Buckhead Coalition Supports New Downtown Stadium; City Council to Develop Action Plan Friday

Hours before Wednesday’s two-hour public hearing about a possible new stadium for the Atlanta Falcons, the Buckhead Coalition passed a resolution to support a new downtown Atlanta football stadium.

According to the resolution the Coalition passed at its Thursday meeting, the Coalition members "believe that the business interests of Buckhead see such a development as a positive economic impact on Atlanta as a whole and Downtown specifically." (The full resolution can be found here.)

The team’s lease at the Georgia Dome will likely expire in 2017, and the team is hoping to have a new place to play by then. For more than two years, the Falcons team has been negotiating a private-public partnership with the Georgia World Congress Center Authority–owner of the property on which the new stadium would be constructed– to use $300 million of hotel-motel taxes, according to a report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

That is until state legislators showed opposition to using public funds and raising the GWCCA’s borrowing limit in late 2012. Gov. Nathan Deal decided to lower the hotel-motel tax revenue contributions to $200 million and name InvestAtlanta as the bonding authority.

The City Council will have to approve a resolution to continue the local hotel-motel tax through 2050, which would back the revenue bonds. The current hotel/motel tax is set to expire in 2020.

Where do you stand on a new downtown Atlanta stadium? Do you think hotel-motel tax revenue should be used to help fund it? Will opposing a new stadium have an adverse effect on the City of Atlanta overall? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Currently, the City Council hasn't been presented with a specific proposal from the involved stakeholders.

Additionally, there have been talks that the new stadium may not be erected in downtown Atlanta, but in other nearby locations.

Following last week’s State of Buckhead address, Atlanta City Councilwoman Yolanda Adrean spoke with Buckhead Patch about the stadium.

“I can’t vote on something if I don’t know the location,” said Adrean, whose District 8 covers several Buckhead neighborhoods.

 “I am in listening mode. I still have questions about who’s bearing the obligations of the front-end costs and the back-end costs,” she said, pointing out that the hotel-motel taxes are mostly paid by visitors to the city and not by city residents.

The Atlanta City Council will hold a worksession on Friday at 11:30 a.m. to develop an action plan to address upcoming legislation that will likely come before the council regarding funding of a new stadium. The worksession is open to the public and will be held in the old council chamber of City Hall, at the 68 Mitchell Street entrance.