The Atlanta Stadium Mess
By 
From the moment the Atlanta Braves announced they were moving from their downtown stadium that is all of 20 years old to the Cobb County suburbs, I was disgusted. Choosing to base your future on the model of the Texas Rangers as opposed to the many teams that have built in the city where public transportation is at least possible said far too much about Atlanta. Turner Field is just south of downtown and you know who lives down there don’t you? That’s right, black people. That’s what a lot of this was about–white people fearing black people, which dominates so much of Atlanta-era politics and has forever, including suburbs refusing to allow MARTA to build out there because of fear that they would come.
Ah, the Braves bridge. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. The concept first appeared in November of 2013, shortly after Cobb County stunned the sports world by announcing that it was luring the team out to the ‘burbs. (To keep the negotiations a secret, it later was revealed, county commission chair Tim Lee had secretly hired a lawyer with commission money without telling any of his colleagues, and then made some commission members stand outside in hallways while others met behind closed doors to evade open-meetings laws. The democratic process.) At the time, no one knew how much the bridge would cost, or exactly how it would be paid for. Those details would be worked out in due time.
Two weeks later, the Cobb County commission passed the Braves stadium deal—or most of it, anyway. Still to be negotiated was a “transportation agreement” that would spell out things like any highway ramps or, say, bridges that might need to be built to enable Braves fans to get to games. But that would happen soon, just you wait.
One year later, with construction on the stadium underway, the bridge remained on the drawing board. Cobb County officials, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, “still don’t know how much the bridge will cost or how the county will pay for its half.”
This summer, things got much, much worse, as the Journal-Constitution reported that the bridge might not be ready until September 2017, five months after the stadium opens. That would leave almost an entire season where Braves fans would have to park their cars, then edge their way along the side of a eight-lane highway, underneath an overpass, to finally arrive at their seats. It’s walkable, but as one local noted in a web comment, only in the way that “the road in the game Frogger was walkable”— so probably not the sort of stroll anyone will want to attempt after nine innings and a few beers.
That brings us up to this week, when Lee finally admitted that the bridge won’t be open until at least the stadium’s second season, at the earliest. The Marietta Daily Journal, meanwhile, is reporting that the actual owners of the parking lot that the Braves plan to use—both the state authority that runs the neighboring convention center and the private owners of the office towers that sit nearby—have no interest in allowing the Braves to build a bridge at all, which could result in sad, desperate fans driving to the stadium only to sit forlornly in their cars, listening to games on the radio and wondering what life is like on the other side of I-285.
So backroom dealing, giving lip service about transportation with no actual plan to fund or implement it, and forcing taxpayers to pay hundreds of millions of dollars? All in a day’s work. At least visitors won’t have to see any black people!