 We'll get started. Thank you guys for attending tonight. Welcome to the Federation of Neighborhoods Community Forum on the Mall Redevelopment and the Future of the Atlanta Highway Corridor. The Federation of Neighborhoods presents forums for residents to learn more about local issues. We are an independent and non-partisan community organization in Athens-Court County. Our membership includes neighborhood associations of the community organizations and individual members. Our forums are always free and open to the public and please consider becoming an individual affiliate member or encouraging your neighborhood association to become a member. And we want to thank Sena, thank you Nick for the support of this forum and by providing this lab space at a discount. Tonight's forum will be focused on the Atlanta Highway Corridor and the Mall Redevelopment Project. We will begin tonight with a few moderator questions and then we'll open up the floor to Q&A from the audience. Before we begin, a few ground rules. This is an open and accepting space, so please be respectful of the panelists and your neighbors, no cheering or cheering. And then when we attend the Q&A portion where we accept questions from the floor, please remember to phrase your questions as questions not statements. An hour and a half. So I will be your moderator tonight. My name is Buck Bacon and full disclosure, I serve on the board here with the Federation of Neighborhoods but I also have the pleasure of working with WNA Engineering and the Better Communities Collaborative. So I'm going to let Scott do all of the answering and I'm going to keep my mouth shut and just throw out questions. All right, well I'm going to give you guys an opportunity to introduce yourself. Ms. Linda, okay, we start with you. Okay. So I am Linda Davis, I am a representative of District 3. This is my district on the school board and I have been a member of the school board since 2012, so I'm going in my 11th year in that role. How you made Better Memories is the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery Coordinator. Don't want to be involved. We have all learned to pivot in the last three years, so here we are pivoting. My name is Mamie Anderson and I am the District 6 Representative on the Board of Education. I have served in that role for the last three years and I am super excited to be, well I was super excited to be on the Mark Committee which sort of helped move along the mode for this redevelopment. Lots of discussions were had about the community benefits agreement etc. through that Mark Committee and then it moved up to Athens-Cart County government and so I served on that committee along with Ms. Davis. Good evening, I'm Scott Haines. I'm a landscape architect and work for WNA Engineering. There I'm the Director of Operations for the Athens office. I also lead the landscape architecture and planning department. For this particular project of them all, I was on the team as lead for developing the plan and also worked quite a bit on the ATAT and CBA as well. Hello, I am Jesse Hool. I'm on the County Commission representing District 6, which broadly speaking is West Athens, but it includes all of the Atlanta highway corridor outside the loop, including the mall which we'll be talking about today. It's good to see some faces in the crowd from neighborhoods that aren't often in the rooms. Thanks for coming in and it's also, I've been to a lot of these, but it's nice to be on the side of the room and also odd. It's the topography of this sign. It's much higher and stranger, so thanks for having me. All right, well thank you guys. I know there are going to be a lot of acronyms thrown out tonight, so Jesse, I want to start with you. Do you know all the acronyms? Can you introduce the acronyms for us? I could list more of them than anyone wants to know, but the keywords. I think, okay, yeah, well I realize it'd be the acronym dictionary. Okay, so one major one we'll probably talk about today is TADS, Tax Allocation Districts. There's six of them in Athens, only one of which also includes participation by the School Board or the Clark County School District so that their taxes and the county's taxes are involved and that's this one, the mall one. These are little geographies, little regions that are drawn up where a special tax is levied. Is now the time to explain what that is or is that later in this? We can talk about that more later. Okay, and then you might hear us reference the mark, that's the Mall Area Redevelopment Committee, that's one of two layers of bureaucracy. This project moved through outside of the Conventional Planning Commission to the Mayor and Commission. There's also the TAC or the TAD Advisory Committee, so basically there's like what you can think of as more like citizen representatives and business owners in the area that are on the TAC, I see at least one of them in the room. And then after they reviewed the project, the TAD proposal specifically, it went to the mark, the Mall Area Redevelopment Committee, and that's comprised of myself, Commissioner Hanby, Mayor Gertz, and the two School Board members you see here. I don't know if there are other acronyms you really want. Oh, CVA, yep, PD, okay. So PD, you're probably familiar with hearing referring to the Police Department, but in this case we'll probably be referring to a Planned Development, which is a specific type of proposal that comes through the Planning Commission where the design is very restricted. All the way down to where a bench is placed is if it's on that plan it's going to be built. So when someone comes to the Planning Commission with a plan development, it's kind of like an even more specific version of a binding site plan where whatever is approved really has to be built. Different than like when someone's just looking for a rezone and they can build anything that meets their code in that zone. And then a CVA you might be referred to as a Community Benefits Agreement. That's a term that can be used to apply to a lot of different things, but in this case it refers to the agreement between the county and the developer around what kinds of benefits the community is going to get from this development, specifically from the TAD money that's used. And maybe one other thing you'll hear us refer to is an IGA, which is an Intergovernmental Agreement. And so that's the agreement between Athens-Clarke County and the Mayor and Commission and the CCSD or the School Board. And CCSD is the Clark County School District. Did I get all the ones you want? I think you're doing a great job, Jesse. So you may be surprised to see members of the Board of Education here tonight talk about the new development of a particular part of town. And so Ms. Linda, Dr. Anderson, I'd like to hear more about what your roles are in this redevelopment plan. So the thing that makes this particular TAD work, that means it has enough money for funding, was for the school district to kick in our share of the Avalorum taxes above the baseline that was set for 2021. So any increment above what we received in 2021, as a school district, is now going to be allocated for the tax allocation district. And that is to fund this TAD. That is the first time we've ever done anything like this. And it's certainly the only TAD that the school board participated in. So 60% of all of your Avalorum taxes go into the school district. And so, again, anything above what we received in 2021, will be going to the TAD to fund this development of the site. And that's our role. We did that because we felt like, well, I'll be honest, we felt like there were six TADs and we hadn't participated in any. And so one of our board members thought it would be a good idea for us to, again, join the county in doing something really beneficial for the community as well. And so that that motion passed. And then when this opportunity came up, when we finally had someone to put in a project to apply for the TAD funding, this seemed like a really great idea to me, certainly, and to other people on the district. And I'll let Dr. Mumbi to share more. Dr. Mumbi. So yeah, I was not on the board of education when this TAD got approved. There were five others that were on the voting plate, if you will, and none of those other ones got approved. And I think part of the benefit to this one at that time that was identified was that that mall area is in blight and it was, it is largely commercial. And so for that specific property, the way that our CFO sort of detailed it to the board was that if they rebuild it as residential property, then it won't have as much money coming out to support students. And so I think that that was part of the measure that, or part of I think the explanation that led the board to approve this particular TAD. Well, now we know that that's not the case. Now we know that a large portion of this TAD is going to go towards residential properties. But as a part of the community benefits agreement, I think the Clark County School District and the Board of Education came back and said, well, what additional incentives can we provide to this particular district and to people living around that area that would make this beneficial to the Clark County School District? And so after multiple meetings and a lot of back and forth, email, telephones, etc., the incentives provided to the school district to redevelop this property with that residential portion, it outweighed the fact that that property is going to continue to sit in blight. And it's going to continue to depreciate in value. And it's going to continue to remove tax dollars from our community over the next one to 20, 30 years. And so adding that residential portion where we are going to increase the students' size potentially if families do move into those households is