For sale: 67 prime acres near Downtown in complex transaction

Nobody wants Turner Field to sit empty when the Atlanta Braves leave in December 2016. So with the official “for sale” sign just put up on 67 acres near Downtown, Atlanta and Fulton leaders are trying to figure out who will sign for the sale, while neighbors west of the freeway are won?dering what happens to them.
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? On Oct. 2, the stadium’s managers at the City of Atlanta and Fulton County Recreation Authority published a Request for Proposals, an official invitation to developers to pitch their ideas for the site and the price they’d pay for it.
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? “We cannot afford to wait,” AFCRA Executive Director Keisha Lance Bottoms — who’s also an Atlanta City Councilmwoman — told the city council’s Finance Committee yesterday. The committee members had asked Bottoms to come give a briefing on the sale.
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? Ideas from would-be builders are due Nov. 20. That timeline has come under fire from neighbors who point out that a key study of their opinions on the site’s future, the Livable Centers Initiative study, won’t be done until the spring.
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? The request for proposals says bidders should prepare to demonstrate a commitment to the LCI’s recommendations. But Bottoms said the city needs to move quickly, before googling “abandoned stadium” starts returning pictures of Turner Field.
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? Mayor Kasim Reed stopped by the briefing to defend the RFP and LCI parallel timeline and tout the redevelopment as an opportunity for the city. He said the city has gone beyond the norms of transparency and inclusion.
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? “All we’re trying to do is bring to bear a transaction that I think at a minimum will be a quarter of a billion dollar transaction,” Reed said. “It’s going to elevate property values and amenities of everybody who lives around Turner Field and its definitely going to be better than what is at Turner Field right now.”
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? Bottoms said the LCI should be done by early spring. The deal could close by early summer.
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? But it’s up to lawyers to hammer out who “they” are and if signoffs on the complex transaction will be required from everybody — Reed, council, and the Fulton County Commission.
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? According to the RFP, AFCRA will weigh the bids, and will put the most emphasis on the bidder’s vision for the site if they have the financial capacity to get it done.
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? “We made sure that we put something in the RFP that says that any transactions obviously are subject to whatever the proper procedures or protocols are with respect to entities, meaning the City of Atlanta and Fulton County,” Bottoms said.
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? But she also said a stack of agreements and documents dating back to Maynard Jackson’s days as mayor speak to how the multiple parcels with multiple owners that make up the stadium property can be transferred and deeded. She’s leaving it up to the city’s attorneys to decide if “City of Atlanta” means city council or the mayor or both.
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? Reed said he would prefer that council is involved. But some neighbors are concerned that the RFP only covers the roughly 67 acres on the east side of Interstate 75/85. It leaves out about 10 acres of parking lots scattered west of the freeway.
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? “We’ve always been S-M-P, Summerhill, Mechanicsville, Peoplestown, and it seems like now that the RFP’s been put out, we’ve been broken up,” said David Holder, chair of the Mechanicsville Civic Association. “It seems like now we’re being, you know, put aside … we want to make sure that we’re included as well.”
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? Bottoms said the west side plots are not part of the RFP because it could leave Fulton County without jury parking. She said nothing would stop AFCRA from putting out an RFP on those lots in the future.