Forest Park advisers outline $104M city center plan; council delays bond sale until after SPLOST vote

Forest Park’s finance adviser presented a funding plan on Aug. 4 for a proposed city center building — an approximately 200,000‑square‑foot facility that would house city hall, police, recreation and parking — estimating a total project budget of about $104 million.

"So the proposed budget for the city center is a 104,000,000," finance adviser Ed Wall told the mayor and council during a detailed presentation that included debt‑service charts, bond‑sale strategies and a sensitivity analysis tied to special‑purpose local‑option sales tax (SPLOST) receipts and tax‑digest growth.

Wall and staff described current resources the city could apply to the project: roughly $29.675 million from a 2021 bond issue account, $11.5 million in a separate account, $850,000 in TAD funds, and other reserves — which Wall characterized as "$43,000,225 that you all will be contributing" as equity toward the project. With that equity, staff proposed issuing roughly $62.335 million in new bonds to finance the remainder.

The presentation also outlined a refinancing of an $11.5 million bullet maturity from 2021 and modeled annual debt‑service impacts. Wall said refinancing and lengthening the amortization would lower annual payments, and that issuing the new 2025 bond series would add about $4.67 million in annual debt service (bringing total added debt service to around $7 million when combined with existing debt obligations).

Wall stressed the financing depended on the result of a county SPLOST ballot measure in November. "If this [SPLOST] doesn't pass and you issue the bonds before the November vote, then you'll have to come out of the general fund with that amount of money," Wall said. He recommended waiting until after the November vote to issue bonds but advised that staff and the city's attorney prepare bond documents now, because document preparation can take 30–90 days.

City Manager Ricky Clark and council members pressed staff on alternatives and assumptions, asking whether national banks would be solicited, whether overpayments could be applied to principal, and how the city's tax digest and sales‑tax growth assumptions affected debt service. Wall said the administration typically markets the bonds to Georgia‑domiciled banks to capture tax‑exempt interest advantages but can also run a national solicitation for comparison.

Council ultimately voted to table any immediate bond issuance until after the November SPLOST vote while authorizing staff and the city attorney to begin preparing bond documents and related legal work so the project schedule would not be delayed if voters approve the sales‑tax measure.

Next steps: staff will prepare bond documents, continue value engineering with the construction manager, and return to council with final funding instruments and a recommended timing strategy after the November vote.