balanced by some of the things that are in the community benefits agreement that could outweigh the fact that we are going to be educating more students because of some of the things that over the next 20 or 30 years will actually add a tax benefit to our community and to our district specifically, to District 6. Because the reality is that that particular parcel of land is losing value. It's losing value every year. And so if we don't do something about it, the tax benefit that comes back to CCSD is negated and then plus every single year after that. So if you multiply that by 20 years, we're talking about a negative appreciation in value that comes back to the Clark County School District. Yes. So Scott, this is a question for you. Can you tell us a little more about the current site and its conditions and more about the proposed site and redevelopment? Sure. So if you've been to the mall lately, you can see it's in decline, right? This isn't a local problem alone. You see this all over the nation. A lot of communities have suffering malls. I think the best explanation for that is probably the convenience of the internet. A lot of us like to shop online. I'm guilty myself. It's easy to sit in my living room and either it's Amazon or whatever is your fancy, right? But what that's done is it's made brick and mortar retail much, much harder to maintain. And the mall is a really good example of that. I was there this weekend looking for shoes for my son and it was just it's staggering that there's so little remaining in there. Now part of that is because the mall is starting position itself for transition. But even six months ago before this was going to be a reality, there was no denying the mall was losing ground. And even further back, right? Looking for years and seeing this happening. The mall property itself is about 75 acres, largely impervious. Most of it is covered by asphalt or rooftop. There is no stormwater management to speak of currently on that site. At one point there was the dam broke. I don't know when years ago. So really all of the water that hits that site primarily just runs right off into the river. This has caused some pretty decent flooding conditions and some erosion problems downstream. The county did a study, I think several years ago. Arcadis did the study and it was on the north of Hone. And one of the conclusions to that study was one of the ways they could improve water quality in the river was to put a stormwater facility on this site. You know what happens? Arc's park, Arc's leave a little bit of oil, rains that washes into the watershed. Over time that has impacts just in addition to the pure volume of water that comes off of that site. So one of the great benefits of this is the tidying up that problem. Being able to not only provide stormwater management but also reduce impervious cover in general. I think our plan has something like 20 acres of land that will be returned to open ground or at least ground that can absorb rainwater post development. That's a pretty considerable amount. In addition to that adding trees, if you've seen, you know, you drive by the mall there's not too much to speak of trees out there. The ones that are out there in the parking lots, they're pretty, they're, yeah, they're not going to maintain it very much longer, right? There's some stuff on the edges, some pines and some things like that are in decent shape and there's some magnolias here and there. But for the most part, the parking lot trees themselves are pretty much at a lost cause. So tree canopy is another thing that we can do that'll be improved by the site. Part of the tree management requirements for the county, we have to provide 40 percent of canopy cover for a site like this for Marshall Generals on the site. And we'll make that back with this new plan. That means about 1,000 new trees being planted, either in parking lots or on edges or along street corridors. So that's also a major improvement, you know, heat island effects are a real deal. And one of the ways you try to counteract that is not only by decreasing black top surfaces, but also shading the others that you have that are necessary for cars. And so the two part strategy of providing stormwater and reducing impervious and then also providing shade, hopefully will make a major difference to the site generally, to speak logically, from the stormwater heat island effect. In terms of the mall itself, the mall was built in around, I guess the early 80s. It's my understanding, it was not here in the early 80s, but it's my understanding that the mall, when it was built, really was sort of the genesis of the plan of highway really exploding, right? It pulled a lot of development out of downtown. JC Penney's left downtown and went out west. And then the corridor just really expanded. And I think we're seeing the exact opposite now with the mall in decline. We've sort of seen a decline in Atlanta highway as well. It's very interesting to see how closely those two things are tied together and the effects both positively, well, in terms of growth in the early 80s and throughout the 90s and now in this decline phase for the mall. So we see this project, you know, not only talk about the halo effect of the project, with the improvement of this site, we don't expect to just uplift the site itself, but hopefully provide a catalyst to uplift the entire corridor. In business that we're in development, we've already seen people calling, you know, like, hey, what about this site that's not on the mall site that are asking about, they're looking for out parcels that are kind of interested. As soon as everybody saw it, it was Greenland that got approval. All of a sudden, all those other properties too started looking really promising. And so I think in terms of improvement overall, the mall is going to be a huge catalyst for that. In terms of plant self, we're planning on taking, gosh, at least three quarters of the mall down. If you imagine where the food court is, come in the main entrance, kind of cutting through there and taking everything that's to the right of that out. And then eventually where Sears is, Sears would go as well. Okay, so that leaves Belk. Belk has a long-term lease with the mall. They have provisions that allow them to stay for an unbreakable lease, more or less. They had a lot to say in the plan. They got to say whether they liked it or not, whether they had e-sheds still for the highway and so on and so forth. We had to please them first. They'll get a facelift. And then everything behind them stays as well. So imagine Belk and have the block of structure behind it with stay. Where the food court is to the right, that comes down. You can see on the plan there's a large greenway or a center green, if you will. That would be an open park space. Okay, so one of the things about fighting online retail is that you have to provide a space that people want to go to. You have to have something better than your living room that makes people engage in your sight. I don't know if this happens to you all much, but I know on weekends or whatever, what do you want to do? What do you want to do this week? Finding these kinds of spaces where you can go, let's just go to the space. There'll be something to do there. Whether it's just hang out in the park or whatnot, and then people tend to do a little shopping and maybe they have dinner or lunch or something like that. So it's making shopping and retail sort of a secondary activity to the primary function of just go to that space because the space itself is activated and cool. That is the heart of what we're going for with this plan. So large center green space flanked with commercial on the ground floor and residential above it. And you'll see on the plan there is quite a bit of new multifamily residential, but also single family residential too. You can see the town homes in the back. The idea of this plan was to make sort of a gradation from intensity in the core out to lesser, less intense uses as a transition to the neighborhood surrounding. Because it's surrounded by single family, primarily on the backside. You notice on Huntington Road, we're trying to engage that with single family homes. So you have a nice transition of traditional ranch house single family on Huntington. And then as it comes over, you have single family town homes. And then it transitions to a little multifamily court. It's the center of commercial for this idea of trying to make more of a gradation of uses instead of the mall just being bang commercial and around the parking. And then, you know, it's very insular in that sense. So trying to create more weaving of the fabric of the neighborhood. So, can you tell us more about the process that brought us here? So more about the plan development, more about the mark, more about the tag. Sure. I'll try to demystify the process. And you know, in these things, I'm always most excited about the Q&A parts. I'll try to do this briefly, not because I can't talk in more detail, but because I don't want to bother too much. You all want to hear it, so feel free to ask for more later. But, you know, most anything that gets built in this county, anything that gets built in this county happens one of two ways. It happens by right, which is whatever someone wants to build, whether it's renovating a building, adding onto it, tearing it down, replacing it, building on a vacant lot, whatever they want to build is something that they can do according to the way our codes are written, and they don't need any special permission to make, to do anything outside of that code, right? Or it needs some kind of waiver or changes, conditions, and then it goes through our planning commission into the mayoral commission. So ultimately, everything is decided upon by the mayoral