As the Atlanta City Council deliberates on approving millions for the controversial and under-vetted public safety training center, also under-examined is the future of other police and fire academy sites where the City has already amassed hundreds of acres of land – more than enough for the training center itself.
The former police academy on Southside Industrial Parkway is in a shuttered Atlanta Public Schools (APS) building still owned by that agency. But various City of Atlanta agencies own a huge assemblage of adjacent, largely undeveloped property. More than 76 acres are already publicly owned there, or more than 90 counting a City park.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department (AFRD) academy is in rented space in a College Park building. The City owns that building and a huge amount of largely undeveloped property around it, totaling more than 149.5 acres – most or all of it controlled by Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which will soon seek redevelopment proposals for at least part of the area.
That’s at least 225 acres of land already publicly owned and already used as public safety training academies. The footprint of the new training center – on a forested site in unincorporated DeKalb County also long used for some Atlanta Police Department (APD) training – is just under 87 acres.
That raises the question of why neither ex-training property was considered for the new training center in a secretive site-selection process that apparently looked only at individual large properties owned by the City, not assemblages, for reasons that have never been explained. Dawn Rivera, a former president of the East Atlanta Community Association, recently pointed out to me the publicly owned land near the former police academy and suggested the increasingly industrial area would have been a better site for the new training center rather than a location in what is supposed to be part of the South River Forest green space vision. The $30 million the City Council may authorize for new training center funding, Rivera suggested, could have gone to buying out the handful of private property owners remaining in that area.
Another question is whether future planning of any kind for those properties and a former AFRD academy in another APS-owned building also will be secretive. The City press office did not respond to questions and other City agencies indicated no immediate plans for the property near the former APD academy.
The new training center is in part intended to permanently replace APD and AFRD academies that were long housed in buildings that are generally agreed to have been atrocious – even condemnable. Both were in former APS schools: APD in the former Harper Elementary at 180 Southside Industrial Parkway on the city’s southeastern border, and AFRD in the former Gilbert Elementary at 407 Ashwood Ave., near Lakewood Amphitheatre.
Today, both are in temporary, leased spaces for classroom training, with other types of training still conducted elsewhere. APD’s classrooms are within Atlanta Metropolitan State College, which itself was considered but rejected as the site of the new training center, despite continuing to express interest months afterward. AFRD’s classrooms are in an office building at 5155 Clipper Drive in College Park, about a mile east of the airport.
The plan is for those academies and other training facilities to move to the new training center on Key and Constitution roads in DeKalb, which planners expect to open in 2024 despite fierce opposition.
What little is known about the secretive site-selection process indicates that the former APD academy and current AFRD academy sites may have been rejected out of hand based on false assumptions. A site-selection report obtained by SaportaReport said the City’s Department of Enterprise and Asset Management (DEAM) began by looking at all City-owned properties over 10 acres in size. That would have ruled out the literal building sites at the former APD academy and current AFRD academy, based on APS ownership and property size, and may have ignored the huge amounts of City-owned land around them. The process eventually looked at the state college, Greenbrier Mall and the DeKalb County site, settling on the latter.
In addition, the original demand from APD and its private support nonprofit, the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), was for the new training center to cover 150 acres. As a nod to public controversy about the eventual DeKalb County site, the City Council as part of a 2021 lease approval hastily chopped the size down to approximately 85 acres – which would have more easily fit onto these and possibly other rejected or never examined sites.
Nor was there any public or City Council vetting of the concept of the new training center having all its facilities in one place or if all of its elements are necessary. APF has floated unquantified reasons, including travel convenience, amenities that will attract other public safety agencies to rent the facility as a money-maker, and a police morale-booster akin to fancy locker rooms for college football teams.
Along with DEAM, APF played a key role in the secret site selection and is now the lead planner on the new training center. Continuing a pattern in recent months about training center inquiries, APF referred questions to the City press office, which did not respond at all.
APD and AFRD have no plans to reuse the former academy sites, according to the police department and the Atlanta Fire Rescue Foundation, a private nonprofit that supports the fire department.
The current AFRD site will be part of a request for development proposals issued sometime this year, according to airport spokesperson Andrew C. Gobeil. He would not specify how much of the City-owned property is involved, but said it is larger than just the 6.2-acre property on which the AFRD-rented building stands.
Invest Atlanta (IA) – the City’s economic development authority – and the Atlanta Housing Authority (AH) own some of the properties near the former APD academy and say they have a general concept of seeing them redeveloped for industrial uses, like other sites in the area.
APS has the former schools once used as the APD and AFRD academies on its list of surplus properties, meaning an intent to eventually sell them. APS did not respond to a question about the future use of the sites.
