Editorial: The Parks Bond

An editorial from the Marietta Daily Journal on Sunday, November 16, 2008

Cobb residents did an admirable job in the first step of the process of adding public greenspace for the county when they voted by an overwhelming 65.3 percent margin Nov. 4 to approve a $40 million parks referendum. The measure was approved in every precinct of the county.

Now comes the next step, that of nominating properties for potential parkland. The county will accept such nominations starting Monday and running through Jan. 31, which will be here before you know it.

"We want the public's input and we want them to nominate properties," Cobb Commission chairman Sam Olens said.

Should you know of an attractive piece of land that you think would make a nice park, especially if it is in a part of the county that is underserved by parks, you can obtain a nomination form at the county's Web site, www.cobbcounty.org, or by calling the Cobb Parks Department at (770) 528-6800. However, when nominating a property, it is helpful if you know whether it belongs to a willing potential seller. That's because the county will not be using its powers of eminent domain to obtain property with the proceeds from the parks bond.

After a property is nominated, the county staff will talk with the property's owner to get a description of its natural features and a better idea of its suitability for a park, according to county public services director Bob Ash.

Once the nomination deadline is passed, the county's 15-person citizens advisory committee will visit the most promising of the nominated properties, subject them to a rigorous analysis, rank them as to desirability and then make recommendations to the board of commissioners. (Each commissioner gets to nominate three members of the advisory committee.)

"This committee assignment takes a lot of time. They did a great job the first time, and I'm looking forward to working with them on this parks bond," Olens said.

County voters approved the first $40 million parks bond in 2006. It proved so popular, and was so well implemented, that persuading voters to approve another $40 million in November was an easy sell.

Park supporters would be wise to stick with what worked so well the first time: choosing parcels based on availability, attractiveness, price and the need for more parks in a given area. That method is the one most likely to net the county the best portfolio of new parks.

County seeking parkland feedback

From the Marietta Daily Journal on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 by Ashley Hungerford, MDJ staff writer

MARIETTA - Let the nominations begin.

The Cobb Board of Commissioners officially activated the citizens advisory committee and opened the nomination process for land to purchase under the new parks bond.

On Nov. 4, Cobb voters approved a second $40 million bond to purchase parkland. The first $40 million parks bond, approved in 2006, was used to purchase more than 300 acres of land.

Bob Ash, Cobb's public services director, said the county will accept nominations of potential parkland from willing sellers starting Nov. 17. The nomination deadline will be Jan. 31, 2009.

"We want the public's input and we want them to nominate properties," Cobb Chairman Sam Olens said.

Land nomination forms are available on the county's Web site, www.cobbcounty.org, or by calling the parks department at (770) 528-6800.

For each nominated property, county employees will talk with the owner to get a description of the property's natural features and why the property would make a good park for the county.

After Jan. 31, a 15-member citizens advisory committee will visit the nominated properties. In January, each commissioner will nominate three citizens to serve on the committee. As with the previous parks bond, the committee will recommend purchases to the Board of Commissioners.

"This committee assignment takes a lot of time," Olens said. "They did a great job the first time, and I'm looking forward to working with them on this parks bond."

Olens said the county has already received about a dozen suggestions of properties to purchase. Ash said county staffers will contact those owners so the properties can be formally nominated.

Properties that were recommended under the first parks bond but not purchased are still eligible, so long as the owners are still interested.

Cobb picks parks

From the Marietta Daily Journal on Wednesday, November 5, 2008 by Ashley Hungerford, MDJ staff writer

MARIETTA - Cobb residents made it clear they want more green space in the county.

Cobb voters approved another $40 million parks bond by 67 percent of the vote.

There was a total of 154,380 votes cast concerning the bond, with 103,525 in favor of it.

"Noting the economy, I think this is a great tribute to the (15-member) citizens committee who assisted us with the purchases of the first parks bond," Cobb Chairman Sam Olens said. "The public has faith in the process ... this is great because for the majority of the county, there is no millage increase. And land will never be this cheap again. This is one of the bright spots of a terrible economy."

The first $40 million parks bond, approved by more than 70 percent of voters in 2006, enabled the preservation of more than 309 acres of green space. The county still has more than $2 million left that they could still use to purchase land.

Members of the Cobb Parks Coalition, the grassroots effort that pushed for a follow-up bond, said current economic conditions make it the prime time to buy more green space. Property values are low, and developers aren't in a hurry to buy land to start new projects.

Cobb Parks Coalition leader Paul Paulson said he was impressed by the turnout in support of the parks bond.

"A lot of people worked very hard and it looks like the hard work paid off again," he said. "This was a test of what people wanted. People are sick of development and they want to preserve what's left of the green space. They told us that over and over."

