More warehouses means more truck traffic
This week’s Courier Herald column:
Orchard Hills was a golf course on which I spent a few sunny days during my late teens into my early thirties. It wasn’t part of an exclusive country club nor part of a developer’s pathway to sell suburban McMansions. It was just a nice piece of rolling land that offered good, inexpensive daily fee golf to those who wanted to escape reality for a few hours to practice their swing and/or partake in a bit of outdoor day drinking.
The golf course closed several years ago, falling victim to oversaturation of golf in the suburbs. The course’s location, adjacent to Interstate 85 and Georgia Highway 16 in Coweta county south of Atlanta, made the land ripe for repurposing.
An announcement this week says that the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company will anchor a new industrial park being developed on the property. The company will occupy 1.5 million square feet of warehouse space, in what the Atlanta Business Chronicle calls the “largest build-to-suit industrial space under construction in metro Atlanta”. Goodyear is expected to employ about 150 Georgians in the facility.
Individually, headlines like this represent wins. Jobs are created, and local tax bases are fortified. Warehouses, in particular, tend to bring in significantly more in property taxes than the businesses that occupy them demand in county services such as public safety. Their by-product, however, is traffic. Specifically, truck traffic.
It’s when the successes such as this project transition from microeconomic headlines to macroeconomic statistics that the infrastructure that supports them must be examined. Georgia’s transportation and congestion issues have been well documented, but have focused most directly on how to move people. While policy makers have been arguing over cars versus transit, our roads have been filling up with trucks carrying freight.
There is no easy solution on the horizon. There is clear evidence that the problem will continue to get worse.
Georgia is expected to add as many as 3 million new residents in the next quarter century. These people won’t just bring their cars, but will also demand goods and services. These are increasingly delivered via delivery services, which themselves add multiple trips to and from residential homes daily.
The middle stage of both manufacturing and distribution requires warehouses, and Georgia’s geographic position and our ports and airport logistics hubs make the warehousing industry a logical fit for the state. This extends from the Port of Savannah all the way down I-16, up I-75 into metro Atlanta, and all the way around the metro area and into North Georgia. It’s truly a statewide issue.
And much like the projected cascade of new residents, new warehouses are coming. There is a proposal to build out 1,400 acres with 18 million square feet of warehouse space in Butts county, about half way between Atlanta and Macon. 700 Acres adjacent to the Budweiser brewery in Cartersville, Northwest of Atlanta, have also been sold to be developed as warehouse space.
Henry County, on the Southeast corner of metro Atlanta, considered a moratorium on warehouse development this summer. The motion failed on a 3-3 vote. Reading some local reporting on the subject indicates that the move wasn’t so much to stop warehouse development there, but was to add developer impact fees to front-end load the tax payments to the county.
The point here isn’t that we need to stop warehouse development. We do need to understand, however, that the future is coming, and this – and truck traffic – will be part of it.
Our freeways are already full, and it can take a decade to get a permit for new lane construction before the first dirt is turned to pave a new road. Even if we were to start today, that’s 1 million new Georgians and all the trucks that will bring the items to their new homes away from now.
Georgia’s transportation planners better get moving if they want to keep Georgians moving.
About Author
Charlie
Founder of GeorgiaPol.com; Now weekly columnist Very interested in Georgia and Georginas. Interest in politics is waning daily.
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It’s not only road infrastructure that needs to thought about in the long term for growth. A warehouse the size of the ones being built in small and low population rural counties through out the state need large scale utilities and municipal services. Every warehouse needs to be sprinkled. That means water lines that can carry enough pressure to run enough flow to at least an on site pump to the sprinkler riser. That requires public water towers or onsite holding tanks which will be feed by local lines. They need sewer lines, storm drain lines, electrical, fiber optics, etc. Most of this (outside, storm drains, water and sewer), can be done by private suppliers, but you still need local government interactions, setbacks, right of ways and planed layouts for underground lines, and so forth. That takes time and taxpayer funds to organize. And in most cases, when a private owner comes in to deliver a large job creating endeavor with the chance for a trickle down effect (truck drivers need to buy gas and snacks, might need a hotel even) they bargain using the waving of development fees, lower water rates, and/or tax credits.
Plus you have the long term costs. Warehouses that big need enough fire trucks and trained fire fights with the right chemical certifications for what is in the warehouse beyond what they have for local volunteers. They need special foam truck, basic hazard trucks, ect. They will need another fire house. And these are not optional items. An ISO score for a fire department sets the safety rate of an area, which effect insurance rates for all building (like your local school) and home owners. It will raise your taxes or fire fees ether way, and also your private insurance rate. Increase road traffic means more emergency services, EMS trucks, sheriff and local police and their cars, and places to put them. All of these takes taxes, and if a government bargained the taxes or impact fees to get the warehouse, the local tax base and SPLOST will have to raise the funds.
Local small governments (in general), do not plan for these infrastructure service things long term. They wait until a new business or warehouse arrives, and then they put band aids on the problems. They don’t want to pay for things that might arrive for a decade. So they don’t have plans or even alternate plans in place. “We don’t need a bigger tanker truck for the fire department – which will coast us an additional $45,000 – then the new one the size of the old one (which is $350,000), and then we don’t have to raise the millage rate next year before the election for the upcharge”. Then 4 years later, they need a bigger tanker the size of the one they could have gotten, and now they need to find the $450,000 (inflation and trade war pricing) to pay for it.
I’m stepping off my public budget planning soap box now.
But I might come back.