commission. If it requires any sort of modification outside of what's allowed by code, what can be done, quote, unquote, by right, this is a particularly large and complicated example of something that could not be done by right, but this happens all the time in much more minor ways, like, you know, someone wants to turn their single family house into a duplex, and that can't be done by right in the neighborhood, and so they have to go through the process. So that's kind of your standard process. It's well-honed. There's dozens, if not hundreds, of items in a given year that go through the planning commission, hundreds might be an exaggeration, certainly dozens, many hundreds more that go through the planning department and are built by right. When TADS get introduced into all of this, the tax allocation districts, it introduced this opportunity for areas that are particularly hard to be redeveloped to be incentivized because there was some public money that could be fed back into the project to incentivize building that might not otherwise occur, or and or to get the public at the table so that what gets built looks more like what this community wants and needs, what we can describe as a community benefit. So that use of TAD money is what opened up this whole extra can of worms of bureaucracy, and that's where you got that TAD advisory committee, the TAC that I mentioned, and then the mark, the mall area redevelopment committee that I served on, both reviewing essentially the parameters of the development that apply to that community benefits agreement which governs the use of the TAD money. So that's different than the design of the project, like what you see on that paper there, that's the way the whole physical infrastructure is laid out. That was all part of a decision that ran through the planning commission after planning staff reviewed it, right? But all along everyone was talking about how the two kind of had to happen in tandem for it to happen at all. So the planning commission certainly had in mind that a lot of what they were seeing on here wasn't actually going to happen if there wasn't a community benefits agreement, but their charge was just to look at the design, not to look at the community benefits agreement, and those other two groups, the TAD advisory committee, the TAC, and the mall area redevelopment committee, the mark, had to kind of look at whether that community benefits agreement was ultimately a good deal, and by a good deal I mean is this a well-crafted enough agreement that we know it's legally going to hold up and be binding, even if the people involved change, even if we end up in some kind of dispute later, but also ultimately is the amount of money that's coming back off the tax rolls to go back to these projects justifiable because what we're getting from this project is a good enough benefit for the community. So those kind of a mix of that sort of due diligence, legal scrutiny, and that kind of judgment call that was done by the TAC and the mark, and then all of that, all at once, came to the Mayeron Commission in two separate agenda items. We had our vote, that's actually three separate agenda items technically, so we had our vote on what came through the the planning commission, which was a change in future land use and a rezone, those are two of your votes, and then a third vote on that community benefits agreement. I think maybe the other thing I'll just add to this unless you were expecting more from me, Buck, is this all started quite a while ago, I mean you could argue this started many, many years ago, pick your beginning point, but really where the people involved in owning and redeveloping the site started to approach officials that worked for the government was about two years ago, and ultimately two December's ago is when they brought their first draft of a plan through the planning department, and then it was heard in February of 2022 by the planning commission, and it was not heard particularly favorably. I also hosted a town hall, and people at the town hall didn't feel very good about it. There's a lot of people feeling not very good about it, and so the people who were bringing that proposal forward really heard, I think, from the community and absorbed and made real substantial substantive meaningful changes to what they brought forward in their next version, which looked almost exactly what you see there, and that was where they actually got rid of their engineering firm, and they brought on WNA engineering to do that work. So when we talk about a community benefits agreement, I think of it as kind of in two phases in that there's a bunch of stuff that is community benefit baked into what was their PD, their proposal for the planning commission to consider, that included like the design for not only the transit station, but also all the bus stops in it, all the connectivity to adjacent neighborhoods, all that stormwater infrastructure and grading that Scott was alluding to, all the green space, etc etc, and I'll avoid the new writing everything you already spoke to, that was baked into what was kind of like round one of community benefit, and then round two of community benefit was like, okay now we're talking about this tad money, and some of us feel like you get to do more than just that, and that's where you got things like the affordable housing component, and the child care center, and the internship program, and the minority women-owned business program, and probably some other thing, the youth development center, etc etc, so I think a lot of people started to really hear about this, there was a lot more media reporting, there were certainly a lot more meetings of all these layers of bureaucracy, in the few months leading up to that Mayor and Commission vote, and that might have given the impression that like a lot was being decided just in a couple of months, but actually a lot was finally really being discussed and hammered out with people really digging their heels in, and kind of really negotiating harder in those last couple months, something that had been going on for about a year and a half to two years. Awesome, thank you Jesse. So Dr. Andrewsons, Ms. Linda, can you tell us more about the tax allocating districts, and how it relates to the mall redevelopment project? So when the Clark County School District voted to approve District 6 being involved in this tax allocation district, the Intergovernmental Agreement basically said, all right, we will freeze the taxes that are coming out of District 6 starting January 1st, 2021, and any incremental increase in that tax by the parcel, by the way, by the parcel will be thrown into basically like a bank account, like an escrow. If you've ever bought a house, you put your money in an escrow and wait for all the contracts to work out, and so that's essentially what's happening right now. So from 2021 to today, there's money being placed into this escrow account, if you will, to redevelop these properties based on community agreements, CCSD, ACC, etc. And so what this means is that if we don't do any development, then that money just sits in that pot. So any incremental increase that we have, and right now it's very little, because there is no redevelopment happening, right? So any incremental increase that we have is sitting in a bank account waiting to be spent, and no one is spending it, because that vote already happened. And so right now the decision is do we approve these redevelopments and hope that that incremental tax increase amounts to what this development will be, or do we just not do anything and let this bank account continue to increase in what's inside of it? We can't reverse the vote that already happened. The only thing that we can do is invest in something better than what we have today, and hope that the tax value of that parcel, that one parcel, not all of District 6, but that one parcel, every improvement that they make from today moving forward will increase the tax value of that property. And once that tax value increases, it goes back into that bank account, and they can borrow against it. And so what we're looking at here is something that we've already agreed that we're going to do as a community. Right? We've already said let's open this bank account and let's put money in it. And now we're trying to agree on how we're going to spend it. And so what this mark did and what ACC did was say if you're going to pull money from this bank account, what's in it for us? What's in it for ACC? What's in it for CCSD? What's in it for the Clark County School District and what's in it for the for the and the Intergovernmental Agreement and the Community Benefits Agreement that we approved at the end of months and months of conversations and discussions said, okay, if you do these things, then after you have already invested money from your private funding, you can start pulling from our bank account. They are essentially financing millions, I think it's 70, millions of dollars before they can pull from a bank account that we have already approved from 2021 that money is going to go into. And they cannot pull from that bank account until they have fulfilled the promises that are in the community benefits agreement. And the last thing that I'll add to this is that we asked, the mark asked for the Clark County Government to give us an inventory of all of the other tags in the state and what they're doing for their Community Benefits Agreement to get money into private industry to build in their communities and it doesn't even begin to match what we asked for. It doesn't even begin to touch what we asked for and the reason I've got two. One, we are a diverse community and we are a loud community. We sit at a table and we ask for what we need and we don't say yes until we get it. That's how