In 2006 election, 121,109 of the 179,625 votes cast were in support of the bond measure.

Paulson agrees with Olens that now is a great time to purchase property.

"With the market like this, we can pick and choose this time and expand the $40 million to buy more acres," he said. "We want to purchase the best property."

The parks bond's biggest hurdle came from the cities of Marietta, Smyrna and Austell.

Because of the financing the county approved to fund the bond, residents in those three cities will see a 0.1 mil tax increase.

Olens said the financing decision was an "unintended consequence," of the short timeline the county had to get the bond measure on the November ballot.

To finance the 15-year, $40 million bond, the county plans to divert from the fire fund 0.1 mil of county property taxes collected and put those revenues toward the debt fund. For taxpayers in unincorporated Cobb, Acworth, Kennesaw and Powder Springs, the net effect on property taxes is zero because the increase to the debt fund is offset by the decrease in the fire fund. Officials said the fire fund has a surplus.

But for residents in Austell, Marietta and Smyrna, the 0.1 mil increase is not offset by anything, leading to a slight property tax increase. Paulson earlier said 0.1 mil increase would amount to about $4 per year on a $100,000 home.

All three of the cities have their own fire departments and do not pay any taxes toward the county's fire fund.

Officials in Smyrna and Austell eventually voiced their support of the bond.

But prior to the election, Marietta Mayor Bill Dunaway said he didn't oppose the bond measure, but couldn't endorse something that he said was unfair to the residents of Marietta.

Tuesday evening, Dunaway said he voted for the bond.

"But I think it's unfair to property owners in the three cities and therefore could not endorse it," he said. "We hope that the county will try to seek out property around the three cities.

Like with the first bond, county officials said they will take nominations on tracts of land to be considered for purchase. The Board of Commissioners will appoint a citizens advisory board that will be charged with ranking the nominated properties.

Olens said they already have about 30 properties that have been "quasi" nominated, including a couple new parcels.

One new property is a 50-acre tract in northeast Cobb. Olens said the tract would be great for an area that currently doesn't have any parks.

Paulson also has some parcels in mind, including the 9.85-acre Hamby property in Kennesaw, 54-acre tract owned by Wylene Tritt on Roswell Road in northeast Cobb and a 25-acre tract owned by the Canup family in west Cobb.

With the first $40 million bond, the county purchased the 137.45-acre Stana property on Brownsville Road in southwest Cobb, $5.76 million; 112 acres of the Bullard-Stockton tract along Dallas Highway in west Cobb, $18.6 million; 26.5 acres of the Mabry Centennial Farm at the corner of Wesley Chapel and Sandy Plains Roads, $4.2 million; 16 acres near Henderson Road off Veteran's Memorial Highway near the Chattahoochee River, $2.4 million; and 17.7 acres of the Price property at Stilesboro Road near Acworth-Due West Road, $1.4 million.

The county will also use $5 million of the parks bond money to help purchase the 95-acre Hyde Farm in east Cobb.

"We got some great pieces of property, but there's a lot left to save," Paulson said.

Joni House: Parks bond vote may be best chance to assure greenspace

From the Marietta Daily Journal on Monday, November 3, 2008 by Joni House, MDJ More Opinions contributor

There are some things we may never get another chance to do. Running out of time is not something anybody wants to think about. It makes us wince to think about things left unsaid, vacations not taken, and even, yes Mom, the thank-you notes unwritten.

Communities run out of time too. Things slip by us simply because no one is paying attention. And buried within all the polarizing issues on the current ballot, there's something that requires our nonpartisan local attention as Cobb county voters.

The last item on the current ballot asks whether Cobb should spend an additional $40 million on greenspace purchases for our community. If we pay attention and vote "yes" now, we will be voting "yes" to providing passive recreation opportunities for generations to come. We will be saying "yes" in a forward-looking way, knowing that this opportunity with its unique circumstances won't be around for future voters to choose.

What's unique about this chance to expand the greenspace portfolio? The opportunity now before us results from the stars aligning on several factors in a way we won't see again.

First, Cobb county's balance sheet - that is, its debt load and assets especially relative to its ability to service debt - is strong. In other words, we're not even close to debt laden. The greenspace bonds will be completely paid off in 15 years. Cobb can finance conservatively even in this most challenging of financial markets.

Second, the bad news for the national and local real estate markets has created a rare timing opportunity for our community as greenspace buyers. The market forces temporarily driving real estate prices down have also affected prices for the type of undeveloped land Cobb needs for its citizens for future passive recreation. We have the chance to acquire land throughout the county at prices that will stretch our collective buying power. A newly funded Cobb greenspace program will be at a fortunate crossroads where the public may be able to preserve parcels previously out of reach, while sellers will benefit from an injection of capital into the real estate community.

