Massey said. “There’s really nothing for them to do, except watch TV and stay in the house.”
Whatever is being built, Riley said, the county shouldn’t commit to more ongoing expenditures while it’s trying to close a projected 2012 budget gap of more than $100 million. The county is already in the midst of a massive library-building program that will add an estimated $8 million per year in operating costs.
“Anything that is outside the scope of mandatory government services should be off the table,” Riley said.
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