Back in 2013, the Atlanta Braves Major League Baseball team announced that they would be building a new stadium in Cobb County. Ground would be broken and Georgians would be able to watch their baseball team in its new stadium at the start of the 2017 season. At the time, then-Cobb County Commission chairman Tim Lee and Braves management said things were going swimmingly.
In 2015, two years after the deal was approved and one year after his own finance director warned that county spending was quickly overtaking its revenue, Lee issued the following statement:
“Thanks to serious, conservative leadership, Cobb County will realize a 60 percent annual return on investment from the SunTrust Park partnership,” he wrote. “In fact, it will be the first private public partnership of its kind to result in a return on investment to taxpayers in the very first year.”
The problem was that Lee couldn’t get people on board with this sham of a deal, so he showed the world how to get things done undemocratically in a democratic country.
Commissioners’ November 26 approval of the Braves deal came just 18 days after their first top-secret briefing on November 8. Commissioners gathered again privately on November 13—two days after the public announcement of the team’s relocation—to kick around the details, even as some Cobb residents pushed for a closer look at the deal’s fine print and for more time to consider its terms.
At both the November 8 and November 13 meetings, the five commissioners used a “revolving door” format so only two of them would be in the room at once. No quorum existed that way, officials contend, so open-meetings requirements did not apply.
Very quickly the deal was exposed for the ballooning costs to tax payers that it was always going to be, with Tim Lee trying to pretend that all of the promises made and the costs those incurred—while he created tax cuts that further drained the coffers—weren’t connected to the stadium.
* The pedestrian bridge across a major highway to get fans from their cars to the stadium won't be ready in time for next season, and no one knows yet how much it will cost. Plus, if the county's renderings are to be believed, it will only have room for one shuttle bus at a time, which will inevitably be delayed by fans on foot spilling over from the pedestrian path right next to the bus land, and oh, the humanity.
* Thanks in part to those ballooning bridge costs, plus the cost of widening the highways that the bridge will pass over to prevent Braves games from worsening the county's already-legendary highway gridlock, the public price tag for the stadium has soared from an initial estimate of $276 million to somewhere north of $350 million. If someone offers you a wager on it eventually breaking $400 million, take the over.
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* After it was revealed that country commissioner Lee had pushed the stadium deal through by, among other things, hiring a lawyer to negotiate the Braves deal without even telling his fellow commissioners, Lee defended himself against ethics charges by insisting the ethics code only said elected officials "should" avoid the appearance of impropriety, meaning it was, you know, a suggestion. The county ethics board then dismissed the charges because Lee had said he was sorry.
The chickens have come home to roost, as they say. Or the transparent swamp politics of self-described “fiscal conservatives” have borne out, as everyone knew they would. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains:
Up to eight Cobb libraries could be closed or consolidated under a proposal to save about $2.6 million for the county.
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The document also proposes eliminating all part-time positions, a total of 124 employees, which would affect library hours.
Any closure or consolidation would be approved as part of the 2019 budget in July.
The public libraries? How can that be?
Today, Cobb is facing a $30 to $55 million budget shortfall after raiding $21 million in rainy-day funds to plug a gaping hole in the 2018 budget.
Notwithstanding Lee’s generous predictions, County Finance Director Bill Volckmann said even though income from the stadium is on track to meet or even exceed expectations, “It’s not going to be a windfall.”
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The public debt obligation on the stadium amounts to $16.4 million a year. Of that, $6.4 million is paid by Cobb residents out of the county’s general fund, while the remaining $10 million is funded through taxes and fees, including a countywide hotel/motel tax, a countywide rental car tax, a localized Cumberland hotel/motel tax, and localized Cumberland commercial property taxes.
Cobb pays another $1.2 million for stadium operation and maintenance and about $1 million for police overtime and traffic management at games and events.
And that doesn’t account for the infrastructure projects started and/or stopped, that were part of the “deal.” Cobb County is taking an enormous financial hit right now, and social services and nonprofits are the first on the chopping block.
A teary-eyed father of a special-needs child. A mother of an opioid addict. A man who thinks the government shouldn’t fund nonprofits.
Those were some of the 42 people who spoke to Cobb County commissioners at its Friday meeting before the board voted to pass a $405 million 2018 budget that cuts $1.1 million of grants to nonprofit organizations.
And this is what they tell you when your child’s school has staff cut and programs cut. This is what they tell you when your public libraries are downsized. They tell you there’s no money left, it wasn’t their fault, it was the guy before them. They’re right, of course. It was the guy before them and now that they are in charge they get the brunt of the righteous anger. But there’s a line in the sand and they need to figure out how to stand in it.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta Braves are still worth billions of dollars. And former Cobb County Board of Commissioners Chairman Tim Lee?
The Northeast Georgian reports Lee will start Feb. 1 as director of economic development for the Habersham Partnership for Growth/Economic Development Council.
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“My goal is to take what I’ve learned in the last 12 years as a commissioner, and more specifically, the last six years as chairman, and combine that with my marketing and advertising experience and combine those two assets into helping to serve somebody else, bring about success in whatever field that’s in,” he said.
His job is to “attract new businesses” to the area. Sounds like his job is to sell out the area to new businesses.