Third, as time goes on, the supply of undeveloped land will continue to shrink. Looking past the current real estate market, there will always be human need and population growth and movement driving the development of land. The pressure on our greenspace supply hasn't ended. It has just temporarily eased a bit. In real estate school they teach you, "They're not making any more land." And it's true. The longer we wait, the less land there will be to buy. If we wait to renew the greenspace program for Cobb, the land choices will be fewer and those that remain will be more expensive and possibly more difficult to finance.

Also available at this point in time to enhance a continued greenspace program is the set of learnings that the county team gained from designing a selection and vetting process from scratch to implement the purchases under the 2007 bond. All team members, including staff, Board, and citizens committee, partnered to establish an empirical evaluation toolkit to ensure that each parcel of land was treated in as non-political and objective way as possible.

Our generation may be the last to have the opportunity to make thoughtful, strategic greenspace purchases. We may be the last group of voters with the power to ensure the future availability of trees, fields, trails, and unspoiled places for recreation for the Cobb county community.

There's an opportunity on Tuesday for our community to fund the purchase of more greenspace for our passive recreation needs into the future. We chose to fund the first phase in 2006. Now we have the chance to fund more parkland to address enriching and expanding the portfolio. It may be one of our last chances to make strategic balancing purchases so no member of our community is underserved.

Please pay attention to the last item on the ballot. Please vote "Yes" for greenspace on Tuesday. We may never get a better chance to preserve greenspace for our future.

Joni House is president of the Grayfen Group, a management consulting firm in Marietta, is co-chair of Friends of Hyde Farm and is vice chair of Parks Bond Citizens Advisory Committee.

Joni House: Cobb needs parks, not tantrums

From the Marietta Daily Journal on Sunday, October 26, 2008 by Joni House, guest columnist

There's a current dust-up over Cobb's greenspace priorities brought to a head by the possible purchase of the 9.95-acre Hamby tract in downtown Kennesaw. The property was part of the 2006 Greenspace Bond list of recommended possible purchases.

On the one hand, the city is reluctant to see the parcel go as greenspace. We can understand that the carrot of future tax roll revenues that development would bring is a powerful carrot indeed. On the other hand, the county is pursuing its due diligence in considering whether the parcel in fact merits purchase as public greenspace with a portion of the funds remaining from the 2006 bond issue.

External pressure on the county to purchase this tract is being articulated in some citizen circles in declarative, absolute statements extolling this parcel as "the best" of all uses for the funds remaining from the original 2006 $40 million bond issue.

But in the Citizen Advisory Committee's recommendations on spending the 2006 bond revenues, "what's best" took on many meanings. The Citizens Advisory Committee spent countless hours, some into the late nights over cold chicken fingers, in vigorous discussions about what Cobb citizens now and in the future would most value in greenspace tracts in a public portfolio of recreational lands. In many cases, parcels that were appealing to some of us were also-rans to others. Some members valued historical merit, others hydrology, others accessibility to non-mobile populations, others connectivity to existing parks.

The 15 minds met by building an objective rating system that identified multiple criteria for the "ideal" greenspace purchase, weighting each criterion as to how important it was, and then using a mathematical model to calculate a numeric score for each property.

The relative rankings of the properties were often "caveated" in our recommendations to the Board of Commissioners. One of the main cautions raised time and time again in our recommendations to the board was what the best use of citizen money would be in various combinations. Even though the committee was not charged with financial aspects of the transactions, as we had information on a parcel or could see disparities in relative possible pricing among competing parcels, we passed that information along as footnotes to our recommendations.

For example, we could observe that pricing over a certain amount per acre would have made one parcel seem overpriced relative to others, or, we could identify that a property was eligible for external matching funds to help stretch Cobb taxpayer dollars.

The committee had considerable heartburn about whether our "good only within certain dollar criteria" could actually be executed within the highly complex world of real estate transactions where the nuance of the recommendations is easily lost. We also worried about the influences of "buy it simply because it's cheap" would be the pitfall at the other end of the negotiation spectrum.

Yes, the committee members all had our favorite parcels. And yes, we were appointed by our respective commissioners who rightfully were concerned about their districts. Yet in fairness, we never felt pressure to allocate by voter population, relative taxes paid, city vs. unincorporated, or other divisive factors that could have been introduced to derail a portfolio approach.

And most amazing in the process, as a committee, when our advocacy speeches had been given (and re-given), we could come together for the good of the county as a whole. We honestly felt that the committee and the county staff had been given the statesman-like example of the board of commissioners to act in a non-partisan, non-polarizing way.