District 9 City Councilmember Dustin Hillis voted in favor of the training center lease in 2021 and now chairs the City Council’s Public Safety and Legal Administration Committee. He said he was unaware of the large amount of City-owned land near the former APD academy, “but [I] have asked” after SaportaReport’s inquiry. As for the idea of using the current AFRD academy area for all or part of the training center, he cast doubts.
“The parcels around the current/temporary fire academy classroom space are all airport assets and, at first glance, contain much more developed forest and have many more bordering residential homes than the long-standing APD training site along Key Road,” Hillis said.
The academy sites also have green space and residential areas that likely would have sparked controversy similar to that of the current training center site.
Regardless, the three former and current academy sites amount to at least 233.5 acres of publicly owned land that are likely to see neighborhood-altering redevelopment sooner rather than later. Together, that’s more than 2.5 times the size of the new training center. The following are details of each location’s size and what is known of its future.
FORMER APD ACADEMY
180 Southside Industrial Parkway
Total publicly owned land: 89.9 acres including park, 76.4 acres without park
The former APD academy is APS’s shuttered Harper Elementary, which sits on about 7.5 acres near the intersection of Southside Industrial Parkway and Ruby H. Harper Boulevard. It is just south of Harper Park, which is recorded by the City as 13.57 acres.
The City owns several properties along the west side of Harper Boulevard, where a few houses are mingled among vacant or wooded lots. The City and its agencies also own a huge area of residential and industrial land to the east of Harper Boulevard, totaling more than 46 acres. Among them are a 19-acre site owned by the City, 22 parcels owned by IA, and a 3.4-acre site owned by AHA. A handful of parcels in the area – much of which is platted as a non-existent subdivision – are in private hands. Just under 13 acres in the entire area are privately owned.
In the 1960s, the streets were known as Poole Creek and Gilbert Roads, and the area was the site of the Gilbert Gardens and Gilbert Gardens Annex public housing complex. The public housing was torn down in 2004 as part of the infamous razing of residential areas based on flight noise from airport expansion. AH sold the main Gilbert Gardens site, according to agency spokesperson Jeff Dickerson, and it became part of an industrial park. “Due to lack of market demand, AH has not sold the smaller Annex site but is in discussions about opportunities to consolidate the land with adjacent properties for an industrial use,” he said. The area is mentioned in AH’s current strategic plan as among the priority sites for redevelopment.
IA spokesperson Katrice L. Mines said the parcels that authority owns – along Southside Industrial – were conveyed by the City “many years ago” and are zoned for industrial reuse. She did not respond to questions about any imminent redevelopment or sale plans.
One 1.4-acre property on the east side of Harper Boulevard is listed in Fulton County property records as owned by Benedict and Monica C. Ezeokoli of Marietta. A woman who answered the phone at a listed number for them said “no” when asked if they had heard anything from the City about redevelopment plans or an interest in buying their property.
APS is in the midst of creating an inventory of its historic school buildings following controversy about the possible sale of one in Lakewood Heights. Ben Schmidt with the Atlanta Preservation Center (APC) took the lead on creating the inventory and its standards. While Schmidt’s research continues, he currently ranks the former Harper Elementary low due to a lack of information about community significance and heavy alteration to its exterior.
CURRENT AFRD ACADEMY
5155 Clipper Drive, College Park
Total publicly owned land: 149.5 acres
The current AFRD academy building, according to the airport and Hillis, is a 52,000-square-foot facility formerly used by the aviation company Boeing. It sits on a roughly 6.2-acre property. But the City also has acquired a massive area of undeveloped, wooded land to the south, another commercial building across the street and properties to the north along Godby Road.
The property amounts to about 149.5 acres bordered by commercial and residential areas. The wooded area includes streams and a pond. It is not clear from property records or airport information how much of that property is considered an airport asset.
According to Gobeil, the airport spokesperson, the AFRD academy property “is slated to be part of an off-airport property development plan, and part of an RFP [request for proposals] to be released in 2023.” He did not provide any details of what the RFP would seek, including how much of the City-owned property would be included. “The [AFRD academy’s] 6.2 acres will be part of a larger parcel of property to be included in the RFP,” he said.
The City of College Park and Ken Allen, its City Council member for that area, did not respond to comment requests about the future of the property.
FORMER AFRD ACADEMY
407 Ashwood Ave.
Total publicly owned land: 7.68 acres
Located near the intersection of Ashwood and Bond Drive, this is the former Gilbert Elementary and is on the APS surplus property list, but with no clear future for sale or redevelopment. It opened in the 1950s and closed in 1983, with some service after that as an APS facility building prior to its AFRD academy use.
Schmidt, the APC historian working on the APS historic property inventory, rates the school building as of “moderate” significance, mostly due to its neighborhood impacts. That includes its use by YMCA sports teams and a community book-buying campaign in the 1970s to get more books about African-American history and culture.
Maps by Maggie Lee.
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