Athens is. I grew up in this community that's how we are and so when we sit and talk about what comes back to our community in this investment I know that a lot of people don't agree with it and you probably still won't after this conversation and this panel and it's fine but at the end of the day what we're talking about here is looking at a parcel of land and something that we already decided that we were going to do in 2021 and now we're agreeing to doing that and this is transformational possibly. I'm a little bit older and I have the joy and privilege I think I'm living in Atlanta when the TAC for 14th, 17th Street was approved. I didn't know it was a TAC at the time but I lived through that transformation of that abandoned space that was mostly railroad tracks and practically nothing else. I got to experience going into the 17th Street development there and looking at that transformation and when I heard that it was funded with a TAC then I do understand how as long as and I didn't live in Atlanta for a lot of years but as long as I did live there my church was really close to that area it was an eyesore it was nothing absolutely nothing that was happening there so when this TAC was approved by the board and I'll confess I am the one vote that said no I don't want to approve a TAC when we don't know what we're going to do but this is how it was presented to us just as it was presented to the commission. Let's go ahead and approve these TAC districts and then we will find someone or assign the allocations to someone who brings us a good plan and so we bought a pig in a poke and that's what I called it back pig in a poke I said okay do it do it and then they will come and so when I saw this plan and met the people that were doing this plan and had conversations with them I got really excited because I knew the possibilities of what could happen and I'll also just you know remind me that that that whole 14th Street Atlantic Station thing has gone through a couple of iterations since it started but nothing went back to ruin it is every time coming back better and stronger and so I have hope and I am optimistic that this is going to be transformative and it as it is on paper I am convinced as the people that are doing this are looking for that transformation as well now I think it'll be up to us to make sure that that happens because again as as Dr. Anderson has said none of this is left up to chance they have a what is it the PD right that specifies exactly what must be done to bring this plan to fruition followed by the IGA which again takes the school board out of the work of trying to manage the development because that is not what we do we educate children and so that work falls to the county to make sure that the letter of the law is following this and that everything that was promised will be delivered and so I feel good about that decision as well and I'll also say that in talking to the developers I kept hearing them say we want to build a live work play community with all of the new tech jobs that are coming into Athens with all of the new growth that's happening around Athens we want to have a place where people can live work and play and so like that's exactly what's happening at Atlantic Station I have friends who actually still live there been there for like 20 years now and they still love that immunity that evolved from that and they live in some of the townhouses really close to where that key of place was over there so I feel confident that should we come to fruition I mean I have no expectation that it will not since this company didn't come to us and say we're going to go out and put bonds out to raise money to do this work they are funding this up front they will be reimbursed with the miners that are in the tag only if the things that they are asking for reimbursement for are already spelled out in the cba and in the in the what is it the in the pd as well so I feel good that even when you started out with the field of dreams there are enough people that are suspicious enough and not trustful enough that we put some really strong safeguards in here to protect the investment coming from our community I don't know that there is an exit strategy I don't think anybody's funding exit I think we want to see this happening we want to see it be very successful and that is about all I have to say about that well I would like to give the floor an opportunity to to ask questions before I do that to Scott or Jesse if you guys have anything else to add I'll just go ahead and address where this project is right now right because we've just finished going through this major entitlement process and agreement of the community benefits agreement so it's like what's next I'm sure that's been on that's the question that's coming in so I'll just go ahead hit that one so the mall was closed Friday all the property was the balance of property was was closed by the developers you know prior to this they only owned a little bit of the property so it was owned by an Israeli group so that main negotiations difficult and extensions very difficult it's probably the consulate were running into deadline issues you know it was they were not willing to give too many more extensions by that I mean zero more zero extensions after the two yeah so that's great that's our that's a huge milestone to pass we've already begun biweekly calls working on design drawings expect to probably be in that phase for the next five to six months again those those that involves not only site development civil engineering and landscape architecture drawings but also architecture drawings for these large buildings in addition to utility relocations a ton of utilities all of this has to happen by the mall stays in business like so belt has to remain functioning through all of this which makes phasing very difficult we can expect permitting probably takes 90 days after that that puts us somewhere starting construction in say early 2024 and instructions probably two years or so or more but given the immensity of this project it's pretty aggressive and pretty fast timeline one of the reasons that we're seeing such fast movement Dr. Anderson talked a little bit about this with the TAD the project has to generate the increment okay so it has to increase in value in order for there to be money available to pay back to pay into the increment for the TAD which means the developer the ask for the TAD was 189 million dollars in 30 over 30 years so whether they can reach 189 million in year 27 that's the end of the TAD and then full increment flows back to the coffers or if they reach 30 years regardless of how much money has been increased the TAD that ends so they have to doing the math they have to get underway and improve the value of the property as quickly as possible so that the increment starts generating and accumulating if they're going to have a chance to get back the money that they need to pay that that part of the performance this really places a lot of the performance if not all of the performance on the developer to not only produce a project quickly but also produce something that is really good because unless the project is successful there's no increment and so it doesn't pay it's a great vehicle it allows for almost zero risk for the city and the county unified government places a lot of it on all on the developer so it's been a very interesting process to get to know intimately and we are now seeing the result of that which is we're moving fast real quickly you used the word I think the phrase the mall closed on Friday it didn't mean that it closed the doors yeah sorry so we've ever bought a house, we've ever bought a piece of something and when you close the deal right yeah sorry to be so we thank you but the property changed in the end the mall remains open, don't make sure that all right I wrote down five things I'll blow through real quick here and then we'll open up for Q&A so one is I want us to think about how we're talking about the transformative impact of a project of the size this is an area the size of downtown I know these federation and neighborhood meetings often have a more in-town downtown crowd we're talking about a collection of parcels just outside the loop the size of downtown so I mean you can drag and drop on google maps if you don't believe me but it is massive which also means there's a lot of weight behind this decision but certainly there's a lot of potential what can come from this for the entirety of West Athens super especially the Atlanta Highway Corridor and really the counting as a whole the next thing I wanted to mention was the model of this community benefits agreement is a Pego model which is different from what's typical for TADS so TADS usually do a bonding model where the counting or municipalities like the fiscal agent to sign on to a bond that puts both more risk on the government and also means that that money is coming up front what that usually means that you have a more fleshed out plan that's like more guaranteed to happen as much as we can guarantee anything these days so a lot of the uncertainty that we're seeing with like okay like where is the financing going do we think this is going to happen some of that is just inherent in the style of deal of a Pego model but almost all the risk really is on the private developer so we you know you heard their attorneys refer to it as like de-risking it for the government but I think in a lot of ways that's that's quite true they only get access to this money as Linda pointed out if they really build everything that they said they would and only after it's built so we're not paying into this unless we get exactly what they said they would give us the next thing I wanted to point out and this is kind of building off of Dr. Anderson is