By John Ruch

Planners of Atlanta’s controversial public safety training center appear to be counting properties outside its legal boundaries to meet a lease-required amount of green space.

And the City appears to be counting that land as part of a new park whose planning has been merged with the training center in the latest political move by Atlanta’s mayor.

The use of the outside properties appeared recently on two mysterious maps. One was filed in court documents opposing an appeal of the training center’s land-disturbance permit (LDP), which is based partly on questions about the site’s size. Another appeared briefly in a City press release that was later deleted without notice and replaced with a link to a redesigned training center website that does not include the map. The City and the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), the training center’s lead planner, did not respond to questions.

The maps show three additional properties to the north and east of the training center site, totaling about 85 acres. An earlier intent to include them in the plan may explain a fundamental error and controversy in the City Council legislation authorizing the training center’s lease, which gave the site’s size as about 85 acres bigger than it actually is. As a result, the lease also includes a pledge to preserve more green space than is physically possible under the training center plan.

The training center property and footprint as shown in the original lease agreement approved by the Atlanta City Council.

Other factors have added to confusion since then. The APF, without public notice, got three parcels on the site redrawn and partly combined, ultimately increasing the amount of acreage it controls. And differing numbers for the total and green-space acreage have been given by City officials, including in a recent “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) between Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond and related press…