$7.8M Land Purchase OK'd for New School

The Cobb County Board of Education unanimously approved four contracts totaling almost $8.4 million Thursday night toward the construction of a in Smyrna.

“The community around Smyrna is looking forward to this new elementary school being built, and I know that the city itself is hoping that this new school can help with pushing forward the redevelopment of the area,” said Post 2 board member Tim Stultz, who represents Smyrna and made the motions to approve the contracts.

The deals include $7.8 million to purchase three parcels of land the Cobb County School District plans to combine into a school site of slightly less than 18 acres next to along Fleming Road between Ward Street and Atlanta Road: $4.3 million for 9.027 acres owned by Halpern Enterprises; $588,060 for 1.5 acres owned by Robert and Jennifer Young; and $2.9 million for 7.45 acres owned by the .

The school board also authorized the hiring of Cunningham, Forehand, Matthews & Moore on a $598,000 architectural services contract for the elementary school. The school administration recommended the firm out of more than a dozen that submitted proposals.

The progress toward building the school came despite concerns about the cost and suitability of the site. Those concerns, especially worries about the possibility of expensive excavations and the cost per acre, prevented the board’s advisory Facilities and Technology Committee from voting on whether to recommend the site earlier in the week.

The school system has 60 days from the signing of the contracts to decide whether to close on the land or back out and choose another site among the many considered during an exhaustive search, said Doug Shepard, who oversees SPLOST projects for Cobb schools.

All the money for the project comes under SPLOST III, the special purpose local option sales tax approved for the school system’s capital projects in September 2008.

If the land proves unsuitable, Shepard said, the school system will lose only $300 for the land contracts, $100 for each one, plus a few thousand dollars in likely architectural expenses to see what work would be necessary to use the site.

Shepard doesn’t expect problems. He said all of the sellers provided studies of the properties that were conducted in the past few years either because the land was sold or it was prepared for development. He said Halpern’s extensive studies showed the largest piece of the site is clean environmentally.

But the school system will conduct its own studies, including soil samples and borings, to confirm the information the sellers provided. The board will get to see those results before giving final approval for the land purchases, and Shepard said the school administration will recommend canceling the deals if there are environmental problems or excavation issues that blast the project’s expenses beyond the budget.

As for the price of the land itself, Shepard said the school system is paying less than the appraisal amount for each of the three parcels. He acknowledged the difficulty of an accurate appraisal at a time when property values have fallen and commercial real estate sales are rare, but he said the school system’s independent appraiser did a detailed analysis that involved comparable sales, discounted cash-flow modeling and carrying costs to provide “an appraisal we can be confident in.”

The school plan includes an access road from Ward Street that’s part of the March 15 referendum for a new 1-cent countywide SPLOST. But Shepard said the school can succeed without that road.

Because the school system expects most of the school population to come from the east, he said, “we believe that the primary access to this school site will be Fleming Street and ultimately Atlanta Road.”