Local

Rise In Property Value Affects Cobb Park Acquisition

May 25th, 2017

The Cobb County Board of Commissioners is running into trouble buying land to turn into public parks.

In 2009, Cobb voters approved a $40 million park bond, but the county didn’t issue the bond because of the recession. Nine years later, it has access to only $27.4 million, a little more than half of the original value, because it waited to issue it.

And Cobb constituents aren’t too pleased with that.

“They’re asking us to pay a price because they were negligent in issuing the bond when they should have issued them,” Paul Paulson, the founder of the Cobb Parks Coalition, said.

Paulson said the main reason property values have increased is because, during the time the county wasn’t issuing the park bond, it spent millions on the new Atlanta Braves stadium, SunTrust Park.

“The stadium might have triggered it, but we have many more things going on in this county right now that makes this an attractive place to come and, hence, when you have that, prices go up,” Michael Boyce, chair of the Cobb County Board of Commissioners, said.

But Paulson disagreed.

“I don’t think that’s reasonable,” he said. “We didn’t vote for $27 million, we voted for $40 million.”

Boyce agreed and said that before he entered office he thought he understood the park bond’s intricacies. But now that he’s in office, he said he knows how complicated it is.

“I get that and I truly sympathize with them, but I only deal with the facts, and the facts right now for buying the property come from what my lawyer tells me I can or can’t do,” he said.

Boyce plans to hold public meetings with park advocacy groups, like the Cobb Parks Coalition, to see if they can work out a compromise. He said commissioners are in the final stages of negotiations for five properties that could become Cobb pubic parks.