speaking to and thank you very much for for kind of breaking down like how this account works they're only eligible for monies specifically generated by the parcels the mall is on so the tad is like a map drawn across like a couple hundred parcels some of them are even single family homes and things in a bunch of public streets but only the increased value of the actual mall properties is what's going to pay back into this so they're basically just getting like a tax break in a particularly complicated structure for their own property all that other money that's generated by adjacent parcels into the tad into the account that Dr. Anderson likened to an escrow account is still available for something else and cannot be used for this this is specifically structured so that only if and when hopefully when these folks you know build the thing and make it more valuable and then that money is generated are they then eligible to get it back from that specifically someone builds something somewhere else if property values go up or down elsewhere has no bearing on what happens here fourth or five I saw in the canned questions we didn't get to quite all of them but there's a question of timing and I get asked this a lot in the extremely large tone that is our community benefits agreement you may want to look for phase table you can just like search the document for face table it's schedule six one but in the many schedules which kind kind of refers to like all the things that need to happen and when and how you'll see a breakdown of what exactly will be built when and it refers to the parcels that are referenced on the PD but the short version is this is structured as deadlines so ideally as scott's go to you know they might build even quicker and then it's generating value even sooner but the only way they get money at all is if they build it by these deadlines so the earliest we can expect completion to be done on portions is 2027 and the latest we can expect the last stuff to be built is 2031 just to give you all a feel and the last thing I want to refer to I could go on and on about all the really cool stuff as one of the skeptical cynical people that served on the mark with Linda you know like to really try to make sure that we didn't just have nice sounding language but language that would really hold up in court if well-paid lawyers started to go to battle with each other right and so we have in here a maintenance plan and why I think that's especially cool is a lot of times what gets built including what gets built with public money or with a tax break just focuses on what goes on the ground at the outset and doesn't necessarily contemplate what happens a decade or three decades out well we got a little more leverage here because we're talking about a three decade deal right and so we really looked at well the payment that goes on the ground once you put it down ain't going to be in any kind of condition 30 years from now so how do we make sure that you as the private developer who may well sell and then that person sells again actually still has a road 10 20 30 years from now that people can actually drive down still has a sidewalk that people can actually walk across still has a stormwater pipe that doesn't collapse and create a sinkhole well we're going to have a maintenance plan built into this agreement that all parties have to agree to before you get access to any of this money too so that maintenance plan is actually still in the works right now should be executed sometime within the next what like two months roughly is that what we're looking at has to be done has to be done by august but they're trying to make stuff happen as soon as possible right so august at the latest so there is i think an an even above average um four car county and really for agreements like this in general um stipulation that what we see happen on this site doesn't go the way of a lot of other private developments uh you know i feel like i learned from the mistakes of you know commissions of your not not nothing against them just like you know we approve private developments they build private roads they put in streetlights they put in sidewalks they deteriorate the people who built it sell or leave and a bunch of homeowners move in not aware that they're now like personally responsible for 120th of a road that's going to cost them five or six figures to replace right and so the safeguard against that phenomenon happening here we have this this built into it and i i feel particularly excited about that thank you guys uh so we'd like to take uh questions from the audience uh and uh yes ma'am so back to the tad so there the developer will be the money that is available to the developer through that and there's a cap is that correct so they have they say they are going to be able to develop this within 70 million dollars and that's what you guys will get back to them or they'll be able to access right so is there and that's only for like what you were explaining the actual footprint of the existing wall itself yes not the outlining properties around anything outside of that it's very interesting yeah and that's that's that's how tabs are are built is the parcel itself has to increase in value as they're developing it and and so yeah the the surrounding part there's this halo effect that they've talked about where increases in land volume and property value and all of those will happen around but that's not part of the reimbursement process for the money that is in this account for them to pull from and an additional statement that i'll make is that there is a a person there's a verification agent there's a verification agent that that is going to be responsible for ensuring that every receipt that they submit for reimbursement accounts for what is in the cda what is in the ij like all of the things that we agreed on they are only reimbursed for those things so we talked about a lot in our committee soft money right and and there's all of these things that are non reimbursable that we talked about on our committee and we said well you're not going to get money for this and their argument was well our return on investment will earn us back the money that we're not going to get for you know personnel for this particular thing or gifts and gifts for this other thing and so there there is a verification agent that will determine what what they get reimbursed for for every single item that happens during this redevelopment process and they can only get reimbursed if the parcel increases in value and that money of the parcel that has increased in value goes into this account so they not only have to come up with the money up front they have to come up with the rest of the money to develop the rest of it outside the reason i'm concerned is because i live in holiday states right next to it so that means we're facing nine years of construction along the 110th road border and everything that goes along with it and the destruction of those roads and when our nose going to get repaid and you know getting in and out of our neighborhood because that is the only way to get to earn it well i think that i can go around but the only way is to go through the mall and so it's it's very concerning to us but we're going to have to trust that the decisions that have been made are going to be the best interest for that entire area so i'd like to add but one of the things i think that might give you some relief is that like i said belt has to remain open the mall has to remain so the site doesn't close parts of the site close as it's faced which means there's always going to be a way to navigate through it at times for brief periods and say like when they're installing the roundabout in Huntington there will be a reroute but it will be a fairly short detour and the dates that jesse gave are outside like drop dead type dates if the construction is not completed by those dates and they risk fall on the deal so like i said it's in their best interest to get that construction quickly um no one wants to have construction for nine years they want to do it for like 20 29 didn't you know right that that's so that's part of the cbs but they can't later what they should say but that wouldn't benefit the developer because if they're still into construction in 10 years from now the means are going to lose all that chance for that increasing increment and so the longer they stay under construction and do not open that's just money they're losing that they can not be regained as part of the part of the package so they're going to want to buy it up as fast as possible for a number of reasons and i just wanted to make sure that we're differentiating that the mall itself of course is the project that is under this cba and under this agia and the um it is a portion of the tad so those other properties that qualify for the tad are waiting for someone to bring forward an application for those funds as well and so it's not just this one space it's the largest space by anybody guess but then there there the other surrounding parts of the tad that are included in here again this developer doesn't have access to those funds but if someone else brings forward a plan to another property then it falls under a similar kind of arrangement so that again you're going to have multiple people working on in this area our thing to go after these same funds i made us to add a couple of things you know the blessing and the curse of belk right so the curse of belk uh to my chagrin is that we have a lot more surface parking where i wish there was something else like green space or housing or structured parking instead but the blessing of belk is that because they have to stay open all the time all the folks who live adjacent who rely upon kind of using that mall to get through it and we'll