Fulton County has put $56.5 million on the table to buy the Atlanta City Detention Center, and Roswell's representative on the county commission helped push the deal forward.
Five of six Fulton County commissioners signed an Aug. 10 letter to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens offering to purchase the downtown jail and setting a 5 p.m. Monday, Aug. 31, deadline for a response, according to 11Alive. District 2 Commissioner Bob Ellis, who represents Roswell, Alpharetta, Sandy Springs, Milton and Mountain Park, was among the signers.
The offer is based on a 2025 broker opinion of value from commercial real estate firm CBRE Group and accounts for an estimated $75 million in renovations the aging facility needs, CBS Atlanta reported. Commission Chair Robert L. Pitts, Vice Chair Khadijah Abdur-Rahman, Commissioners Bridget Thorne and Dana Barrett also signed. Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. did not.
The gap
The county's $56.5 million bid lands far below Atlanta's own third-party appraisal, which valued the 471,000-square-foot, 17-story facility at roughly $144 million. Dickens had previously offered to sell the jail for $80 million but withdrew that proposal Thursday, July 30, after bundling it with tax allocation district extensions and a joint hospital project.
The commissioners' letter called those conditions unacceptable, stating they would have inflated the real cost to Fulton County taxpayers to $1.4 billion. The letter also noted the county has contributed more than $550 million to Atlanta redevelopment over 25 years, including $53 million in property tax revenue to Atlanta TADs in the past year alone.
"We've been trying to … buy this jail for 17 years," Commissioner Barrett told Atlanta News First on Aug. 10. "If we are able to accomplish that with the people who are currently in office now … that's something major."
What Ellis has said
Ellis has been the most vocal north Fulton advocate for acquiring the jail. In a July 31 interview with Rough Draft Atlanta, he argued that Atlanta's prior offers "are not valid offers, because they have had material, financial contingencies that harm Fulton County taxpayers." At the time, Ellis pegged the county's own appraisal at about $65 million, a figure that has since been refined downward to $56.5 million in the formal CBRE-based offer.
Ellis did not respond to a request for comment on the new offer by publication time.
What happens next
Fulton County currently houses several hundred detainees at the jail under a lease expiring at year's end. If Atlanta rejects the offer or lets the Monday, Aug. 31, deadline pass, the county would lose those beds and face a capacity gap at its main Rice Street facility, which already holds roughly 1,900 of the county's approximately 3,000 total inmates.
Dickens' office acknowledged receipt of the letter late Aug. 10 and said the city "will respond in full in the near future," but gave no indication whether it would accept.
Arrington, the lone holdout, said he believes Atlanta should transfer the jail at no cost and called for a broader deal that could "avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary jail costs."
The Roswell Ledger will update this story when Atlanta responds or the Aug. 31 deadline passes.
