The housing market meltdown that left record numbers of homeowners in foreclosure in Cherokee County has also taken its toll on retail and commercial space in the county’s three largest cities, leaving the municipalities looking for ways to fill in the blanks.
And, while Canton, Holly Springs and Woodstock offer three unique scenarios to potential small businesses, those differences that are a selling point have also become a blueprint for how those cities can market themselves and move their economic development forward.
“For the past 10 to 12 years, we were having breakneck growth, and incentives didn’t even come up, because we were just trying to keep up with it,” said Woodstock’s Community Development Director Richard McLeod. “This is such a broad national or international issue, it’s gone beyond looking at ‘Are we better than Canton,’ to ‘Are we better than Atlanta, Henry County or even Arkansas?’ Everybody is in this same boat trying to attract job growth.”
In the meantime, driving around Cherokee County’s various commercial areas, such as Ga. 92 in Woodstock, Ga. 5 and Ga. 140 at either end of Holly Springs or Ga. 20, Riverstone Parkway or even downtown Canton, reveals a familiar sight: shiny new empty retail space that awaits its first occupants and older storefronts that have become vacant as small businesses have gone under during the recession.
Just as the cities offer different opportunities, they each have a different array of tools at their disposal and a different offering of incentives for commercial clients looking for a place to set up shop.
At the Canton City Council’s Feb. 18 work session, for instance, Mayor Gene Hobgood suggested that the city look into waiving its commercial impact fees to try and kick-start growth, similar to an initiative the Cherokee County Commission approved last fall, when it lowered impact fees by 90 percent, hoping to spur new commercial and residential development.
By contrast, Holly Springs and Woodstock, which have no commercial impact fees, are looking at other incentives and strengths their cities have to offer to help build their commercial tax digests.
“We’re still a developing area that’s going to have to build more roads, have more (infrastructure) connections, have more amenities, to catch up,” said Holly Springs Community Development Director Brantley Day. “Impact fees are the least of our issues.”
Day estimates the existing retail space in his city at being between 40,000 to 50,000 square feet, but his efforts are hampered by location … that of the existing space and that of the city itself, squeezed between the county’s two largest cities.
“One challenge we’ve always had here is we are, I think Target calls it, a ‘tweener,’” Day said. “(Large retailers say), ‘We’ve already got on in Woodstock, or one in Canton, or even one in Woodstock and Canton.’ We have the luxury of being a blank slate, but … there are some businesses we’re just not going to have here.”
Having large retailers doesn’t mean smaller businesses will automatically arrive to fill in satellite stores around an anchor.
“There’s not an awful lot of economic development going on out there,” said Canton Community Development Director Ken Patton. “What commercial retail activity that has taken place seems to be involving Sembler’s Canton Marketplace and filling in that.”
Patton indicated that, looking into using an impact fee waiver as an incentive is definitely worth discussing, but he isn’t sure it will be overly effective in bringing in small businesses.
“The city of Cartersville indicated (that) they reduced impact fee assessments and they indicated they have not seen an appreciable increase in activity because impact fees were lowered,” Patton said. “(But), it couldn’t hurt. Until the market turns, there are lot of other factors holding folks back. For instance, banks are wanting 40 to 60 percent cash before doing a loan. With that kind of criteria from the banks, nobody is stepping out (to open a new business).”
Cherokee County Planning Director Jeff Watkins has started to assess the impact of the county’s decision last August to waive impact fees for residential and commercial development.
Both Watkins and Post 3 Commissioner Karen Bosch, who initiated the impact fee waiver in the county, point to the Food Lion store currently under construction on Bells Ferry Road as a direct result of the waiver. Bosch said the waiver saved the company $200,000 in impact fees, which triggered the company to move forward with construction.
“We know from the amount of commercial development plans coming into the system, we know we’ve had quite a few more development plans since August of last year,” he said. “Among those developers that were thinking about doing projects, the reduction in the impact fee was the impetus that made Cherokee County’s project more attractive to them than others that they were considering doing in the Atlanta area.”
Impact fees in the county are one thing, but, on a municipal level, Day isn’t sure that it would amount to much of an incentive in Holly Springs, even if they had impact fees to waive. “At this level of government, there’s no way we’re going to be able to manipulate the market that way to entice somebody to come in,” he said.
Woodstock also relies on other tools to sell the city, which McLeod estimates has hundreds of thousands of square feet of existing empty retail space. “One thing we use is geography,” he said. “Whether you like it or don’t like it, Atlanta is still the center of the region, and we’re closer to it and certainly closer to Cobb County.”
While Woodstock’s location, an educated workforce, three of the county’s five high schools and a plethora of executive housing offer an enticement, McLeod also has various tax credits and tax abatements at his disposal.
“The Tax Allocation District (TAD) is a good opportunity, although that opportunity has dried up a bit within the TAD boundary because TADs are tied to a specific development,” he said, referring to the TAD tied to the Hedgewood development.
Like Woodstock’s TAD, Canton has an Enterprise Zone, comprising the River Mill LCI, parts of downtown and in areas along Marietta Road, which can offer financial incentives, such as waiving sewer tap fees, as well as tax breaks.
Along with the different tools the cities have for luring commercial development, they all have some common support in the Cherokee County Development Authority, which has about 2.5 million square feet of its own existing commercial space available, according to Director Misti Martin.
“We have information for small businesses if they’re trying to get some sort of small business loan, or demographics that show how many nail salons are in certain mile radius,” Martin said. “Or, a small boutique can plug in an address they’re considering and run the demographics of a 3 to 5 mile radius to make sure the market fits their business model.”
And, the Development Authority works on behalf of the cities as well as the county.
“We just it want it to be in our community, whether it goes into Ball Ground or Woodstock or Waleska, as long as they locate in Cherokee County,” she said. “They all add up to jobs and investments, and that’s what we’re here for.”
