Stonecrest staff present Georgia Power EV charging plan; committee weighs reallocation of $500,000 in CDBG funds

Deputy City Manager (acting) told the Stonecrest Transportation, Infrastructure & Parks Committee on April 9 that staff have selected Georgia Power as the recommended partner for an initial public EV charging program and will bring a budgetary proposal to the City Council on April 24.

The deputy city manager said Georgia Power’s program is “turnkey” and cited an estimated city-side contribution of “around $240,000” (presentation figure) for the package under consideration. He said Georgia Power’s make-ready program would contribute up to $300,000 per site toward infrastructure on the Georgia Power grid and that staff had identified three initial candidate sites: City Hall, Stonecrest Mall and Brownsville Aquatic Center.

The nut of the discussion was money and operations: committee members asked where the roughly $500,000 in reallocated Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds (originally for Farrington Road sidewalks) should be directed. The deputy city manager said the committee should develop recommendations for city council but noted the CDBG funds had not yet been received and that staff would bring costs back for specific projects. Committee members proposed options that included allocating the funds to EV charging, to repair a deteriorated walkway at Southeast or toward road resurfacing needs.

Georgia Power representative Tammy Harrington described the company’s role and what the make-ready funding covers. “We support and manage the entire electrification process,” Harrington said, listing project discovery, on-site assessment, pre-engineering design and a turnkey construction-and-commissioning approach. She said the $300,000 make-ready cap per site pays for electrical distribution work (transformers, panels, conduit and related site work) but not for the charging equipment itself, which remains the customer’s responsibility.

Harrington described the program parameters discussed with staff: to qualify for the $300,000 make-ready contribution a site must be on the Georgia Power grid and meet either of two criteria — have one DC fast charger on site or six level-2 parking spaces — and Georgia Power’s current program allows up to five funded locations per customer per year. She also summarized equipment options offered in the proposal (level 2 units at ~7.2 kW per port; DC fast chargers with 62.5–80 kW capability) and said installers provide a five-year warranty and training for city staff on the ChargePoint platform used for network management.

Committee members raised a range of operational questions that staff did not resolve during the meeting: who will set pricing, how revenue and transaction data will be handled, expected daily utilization and how electricity costs will be paid. The deputy city manager and Harrington said those implementation details would be worked out with city finance and facilities staff and in the formal contract documents and easements that would follow a council decision on the infrastructure proposal.

No final commitment or council-level vote occurred at the committee meeting. The deputy city manager told the committee he planned to present the budgetary proposal to the City Council for final consideration on April 24 and asked the committee to frame funding recommendations. The committee discussed adding the CDBG reallocation to the city’s paving/resurfacing program as an alternative if the committee preferred not to use the funds for EV charging.

Ending: Staff will return with updated cost estimates and the formal proposal language to support a council decision; the EV vendor presentation and the question of reallocating CDBG dollars were left for future council-level action.