TOP 10 REASONS WHY THE GULCH PROJECT IS A SHAM FOR ATLANTA

TOP 10 REASONS WHY ATLANTA'S GULCH DEAL IS BAD FOR THE CITY'S FUTURE

1. Public cost is 55 times the public benefit. This is a grossly disproportionate cost/benefit in CIM’s favor. Council has done well to hold it. This deal is so terrible that Council now needs to walk away from it. You don’t negotiate when the gap is so enormous between what the billionaires are demanding from the public and what their scheme is worth to the public

 2. Public cost is about $2.5Bn at 2018 prices, of which $2Bn is property tax and $0.5bn in sales tax. In return, public benefits are only worth about $45mm. Details are broken out below. 

3. When the public is putting in as much as 50% of the cost to develop a private, commercial project, the public should own 40% of it. Instead, we will own nothing. The only explanation for this grotesque imbalance of advantage is CIM’s Abject Greed.

 4. The numbers. Property tax on a $5bn project when it’s complete - in 2032, per developer’s schedule - would be $90mm / yr. APS (the schools) would be losing out on $45mm / yr and the city and county $22.5mm / yr each. 

5. Despite all the smoke from the project’s boosters, this lost property tax really IS a cost to the public. Because if offices, hotels etc. are NOT built in a tax-free Gulch, they will be built in taxable parts of town, such as Tech Square, Midtown, S Downtown, Atlantic Station, Buckhead and around the Beltline. If CIM does not get this deal, the demand for office space, etc. will be met by developers in places where new construction pays taxes. In other words, this Gulch scheme ‘cannibalizes’ a massive amount of commercial growth and deprives the city and schools of future revenues for 30 years.

6. The same is true of the sales tax. This scheme would short the city and the state of some $500mm at 2018 prices thru 2048. Retail sales demand is not going to be created by putting stores in the Gulch. Those sales are going to happen somewhere in town, and the only question is whether they pay tax to the state and the general fund or not. Again the Gulch scheme would ‘cannibalize’ or displace retail activity in town and rob the state and city of tax revenues needed to pay for public services. So the total revenue loss IS $2.5 Billion. That is over $5,000 per man, woman and child resident in the city. It is equivalent to a $20,000 donation or more from every family of four in Atlanta to the billionaire Ressler brothers. 

7. The public benefits that have been dribbled out amount to around $45mm. The different cash funds are easy to add up: $42mm (though with no guarantee they’ll be spent to create real community benefit). The 200 housing units affordable at 80% AMI are worth only about $3mm, because CIM can sell them off after 3 years as rentals. CIM could sell the 200 units at prices for which a buyer would need an income 20% higher than the area median. By definition, that’s not affordable. Forget the claim that there might be some extra units for low-income folks: that’s only if AHA pays for them, which means it costs CIM nothing. 

8. The hard sell for this deal pretends that it brings 37,000 jobs to town. That is nonsense. Employers bring jobs to town – over 40,000 new jobs have moved here in the past 6 years – NCR, Worldpay, Honeywell, Anthem, Kaiser and so on. They locate here for our competitive talent, universities and airport. Office towers do not bring jobs here. (If they did, we’d have had no unemployment in the great recession, because we sure had masses of empty office towers, including the biggest - Bank of America Plaza.) So the scheme does not bring one single job here. CIM is betting that the city will continue to attract employers to fill the huge office towers that they are planning to construct. But this scheme does nothing to attract those company relocations. In fact, if Council allows this crazily one-sided deal, smart company executives will question the city’s financial responsibility. They’ll wonder if a city too busy to think can be trusted to provide good

schools and public services for their employees.

 9. Similarly the CIM sales pitch takes credit for 1800 construction jobs. But office towers are going to be built in the city to meet employer demand. So the same construction jobs will be here, whether those offices are built in the Gulch or in S Downtown and elsewhere. Handing over a $2.5bn subsidy will not result in more offices being built than are needed - or more construction jobs.

 10. The final arm-twist on Council has been a Norfolk Southern deal. NS wants us to give this enormous subsidy to CIM so that NS can sell Gulch land to CIM at a big profit. There’s nothing in that for the public. But NS might move 1,000 HQ people here in a consolidation. To justify a $2.5bn subsidy, we’d need not 1,000 jobs but about 700,000 jobs! That’s around three times the entire number of jobs in the city. It’s also 14 times the size of Amazon’s HQ2, for those who still imagine HQ2 will choose Atlanta.

Peoplestown Residents Plan to Hold "Sit-In" at Mayor Reeds Office In Their Fight to Save Their Homes

On Wednesday 11/4/15 at 10am Peoplestown residents will hold a very brief press conference on the steps of city hall (68 Mitchell st) before heading to the Mayor’s office to hold a sit-in. Residents plan to hold the space until the Mayor agrees to meet with them concerning their homes and their desire to not be displaced from a community they helped build.

"When the Mayor decided Ms. Mattie's home can stay, he acknowledged  that flooding in Peoplestown can be addressed without demolishing an entire block in Peoplestown", stated homeowner Tanya Washington, whose home is one of the homes slated to be demolished.