Where the purchases were made depended largely on where the land was nominated, whether it was available in a willing seller transaction and how it ranked based on the criteria the committee developed. Timing and negotiation processes, market forces and sheer tenacity on the part of county staff and dedicated sellers made what was purchased a very strong county-wide portfolio.

It's just plain wrong for anyone now to go on record and state unequivocally that any parcel remaining is "the best." Invariably all of our recommendations were qualified in some way. But just as the history-justifies-spending-greenspace-money advocates may want to lose their myopia, so should the cities think of their duty to support the county in which their residents live.

But really, the $3 million from the last bond issue shouldn't be burning a hole in anyone's pocket right now. Arbitrage rebate is not an issue. There are other properties on the list. $3 million could allow the county to option some land now. Or, the $3 million could just be rolled forward into what hopefully will be a new bond issue with an entirely new list of lands nominated and evaluated.

No matter how contentious our committee debates were, no matter how late we went, no matter how many packs of "Shut the Hell Up Gum" were passed around the room, nobody threatened to take their ball and go home. Nobody offered to sabotage the process because someone else said their land parcel was less than the best.

We'll be voting on Nov. 4 to add $40 million more bond funding to expand the remarkably successful greenspace portfolio to reach even more of our citizens. Threats to throw the future Cobb greenspace program under the bus for a single parcel of land or for any other divisive allocation scheme are tantrum-throwing, not advocacy. And Cobb citizens deserve better.

Joni House is president of the Grayfen Group, a management consulting firm in Marietta, is co-chair of Friends of Hyde Farm and is vice chair of Parks Bond Citizens Advisory Committee.



Posted comments:

Enter Your Name says - Yes! Our County leaders should not give in to the pressures of a few when a committee of 15 took careful consideration when selecting properties.

Editorial: The Parks Bond It's a 'buying opportunity' for Cobb residents

An editorial from the Marietta Daily Journal on Sunday, November 2, 2008

Even a crashing economy has its bright spots.

To stockbrokers, they're known as "buying opportunities" - those stocks that are so undervalued that they're suddenly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And as Cobb voters head to the polls this week, they have the chance to exercise just such a buying opportunity themselves - the opportunity to set aside $40 million with which to purchase additional parkland for the county.

Thanks to the sagging economy, the local real estate market is not just dead in the water, but under the waves. Development and redevelopment are at a standstill. That's not good, but the silver lining is that there are numerous undeveloped parcels that likely could be purchased for parks and at a much more taxpayer-friendly price than would normally be the case. Not only are more landowners than usual likely to lend a receptive ear to inquiries about selling their land for a park, it's also true that interest rates are at rock bottom, meaning county taxpayers would get even more for their money.

If approved on Tuesday, this would be the second such bond Cobb voters have passed via referendum in recent years. The first, also for $40 million, was passed two years ago. That referendum proved amazingly popular with the public, passing by a 70-30 percent margin.

The county has used that money wisely, following the recommendations of the Cobb Parks Bond Citizens Advisory Committee. Its showpiece purchases have been the 112-acre Bullard Farm on Dallas Highway in west Cobb, a pristine piece of farmland for $18.6 million; and the 137.4-acre Stana property on Brownsville Road in southwest Cobb for $5.76 million.

Other purchases include the 70-acre Mabry Centennial Farm in east Cobb, the 17.7-acre Price property on Stilesboro Road and a 16-acre tract in Mableton. In addition, the county officially designated $5 million of the bond proceeds to help purchase 95 pristine acres of the one-of-a-kind Hyde Farm property along the Chattahoochee River in east Cobb.

All told, the county has purchased just more than 300 acres for $37.67 million.

Now, with our nest egg nearly gone, it's time to replenish it.

After all, did the purchases of the past two years satisfy our need for parkland? They were a good start, but no.

Did they ensure that we have sufficient parkland not just for our current needs, but for future decades when our population will have grown past the 750,000 mark steadily toward 1 million? Not hardly.

And will Cobb be better served by waiting a couple decades to buy more parkland - if indeed, there is any left to buy by then? No. The better option than buying it at 2018 or 2028 prices is to buy it now, at 2008 prices, which, thanks to the economic collapse, are more like 1998 prices.

As to the economic impact on your wallet should the measure pass, it will be about $11 per year during the life of the 15-year bonds for the owner of a $200,000 house. In other words, your contribution toward assuring Cobb's parkland needs for years to come would be the equivalent of a couple cups of cappuccino, or several gallons of gas.

It's a bargain, in other words. Or, to use another expression, a "buying opportunity" we probably won't see the likes of again. And it's up to you to help make it happen when you go to the polls.