have well aware of many folks in your situation you know it's a nightmare on the highway traffic-wise right and you know your way of navigating the nightmare so your formula might have to change but your ability to somehow traverse that tract is going to remain because belk basically negotiated that people are going to have to do exactly what you're hoping to be able to do yeah maybe you know i'm you know thank him but also wag your finger for some of the other stuff you made us do the the other thing i wanted to point to you i i love that you asked about this idea of like what's the most we can spend so much of the conversation for a lot of the negotiation it was just like is this feasible right and so like how how can we feel confident that you're actually going to generate something worthy and not that can pay for this to make this whole thing viable but near the end we're really starting to get into but what if you really knock this out of the park like we don't want to subsidize the profits of private developers right and so if anyone who hasn't already watched the many meetings of the mark you could you could hear the attorney that we hired dan mccray he's very experienced in this outside attorney talk about how he built a very wide mode and this is a guy who's like his reputation for getting work like this relies upon these deals being good right and that wide mode included two caps so there's a cap on the overall amount of money that can go into the projects from the tad and a cap on the percent of the overall value of the property that can be generated back in so if these guys and there are many many other workers get us something built ideally before those deadlines which were 2027 to 2031 then and they do it so well and so quickly that it's worth way more we're not on the hook for more than those caps and it's whichever of those is lower right so we're not we're not paying 29 percent of something that's worth twice what anyone expected on i know construction costs over time doesn't matter how much time whatever amount of time there is between the time you make the decision to build it to the time you actually build it absolutely and i think that's a lot of where you saw in the in the deal some of that like the soft cost that was being spoken to is like everyone's trying to guess at what things are going to cost over the next decade and doing their best job of having the best people make their best estimate but at the end of the day it is still some amount of educated guesswork right um and so our safe garden this is the maximum that we're willing to pay the other really good thing about this development is these people are local so they're your neighbors and there are people that you know and we'll have access to so i think that goes a long way at least in my opinion in terms of accountability and credibility so i feel a little excited about that being being done locally i can give everyone scott's cell phone number yes i have a question you guys uh i've touched on court and uh i think that we i agree with her i think infrastructure is probably the most of everybody's concern here traffic is really bad i would like to hope that i guess this is for you jessie that they are looking at on and off ramps they're looking at the overall corridor how that's going to impact you know the area you know i agree that the mall does need to be revitalized but i also want to hope that they're going to be doing something about the border for the area of traffic yes uh the short answer is oh yeah like a lot's going to be done but what exactly is still a little undefined so i think as paul was asking me before we get started um then a big thanks to the folks who came to my town hall on transportation which focused on the plan ahead of order and here today i'm hoping to do another one of those once we actually have a defined plan from g dot um but alana highway is a g dot corridor georgia department of transportation so um the county gets some amount of influence mostly in the form of asking sometimes in the form of begging occasionally in the form of leverage like hey we've got teesaw money um but but you know mostly in the form of asking strategically for g dot to try to design or redesign things the way we'd hope uh would best align with our plans for our community and uh a lot of how we are able to define that is to have master plans for the corridor for our future land use maps etc that match what we're currently saying and so there's a little bit of catch-up to do a really great example of this is work before the planning department on our future land use map update which is like a very abstract concept but is particularly pointed here especially when we think about how jennings mill parkway was built to handle truck traffic for industrial development that never came and now it's just a bunch of single-family neighborhoods and and so for us to compel g dot or like a federal agency to give us money to really dramatically reimagine these corridors we need to have that those plans in place that match what we actually want now and what we actually want now some in some ways matches what people were thinking all along but in some ways is a dramatic departure so we need to fix those dramatic departures to match what we currently need so that's where like if you hear us talking about master planings there really is value in that another thing i'd point to you back to the future land use map is the past iteration of this while we miss the mark on things like jennings mill parkway the the growth concept areas there is a big one highlighted on the mall and then the tag got built around the mall and now we're seeing this happen and you know the idea is that you have a big enough substantial enough change in one place and it drives change to happen all along the rest of the corridor and so i think the hope is that this development is going to catalyze a lot of those more dramatic changes and it happens to dovetail very well with the timing of g dot's project which is entirely in their purview but lord knows we're really trying to get them to do it in a way that you know we're hoping we're really aligned with our bicycle and pedestrian master plans so that whatever bridge gets built can be can be crossed over by people who aren't in a in a in their own personal vehicle it's also hopefully going to align with our transit development master plan which is also being reworked now to include this expansion station in this development now that we know can happen here and also align with our t-splost project list which includes specifically money for Atlanta highway corridor and also a line with our Athens in motion master plan which identifies Atlanta highway corridor as one particularly in need especially now that we've brought on a couple of new people in our transportation public works department another acronym with tpw here a lot of good folks in tpw but we got two new ones a bicycle pedestrian coordinator and a vision zero coordinator whose mission is to reduce our traffic fatalities to zero and they've created using data we already had we just hadn't put together in this way a crash map and it shows you where people are dying and they also have data that shows that last year more people died in Athens pedestrians and bicyclists than any time in the last 15 years so we have a dire need to like literally change the way our infrastructure is working so people can live through like getting to the grocery store and one of the hot spots is Atlanta highway around the mall so all of these master plans dovetail and I really think that this project is going to catalyze us having the funding and the attention to really take those plans off the shelf and really like put the stuff in the ground to realize them I hope that's uh it's not going to be easy there's going to be many more of these meetings but we're working on I guess the whole thing is like you know the fact that everybody's thinking about it yeah definitely thinking about it and the last thing I'll add is uh I welcome your grievances and complaints wholeheartedly especially if they're in writing and especially if other people are copied it makes it real easy for me to be like it's not just me as one of 10 commissioners competing with nine other commissioners for the stuff in their district it's all these people with their stories that match the data on that crash map so please keep keep coming keep bringing it up yeah absolutely I'll get to you just a second so this is actually where I disagree with commissioner rule because I live in that district and I drive my kid to tennessee road elementary school every morning and I take the bypass and I think it's going to be quicker and then I get off the bypass and there's four lights and then not synchronized and so there's just a backup of traffic for four lights this is where I disagree with them and this is where I had the hardest time probably um maybe a couple of other things but the hardest time I think with um approving this deal because some people sent me an email and said Christmas every day I think was the sort of tagline where when you do this it's going to be Christmas every day and everyone's going to like flood to that area and it's going to create more traffic pandemonium than we already have in the that Atlanta highway uh corridor and I think the reason why I sort of took a second thought was because they're in that plan there are traffic circles that are approved and they're a little bit further down from where the major traffic fatalities happen there maybe I don't know like a half a mile or so from where the major traffic fatalities happen so if we can create a more traffic diet friendly zone in that area with that transit station we may be able to see some improvement despite the fact that residential