The remaining residents whose homes bookend the block are requesting that the Mayor direct the Department of Watershed to amend the plan so they can also stay in their homes.

Last week, the residents and their supporters held a rally and camped out all night on the steps of City Hall to emphasize the point that if Ms. Mattie stays they stay. 

After holding a 10am press conference this morning they presented a letter to the Mayor, supported by a petition with 5395 signatures, respectfully requesting that he meet with them to address their right to also stay in their homes.

Ms Mattie joined them in solidarity and told her City Council Representative, Carla Smith, that she wants her neighbors to be treated as fairly as she's been treated.

The Mayor's office refused to even schedule a meeting with the residents, who had camped out all night in anticipation of getting some word from the mayor’s office about their homes.  The residents and their supporters plan to return to the Mayor to demand the meeting which he promised.

"We've been here going on 30 years, we've raised our children and our grandchildren here. This is our home and we have no intention of leaving", state Bertha Darden who lives in one of the homes in question with her husband Robert Darden.

We are of course disappointed with Mayor Reed's continued dismissive stance towards these Peoplestown residents but we remain hopeful that he will do right by them as he did right by Mattie.

Thoughts On My Occupy Atlanta Arrest

I'm on trial this week, and likely to take the stand today to testify about my October 25th arrest in the park. I've been reflecting a lot about my choice to stay in the park that night, and my reasons for joining the Occupy movement last year. Below are some of my thoughts:

There’s more than on reason I chose to remain in the park after 11pm October 25^th last year.

First the obvious, I don’t believe the freedom of speech has a curfew, and our freedom to assemble applies at 12pm and 12am.

Both of these rights clearly trump a fairly recent Atlanta municipal code targeted at keeping the growing number of our cities homeless out of sight.

To be clear, the reason I joined the Occupy Movement was not too simply invoke my constitutional rights.

It is the unprecedented, historic wealth inequity that brought me and thousands into the movement.

Never has there been a stronger need to dramatize the injustice of our false economic crisis, never has there been so few who control and own so much and the symptoms are clear; from the explosion in the homeless population, lack of good jobs, plummeting wages for regular people while CEO compensation is at an all-time high, schools defunded, and more Georgians locked up than ever.

Occupy presented an opportunity to highlight, in a very visible way, our cities, our countries economic injustice which sees 1% of the population controlling an overwhelming amount of our resources.

I was called to the park because I believe we are not in a crisis of economic resource, but rather a crisis of economic priority. We are not broke, there is no fiscal cliff, it’s a moral one. There’s plenty to go around.

I was in the park because I believe we need a shift, a revolution of values. The sparks of the Occupy movement were very intentionally put out by heavy handed police tactics, infiltration of the movement on every level, targeted arrests and surveillance of individuals seen as leaders, and the eviction of our freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

HOUSEWARMING PARTY!

Bank of America has made a habit of kicking folks out of their homes illegally. Since most people have no place else to go, today Atlanta community members decided to move in to the Bank. There was one simple demand. MAKE A DEAL TO KEEP PAMELA FLORES IN HER HOME!!

WHO IS PAMELA

Bank of America is at it again! The “Too-Crooked-To-Fail” megabank-- notorious for ripping off everyone from investors and      insurers, to homeowners and the unemployed-- is after Vine City resident, Pamela Flores’ home.

BoA is attempting to foreclose on Pamela’s home, claiming that she missed payments during the trial period of a loan modification she    received through the “Making Homes Affordable” program. The thing is, Pamela never missed a payment and has the records to prove it.   Instead of investigating her case and admitting their error, the bank is moving forward with plans to foreclose.

BUT WAIT.... THERE’S MORE!

Trying to steal Pamela’s home is hardly Bank of America’s first offense. Their crimes are vast, and their greed is immeasurable. They’ve drained seniors of their retirement and savings by selling crap mortgages disguised as highly rated investments to unions and pension funds. They’ve diverted millions of dollars that would have been spent on building schools and education by scamming local municipalities out of fees and mismanaging their money. They popularized the term “robo-signing”-a practice that involves forging court documents in order to illegally foreclose on properties they had no claim to. Bank of America is also racist. They knowingly pushed African Americans and other minorities into risky sub-prime loans, while giving white non-minorities of the exact same financial status stable prime loans. An overwhelming 40% of their loans have been shown to have income overstated by the lender, trapping people in loans they knew couldn’t be repaid. They implemented systems to charge bogus overdraft fees to their checking account customers, and even take advantage of the unemployed by charging massive fees to people trying to access their benefits. This is all after receiving billions of dollars in tax-payer funded bailouts and debt guarantees from the federal government. Bank of America paid $0 in taxes last year, and even received a $1billion refund-- money they turned around and used to pay out over $35billion in bonuses to their executives.

WHAT CAN YOU DO??

First of all, close your account with Bank of America!! Once you’ve done that, give CEO Brian Moynihan a call. Let him know how you feel about their practices, and that you want him to “make a deal to keep Pamela Flores in her home at 245 Griffin Street in Atlanta!”

Brian Moynihan, Chairman and CEO of Bank of America

(980)     386-5687

brian.t.moynihan@bankofamerica.com