I did not walk into College Park in 2013 with a blueprint. I walked in with a belief that the city had more potential than its balance sheet showed and a willingness to do the unglamorous work that turns potential into investment.
What followed was nearly a decade of building, negotiating, recruiting, and sometimes just grinding through the kind of work that never makes a press release. And by the time I left in 2022, College Park had a Tax Allocation District, a downtown, an NBA G-League franchise, a BMW facility, and a financial position that was several million dollars stronger than it started.
Here is what I learned along the way.
You cannot attract investment without a structure to receive it.
When I arrived, College Park had no Tax Allocation District. For a city sitting adjacent to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, that was a problem. The location was right. The opportunity was real. But without a mechanism to redirect tax increment back into targeted corridors, we were essentially asking developers to take a leap of faith with nothing underneath them.
Establishing College Park’s first TAD changed that. It gave the city a tool to invest in its own redevelopment nodes and gave the private sector a signal that the city was serious. That TAD is now projected to attract over $1.5 billion in private investment. That number did not come from a marketing campaign. It came from building the right legal and financial infrastructure first.
Every deal is a relationship before it is a transaction.
The $60 million public-private partnership with the Atlanta Hawks Basketball Club did not happen because we sent a proposal. It happened because we built a relationship, understood what the franchise needed, and structured a deal that worked for them and for the city. The result was a 60 million dollar multi-purpose arena and a new NBA G-League franchise, the College Park Skyhawks, and an anchor that completely repositioned how the development community saw our market.
The same was true for BMW. Recruiting a $15 million technical training facility to College Park required us to make a compelling case for why College Park, not somewhere else. That case was built on relationships, on understanding what BMW needed in a location, and on being ready to move when the conversation got serious.
PILOT agreements are only worth what you negotiate into them.
I spent years at the table with developers on multifamily residential, hotel, logistics, and Class A office projects. Every one of those conversations involved a PILOT agreement, and every one of them required me to understand not just what the city wanted from the deal but what the developer needed to close it. Getting that balance right is what separates incentive programs that produce results from ones that give away value and get nothing in return.
The discipline I developed in those negotiations is the same discipline I bring to every client engagement today.
Fiscal strategy is economic development too.
One of the wins I am most proud of from my time in College Park is one that almost nobody talks about. We refinanced $120 million in bonds and saved the city $5.4 million in the process. That is not the kind of story that gets a ribbon cutting. But it is the kind of move that protects a city’s ability to keep investing in itself for years to come.
Economic development is not just about bringing money in. It is about making sure the city is financially positioned to sustain the momentum once the investment starts arriving.
The work is never finished, but the foundation matters.
By 2022, College Park had its first downtown mixed-use development at $93 million, a pipeline of PILOT-backed projects across multiple asset classes, a strengthened balance sheet, and a national brand anchor in the Atlanta Hawks. None of that happened by accident.
It happened because a team of people showed up every day, made difficult decisions, built real relationships, and refused to treat economic development as a marketing exercise.
That is what I built in College Park. And it is what King City Advisors brings to every city we work with today.
If your community is sitting on potential that has not yet become investment, I would love to talk about what it would take to change that.
King City Advisors helps cities, developers, and community leaders turn big plans into real projects. Backed by 30+ years of Georgia experience, the firm closes the gap between vision and execution, where most good plans stall.
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