properties are going to be there we may be able to see some improvements and that has happened in other cities where you increase residential communities but you add road diets you add traffic infrastructure that creates a balance between what's happening on the road and what's happening in the community and that entire parcel is the size of downtown Athens and so there's an there's an opportunity for us to create a balance of what's happening on the road to what's happening inside of homes and in cars that that we can possibly see some improvement despite the fact that there may be 200 homes that are added to that to that area because it is such a huge parcel and the other thing that I'll add is there is a trail that's about two miles maybe a little bit less and there are living spaces or there are spaces for people to commune that is different than what we see right now and so what we're talking about over time and this is me talking from a public health lens because I'm a public health practitioner is you see a difference in behavior right and so you're not seeing people who jump in their cars and just flee and there's like this traffic congestion that happens what you're seeing is people who go there and they spend time and so the traffic congestion is spread out through time and that is a difference from the nine to five intense traffic that we're seeing right now and so I would argue that we need to refocus our vision on whether or not this property is going to increase traffic and rather whether or not the way that this property is redeveloped will create a sense of more flow in that corridor because currently that corridor is really only for commuters who are going through into a company right and so it really just takes a reimagining that's that's kind of what I had to do but I still struggle I'm not gonna lie and I will put it on public record right now I still struggle with whether or not that's going to increase the congestion in that area the fatalities in that area and how we feel when we wake up in the morning and we're like oh my god I gotta drive through a little highway I gotta drive through Timothy Road I gotta drive through come like let's let's maybe take a step back and think about whether or not we can reimagine the flow of traffic in that area and I think this may help this may help because what we have currently is not working uh you had a question yes I did my first question was answered thankfully there's so many offices on the west side which is out in the neighborhood with some weird people and there were a lot of outside offices right there on the parkway so the curse of the blessing of the dog is nice so my second question is more in tune with the financing that the project itself as this is driving all the financial markets to change dramatically the interest rate environment change dramatically and my concerns from my other papers concerns have been what is the feasible project of a woman's interest rate environment that's one and I understand deals and moves are made when the title and happens they happen also it starts like about nine years I think it's probably driven by Scott Scott can you do my best I can't speak for the developers finances so much but what I can say is this particular set of developers like they've said are local and they do have some pretty good deep pockets in terms of financing so they are they're self-financed to an extent right like they're not going to be on a pocket for the entire price tag for all of it but the upfront money they're what's well within the means and so it's really all about trying to get to that second stage where they're going out to the market to financing yeah it's a crystal ball right and we all wish we had it all we know is we can't wait and you know as someone who makes their living in development has flipped through the recession and seen what that is I mean it's tough to try and hedge for those things you just kind of have to keep it one foot from the other and keep going the good news is is we still remain busy right now busier than we've ever been so we are always crossing our fingers if the market remains strong without inflation gets tamped down a bit without stalling market but I mean it's it's it's what developments all about right it's why it takes strong intestinal fortitude to do these types of things because they are they they're risky but the same sense I think given the group that is behind this you know it's it's a very special type of situation for this community you would not see outside developer coming in and doing what they've done it's for local pride a lot of it's to be attempted so we remain very optimistic bullish on the project and for the sake of all the entire history in our own community we hope that inflation sort of finds its finds its ends and starts to decline a bit thank you for getting our feedback first of all I may just add very briefly you know one thing this project has going for it from for the developers is they're getting a lot of money from the the public deal you know I struggled you know what where Dr. Anderson I'm actually not sure that you said anything Dr. Anderson I disagree with although maybe it's random differently but Lord knows I was a nightmare and I felt very you know torn many times along the way kind of right up until the end but uh you know I think when I talk about feeling confident that we got a good deal I don't think we got a perfect deal you know but we don't live in a perfect world we're trying to build from the world we've got I think that the deal we got is very good for the community of Athens because it has a longer list of benefits and many of them extremely important and large that makes it worthwhile but part of why it's also a good deal is because like we really need something like this to happen on Atlanta highway and specifically at the mall to like transform what's happening in that whole side of town what's really the heart of District 6 you know if we want to have a community in that part of Athens-Clarke County that looks anything like what we're building elsewhere in Athens-Clarke County and that ultimately means that we paid an above average amount into this like the amount that we're committing to that percentage is like when someone is referring to like who's going to oversee it that verification agent they're looking at the redevelopment powers law they're looking at laws on the books and any law has a certain amount of gray area but a lot of it's pretty black and white and that's what they're verifying in terms of the figures the financial figures like do these dollars go to this thing is that thing eligible but ultimately just because it's eligible doesn't mean that you need to be putting public money toward it right and a lot of these developments that happen elsewhere especially in larger markets like Atlanta don't have as much of an investment from the community as you're seeing into this one from Athens and so I think that also likely gives them more resiliency to weather some amount of storm in the markets although if we saw some kind of major crash like we saw in 2008 I mean who knows you know but at that point you know if all we're ever doing is planning for another 2008 to happen we'll never do anything so so we just try to do the best we can yeah I'm glad we're doing this better than what we've had for a minute and I'm glad to see it in the board the tab dollars definitely help with the underwriting right a better guarantee that they are you know as long as the project go forward they definitely help with that underwriting on the back side thank you yes sir one last question and a question for the for the group here somewhat similar forward to finding followers that have been furnished provides model for us to do extra profit I think that probably if you look just over in Gwinnett Gwinnett Place Mall right now is undergoing sort of a revisioning and I'm not super up to date with the details other than I know that the city had taken out a good bit about almost all of that land and basically purchased it so it's very different sort of situation they're way more at risk than this community this community has the benefit of having a private developer as local that assumes the risk so but it's a it's a similar situation right that mall declining and how do you envision that and their plan has some very similar type attributes you know heavy on green space trying to increase residential trying to create a sense of sort of a hub of a community there so that'll be one to keep an eye on this it's very very close to close to our home I had an observation when I was talking to a colleague of mine who was discussing why you're parking a county and one of the things that I recognized in that discussion was that when spaces near the Athens-Cart County Oconee border develop it is almost exclusively residential or source commercial it's almost exclusively commercial and that's because there's more of an incentive for those developers to make it commercial property and so in district six what we tend to do and I think Jesse can attest to this we go across to the Oconee border and we go to Lowe's we go to Trader Joe's we go to the Oconee connector mall area and all those things and they're all commercial and so this opportunity for us to take a space on our side of the border and make the taxes work for us made it so that the conversations around a table or what can you do for us not old Navy not DSW or Broadway shoes or whatever it is not Trader Joe's not places that were across our border that were largely commercial but what can you do for us give us residential give us trails give us traffic socials give us a transit station give us all of those things that our Athens-Cart County community needs to thrive so that we don't have to go over that way