During the City of Baldwin’s Monday council meeting, Commercial Realtor Wade Rhodes approached the council to discuss the hot-button issue of development in the Habersham County Airport Business and Industrial Park.
Rhodes began his address to the council by saying “I am not your enemy,” recounting the highly-publicized frustrations Rhodes aired at the county commission meeting in December.
During that county commission meeting, Rhodes brought his frustrations with development at the airport business park forth to the commissioners; after more than 9 months of waiting, Rhodes and his client Don Higgins have been unable to move forward with the completion of a 40,000 square foot building in the business and industrial park.
In 2020, the City of Baldwin uncovered that the retention ponds built in the airport business park were built incorrectly. The building errors were fixed by the county’s engineering firm, Foothills Land Design, but the City of Baldwin has been unable to grant a variance from their new minimum development standards to Rhodes and Higgins as they wait for further clarification that the park’s infrastructure can support the new building.
Rhodes told the council Monday that they’re on the same page, and that they want the same things: bringing businesses to Habersham County. He said that the only place he and the council have “hit heads” is on the variance request for his client’s development in the business park.
Business park incentives
Following his clarification to the council on their shared goals, Rhodes asked the council to look into offering incentives for businesses that come to the park.
“You’ve probably never been asked about an incentive for someone to locate in Baldwin,” Rhodes said, bringing up the incentives Partnership Habersham offered a hotel coming to Cornelia. He says that if larger industries come to the city, looking to set up a location, “I think it behooves us to roll out the red carpet.”
Councilwoman Alice Venter shared that while she wants to bring industry to Baldwin, the kind of businesses currently occupying the business park don’t bring enough tax revenue to the city or county, or offer enough jobs to citizens, to warrant tax incentives. Rhodes assured the council that new businesses coming to the area would be larger businesses that would have more employment opportunities.
Councilwoman Stephanie Almagno shared what the mayor of a town near Savannah told the city council surrounding tax incentives when they visited their inland port.
“Everybody’s going to want their handout, everyone’s going to want their incentives– he said ‘Don’t do it, you have the location, you have the railroad, you have the highway,’” Almagno said. “It’s really interesting because Mr. Fiveash comes here a couple of months ago and says ‘hey, these businesses are going to come in, these are the kind of taxes your citizens could see,’ and then, on the other hand, [they’re] looking at incentives which are going to take away those taxes. So, as Councilwoman Venter says, we have to balance the needs of the city in providing services.”
Mayor Joe Elam said the council would look into incentives for industrial businesses coming to the city, and that the city has had incentives “on the books” for years that could use review.
Giving the region a “black eye”
This was the first time since Rhodes’s public airing of grievances with the commission and local news outlets that he’s come before the Baldwin City Council, and Councilwomen Venter and Almagno weren’t shy about addressing how his comments to the commission and media impacted the city, the county, and the engineering firms involved.
“These are the conversations we need to have quietly,” Almagno said. “For me, I have been very upset with the way you have presented Habersham and Baldwin and the development authority to the commission and to the public.”
Almagno and Venter both shared with Rhodes how his comments have damaged the reputations of the entities involved, and Almagno encouraged Rhodes to bring those issues to the officials involved directly so that they can be addressed, rather than involving the public.
“Running Baldwin through the mud, running our consulting engineers through the mud, it gives the region a black eye,” Almagno said. “I’m going to ask you, if you want to have these conversations about concessions, if you want to have these conversations about our minimum development standards, let’s have a meeting. We don’t have to do it here in public, let’s have a meeting and talk about some of these things.”
RELATED: Baldwin, county ‘have a plan in place’ for airport business park
Venter shared her feelings that Baldwin and their engineering firm, EMI, have had their names tarnished over the course of the comments Rhodes made.
“EMI and Baldwin’s names have been dragged through the mud, absolutely dragged through the mud,” Venter told Rhodes. “And that’s not fair, because if anybody with any sense looked at that timeline and the communication between the engineers, you can see that all we were asking were the same damn questions we were asking in the very beginning, and so it really hurts. I don’t like for people to mess with my people.”
Rhodes told the council that Baldwin wasn’t to blame for his frustrations with the time frame it has taken the variance he and his client asked for from Baldwin’s minimum development standards after insinuating at the commission meeting that the city was holding up development due to their standards. He told the Baldwin council on Monday that “the majority of the blame starts on the county and the development authority.”
But Almagno didn’t want to hear Rhodes talk about blame.
“It’s not blame, just using that word is a problem,” Almagno said. “It’s not blame, this is a process, this is a construction process, this is a process that we are going through. This started with a conversation about one piece of land, and then we noticed that this is a bigger conversation we should have.”
Venter said she’s ready for the issue to be over.
“I’ll be glad when all this is taken care of, because this board right here, our first responsibility is to our citizens and our employees and taking care of them,” Venter said. “This has taken from them, this is stealing from our people because we have had to put so much time and energy into trying to clear up our name, that we’re just done now. . . Baldwin has business to take care of.”
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