Mayor Addresses Revenue Losses, Rail Project Plans

"Our SPLOST revenues are being lowered,” Kennesaw Mayor Mark Mathews began a Town Hall meeting at the on Thursday. “We just got a notice this week about another reduction in revenue, about $600,000. We’ll have to go through and tweak our current SPLOST projects list to accommodate that.”

Mathews also said that property tax revenue in Kennesaw has decreased due to economic conditions. “Tax revenue is down by about $800,000 in this current fiscal year,” he said. “Of course, we cut our expenditures accordingly, and we’ve been doing that for the last four years.”

Mathews said he anticipates property tax revenue to decrease for the next “couple of years"  and expects a decrease of $600,000 in revenue for the next fiscal year. Although property tax revenue has fallen, business license revenue has remained fairly “flat” in comparison to last year’s numbers, he said.

“We will look through everybody’s budget again, and continue to adjust as we need to,” said Mathews.

The mayor also discussed the possibility of a that would run through the metro-Atlanta area.

“Many of you have seen in the paper or on the news, the state legislature passed in 2010 the Transportation Improvement Act, also known at that time as House Bill 277,” Mathews said. “What that did was create a group called a transportation roundtable. There are 21 members, and on that, I am the representative of the mayors for Cobb County.”

“There are a lot of different studies being looked at right now for rail,” said Mathews. “Some of the concepts that are out there are using the existing CSX line, some are using the 75 corridor, some are using the 41 corridor. There are alternative analyses, studies being done right now, that are due in within the next 90 days that will give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down on which is the most feasible.”

“What we will probably end up with is something that gets the rail started, probably from Atlanta to Cumberland,” Mathews stated. “We won’t have enough to make it up here with the initial run, but it will be the funding mechanism for years to come for us to be able to expand.”

Mathews said the roundtable has proposed a one cent sales tax that would go regionwide across the 10-county metropolitan Atlanta area. The tax is estimated to generate approximately $10 billion for the project over the next 10 years.

“The problem is, if you took all of the needs, of all the planned major projects,” Mathews said, “you’re probably looking at $80 to $100 billion worth of projects.”

He said the cost of the project had to be “whittled down” to $8-10 billion before it would be put before voters in July 2012.

“It’s a very complicated and big issue,” said Mathews. “There are all kinds of penalties in place if we turn it down, but the state’s saying ‘let the voters decide,’ and I agree with that. I think the voters need to decide, but I think the hardest task is going to be educating the voters to make sure they know what they’re voting for.”

In his address, the mayor also discussed other city updates and development plans for Kennesaw.

The city’s Department of Parks and Recreation was recently awarded a $100,000 grant from the Department of Natural Resources, he said. The funds will go towards development of the city’s community wide trail system.

Mathews said a 450-bed student housing project on Fry and Shiloh will begin construction “in any time" and should be ready to lease in summer 2013.

“We will start to incorporate a lot of this student activity so that we can maximize the growth we’ve seen over at , and that’s going to be an interesting thing to watch how that evolves and how we integrate that into our community,” he said. “It’s going to be a big, big thing, and I’m very excited to see some of that development starting over on that part of the city.”

Mathews said rezoning was complete for the construction of 30,000 square feet of retailer space on McCollum and Cherokee, which he said was a project worth "$40-$50 million" for the city. He also noted that a $2.5 million facility is slated to open later this year.

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