in district six to shop and enjoy ourselves and so the way that this translated in my brain was oh well I can go a mile and do the things that I do when I go two miles across the border where Oconee County got all the tax incentives to their local to their businesses to build on their property and we didn't get that but we got a community benefits agreement to do the same thing that Oconee County does a mile and a half away that's how I looked at it it was like when you think about that in your brain it means a lot because you're traveling a mile to give your taxes to another county when you could do it right here and you could have people living in that space with affordable housing for an entire generation which is transformative for families you can have childcare you can have internships you can have all of these things that we agreed on as a community that we would have that was that's what made the difference to me a voting yes to voting no is looking across and seeing what happens in Oconee County when they have commercial properties versus what we could do here that could make a difference in our community as a tax base just think about that well I agree because people that live in the county that have to pay property taxes and we continue to see our property taxes go up but then we drive by them all and we see that going down into nothing you know I I will be not as upset about the increases in my property taxes if the county showed that they were using it in a way that I felt was appropriate yeah and having a park and having good trails is great for us because we're right next door how many people will come and take advantage of all that is a question that remains to be seen until it gets built so hopefully that will be the thing that will continue to where people can enjoy that particular area because definitely the west side needs but look at the parking lots and loaves look at the parking lots and charity shows right look at the parking lots at home depot look at the parking like it is literally a mile away and all of those people are going a mile to shop when they could come here and spend their money in Clark County I mean she's lived there for 50 years I lived there I got my house when Loaves was down the street when Walmart was across the street you know we watched it didn't that development basically kill that fashion anyway yes yeah okay yeah go ahead I was just wondering if one of y'all was going to be talking about being in this agreement but one of y'all could just go kind of down the list the list was actually the bit of it said I am least least versed in this but I'm going to take a stab at it because he's flipping pages okay it's uh you start it with the transit system you do the green space you do the 12 foot wide two mile trail throughout this property you do the live work play concept where you have parking garages to get rid of taking up more of the the surface space for parking then you move into the community benefit agreements that we are the mark was a part of discussion discussing and that would include the boys and girls club space that is going to remain at an extremely reduced rental rate and that program is expanding there will be another space I can't remember exactly the square footage of it that is going to be paying the same rate that the police department pays the mall which is about a hundred dollars a month and that's going to be set aside for not a small business and when small and women-owned businesses minority women-owned businesses and then you will have which I am most proud of is I hope a strong partnership with our school system and the apprenticeship program coming through that this community career cabinet and that's also an incentive for a reductions for well I wouldn't call it a reduction I don't exactly have right word to use but an affordability piece for our teachers and clock town the school district employees to become home ownership to participate in home ownership at the mall 10% set aside for that so I think that's very important the child care center it's like 400 square feet for the child care center 3,000 wow 4,000 square feet for a child care center in the in the facility as well and so again I think the thought was around everything that you're talking about you want to build a community where people want to live work and play and again when they get home that they're happy to be home and the good news is with that transit station out there I'm hoping that's going to take the cars off the road for us as well that's something that was paid attention it's fairly comprehensive are we losing the recycle center yes that is that is yes we're here I won't put someone in the audience on the spot but if they want to raise their hand they can probably talk to you after um yeah suki in the back is raising raise their hand so talk to suki about the plan for that after she's our solid base director yeah so that question goes and this this year's woman in the back I know it it's kind of yes and you had a question building all of this you are going to be carrying parts of this down logistically I live in holiday estates I've lived here for over 15 years before them all go through all of that and all the promises that were made and most of them may be not kept um carrying up all that asphalt carrying down all those buildings has to be hauled away somewhere unless you are repurposing it on site the noise the pollution the wear and tear on all the roads where does that material actually end up it's a great question I mean really trying to responsibly source waste streams is a big deal these days trying to recycle these materials as best as possible all that asphalt a lot of it gets milled and reused um the good news is is that a lot of the road infrastructure remains uh we are giving it a diet it goes from four lanes to essentially two lanes with the center median and then we're going to put a bike bike lane and separate from that on the inside so there will be some asphalt that's taken up from that area but a lot of that will actually be able to stay in place and it's really a pretty good shape um it was very heavily constructed knowing that it would receive a lot of traffic when it's originally constructed it's really maintained well over time now there will be things that will be taken up you know we've got a lot of parking lot like I said 20 acres either roof or asphalt that has to be removed and so being responsible for those those streams of waste I mean some of it has to go to the landfill for sure but it as much as possible that can be converted is a benefit um we are looking at some tax things I can't guarantee anything but there has been several folks show up in our meetings talking about different types of tax and setups for um sustainability and we're looking at all avenues to try and find ways to essentially save costs but also be responsible for those things and then on the back end of this our sustainability concerns how do we look at making sure that one that things last and that there'll be infrastructure for improvements like giving chases in the buildings for solar that is in the future or providing EV charging stations which we all know is it's just you know really here now but probably a decade from being really really widespread and essential part we see in all of our projects now this demand for EV charging so looking at things like that trying to be responsible working forward there are things like that in this plan but there will be a lot that's going to be tearing apart so eventually have to be put somewhere on the stack because you asked where will it go very likely whatever doesn't get repurposed is going to go to either the Walton or old Thorpe County landfills because those are the nearest C&D landfills so Athens-Tharke County's landfill doesn't take this type of waste so it has to go to one of these other over-the-county landfills both of those are a fair amount of miles away so you know also I will share if anyone in this room has ideas on where these materials can be reused that's closer by or you know especially if someone's going to pay for some kind of material like letting I guess you know Buck or Scott know who those folks might be and you know they're looking to I say pitch pennies but in this case those pennies can really add up to a lot of zeros you know so if you have any ideas on where waste can be rerouted please definitely let them know and then I think the team behind this is going to do their best to reduce the waste overall but inevitably there there will be some amount I also feel like now maybe a good time to just throw out a plug since you asked that I'm having a town hall on May 22nd with Suki who's in the back and are there members of Solid Waste to talk about waste disposal so any other questions that really want to dive into this you talk about it there I don't all right I'll take one last question they will not be being certified buildings but I mean just a word on lead a lot of our construction standards today are very close to lead standards a lot of the ways we handle sites are very close to lead standards they're just not paying for the certification which is really expensive I've received a certification probably gosh it's been about over 15 years ago so I've seen a bit part of these processes before certifications and I can tell you that most of the points are achievable by the methods that are being used already just from the types of building methodology that's being used today it's simply the verification process that's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get your your leave so although you know it's nice to have that lead that money is going to be spent in other other ways I'd rather first see a small landscape all right well I want to thank each of our panelists tonight