Mayor Dickens delivered the following remarks at a joint press conference with DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond on the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. The remarks are as prepared for delivery.
Thank you for joining us.
We are here today with our partners at DeKalb County to make an important announcement on the future Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
The Public Safety Training Center will be a vital piece of infrastructure that will serve the training needs of our fire and police departments and be a true community asset for our residents.
The facility will be built on City of Atlanta-owned property in unincorporated DeKalb County, so we have been working with CEO Thurmond and his team at the County as we developed our plans.
Today, I am pleased to report that we have reached an agreement with DeKalb County to issue the construction permit and move this project forward.
I’m going to turn it over in a minute to DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond to discuss a few of the details of the agreement between the City and the County.
Before I do, I want to say a few words about the Public Safety Training Center, and help set the record straight on some of the misinformation that’s out there.
The Public Safety Training Center meets a critical need to train both our police and fire personnel.
I have asked Fire Chief Smith and Police Chief Schierbaum to tell you a bit more about our training needs in just a few minutes.
They will tell you that our current facilities are woefully insufficient to meet the needs of our public safety personnel, and the demands our community asks of them.
The Public Safety Training Center is going to include a variety of pieces of training infrastructure, including:
- An Emergency Vehicle Operations Course (EVOC) for fire and police driving training;
- Academy housing for police, fire/rescue recruits;
- A fire department burn building;
- Stables and pastureland to house for mounted patrol; and
- A kennel and indoor/outdoor training center for our canine unit; and so much more.
I’ve doubled the funding for our pre-arrest diversions work and helped lead adoption of policing reforms like the 8-Can’t-Wait measures to improve community policing.
The City of Atlanta has the most extensive training requirements in the Southeast.
Our training includes vital areas like de-escalation techniques, mental health, community-oriented-policing, crisis intervention training as well as Civil Rights history education.
This training needs space, and that’s exactly what this training center is going to offer.
I know there have been questions about the environmental impact of this project, which is a focus of the agreement we are announcing today with DeKalb County.
The 85-acre facility will be constructed on a set of parcels owned by the City of Atlanta that total more than 380 acres.
The rest of that land – about 300 acres – will continue to be greenspace.
This is essentially a huge park, about the same size as our City’s largest park, that will have a training center on a modest footprint within it.
This is Atlanta, and we know forests. This facility will not be built on a forest.
The training center will sit on land that has long been cleared of hardwood trees through previous uses of the site decades ago.
Arborists have confirmed the existing vegetation on this land is overwhelmingly dominated by invasive species like brush, weeds, vines, and softwood trees.
Much of the site contains rubble from old building structures and asphalt from old parking lots.
The parcel is the original site of the police and fire departments’ training centers and has been in continual use for outdoor tactical training for Atlanta’s public safety agencies for more than 50 years.
Our development partner has committed to replace any hardwood tree destroyed in construction with over 100 new hardwoods, as well as replace any invasive species trees with new hardwood plantings.
The site will include double erosion control to ensure viability of Intrenchment Creek, the main waterway in the South River Forest Basin.
The site itself will have greenspace open to the public, featuring trails, ballfields and picnic areas.
My Administration is aggressively committed to environmental protection. We have been uniquely focused on expansion of protected greenspace.
In my first year of office alone, the City of Atlanta and our partners acquired an additional 260 acres throughout the city to be used for parks and greenspace.
The announcement we are making today is due in large part to the extensive input from the community that we have received over the last year through the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee. This Committee includes representatives from neighborhoods in DeKalb County and Atlanta.
These are leaders from the most immediately adjacent neighborhoods who support this project and are actively working to make it better.
Through engagement with that committee, we have already made several enhancements to our plans, including:
- Adding a minimum 100-foot tree buffer along the residential-facing aspects of the facility;
- Adding additional community uses including a pavilion and accessible meeting spaces; and
- Moving the planned firing range to the southern portion of the site, closest to the industrial park and away from residential areas.
This will be a true community center. In fact, we will be also using this site to house a community watch training program for our communities.
I want to take a moment to thank CEO Thurmond for partnering with us in moving this project forward.
He is a passionate advocate for his constituents, and a trusted partner.
He is just as committed to public safety, to the environment, to workforce development, and to our youth as we are here in the City of Atlanta.
I thank him and the County for their partnership, and I invite him to the podium to share a few words about our partnership moving forward.
Original source can be found here.
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