Brookhaven officials were
unpleasantly surprised last week to learn that DeKalb County approved city tax
breaks for two major commercial developments without telling them. At the Oct.
27 City Council meeting, officials said they’re concerned about “questionable”
process and “wrong” numbers in the abatement calculations.
Mayor Rebecca Chase Williams said
the projects are good for Brookhaven and that DeKalb apologized for the
apparently unintentional lack of notice. But it turns out there’s at least a
third tax-break deal within Brookhaven that the city didn’t know about. City officials
are now examining the possible budget impacts of at least a half-million
dollars in tax abatements.
“Under no circumstance should the
city of Brookhaven learn about economic development and tax abatements given
away by the county through the newspaper,” said Wendy Butler, the attorney for
the city’s Development Authority, which did not review the deals. She added
that the county might not have the legal authority to cut the deals.
The two tax-break packages the city
only learned of after the fact are a new office tower planned for Perimeter
Summit Parkway, with a $460,000 city tax break, and a $77,000 break for
expansion of the Source One Direct credit-card company along I-85. Those
abatements would be spread out over the next 15 years. The city’s tax breaks
were just part of larger abatement packages, including county and school taxes,
that are worth millions.
The amounts are significant for the
small city, City Manager Marie Garrett said, noting that $77,000 is close to
the price of “two police cars fully loaded.”
The abatement packages were approved
earlier this month by the county’s Development Authority, which recently
branded itself as “Decide DeKalb” and has an all-new board who membership
includes a Brookhaven Zoning Board of Appeals member. City officials said
Decide DeKalb has apologized for lack of notice, which may be attributed to
Decide DeKalb’s recent changes.
However, Decide DeKalb also informed
the city of yet another tax abatement it didn’t communicate, in this case for a
Cox Communications building. It is unclear when that happened and how much the
tax break is.
The mayor and Councilman Joe Gebbia
were the only elected officials to directly speak about the situation. Both
voiced a view that the deals are probably good and that communication is the
main problem. But Garrett and Butler questioned the credibility of DeKalb’s
abatement-review process, leaving it difficult to say whether the Brookhaven
deals are good investments.
“We think this is a good thing for
Brookhaven at the end of the day,” Williams said, but directed staff to craft a
legal agreement requiring Decide DeKalb to notify the city of tax breaks.
Williams did add that it’s a “legitimate question” whether the Perimeter Summit
tower really needs a tax break.
“Look what we got for it…We got a
Class A office building,” Gebbia said of that tower. “Talk about a feather in
your cap.” He added that the new Decide DeKalb is better than the county’s
previous practice of letting individual commissioners heavily influence tax-break
deals.
However, Garrett said that Decide
DeKalb gave the projects a straight 60 percent tax abatement without any
calculation of how the projects might impact the area—including any new
city-services costs.
A driver of the Perimeter Summit
abatement was a promise to create a total of 1,350 new jobs. But, Garrett said,
Decide DeKalb has no mechanism for monitoring whether those jobs are actually
created or last for the life of the tax break. And there is no “claw-back”
provision revoking the tax break if such an economic development promise is
broken.
Officials also expressed concern
about that Perimeter Summit tower’s valuation. It was publicly announced as a
$143 million project, but Decide DeKalb valued it at $85 million for the
tax-break deal purposes, Garrett said. Garrett called that figure
“questionable,” while Butler went further.
“We are having all the numbers
re-run because the numbers were wrong,” Butler said.
Unclear or unknown tax-break deals
could affect the city’s budgeting—now underway for 2016—because the city might
have fewer tax dollars than it thought, Garrett said.
Butler said Decide DeKalb had no
legal obligation to notify the city about abating its taxes. But, asked by
Williams whether the abatements were done by correct legal procedures, Butler
responded, “It’s in play. There’s a lot of litigation about whether counties
can just ride over cities.”
“I hope we’re not looking at
litigation or something like that,” the mayor said.
Butler added that, while Decide
DeKalb approved the tax breaks, they are not done deals. Both projects are
still awaiting bond validation hearings, Butler said.
Comments
Thanks to Catherine Bernard, Brookhaven voters refused to authorize the
city to establish its own Development Authority to give away tax holidays to
subsidize private businesses.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment