The Cobb Board of Education next month may consider a resolution seeking eminent domain to purchase 15 acres of vacant land near Walton High School.
The land is being eyed for the construction of a softball field and tennis courts that were displaced for the new Walton classroom building that opened in 2017.
The two parcels at 1495 and 1550 Pine Road have been unoccupied for several years. A white house, built in 1923, fronts the road and there’s another building in the back that is accessed by a gravel driveway.
The rest of the property is undeveloped and most of it is wooded, with the northern part of the 1550 Pine Road parcel fronted by Bill Murdock Road, just across the street from Walton.
There’s a sign on the property giving notice of the eminent domain resolution at the Nov. 14 school board meeting.
According to a Cobb County School District spokeswoman, the board has been negotiating with the property owner, who “has expressed interest in selling” and that “the District has offered more than full market value for a property that has most recently been used as a garbage disposal service.”
The offer from the Cobb school district is $3 million, a price the spokeswoman said is for property that appraised for 10 percent less than that amount. That comes to around $200,000 an acre.
According to Cobb Tax Assessor’s Office records, the land owner is Thelma McClure, who took possession of the property in 2013 after the death of her husband, Felton McClure.
Cobb school board member Charisse Davis represents the Walton cluster. She said while the prospect of seeking eminent domain is a serious one—it’s the government taking of private property for public use with compensation—”the district has been trying to work with the property owner” for years, and “we just weren’t getting where we needed to make a deal.”
The decision to seek eminent domain, Davis said, came “after careful consideration.”
Walton softball parents have been pressing the school for a return to the campus, which was called for when the new classroom building plans were being made. New softball and tennis facilities are included on the Cobb Education SPLOST V project list.
For Davis, who was elected last November and lives in the Smyrna area, “it was January when I first learned about this issue,” she said. “I wasn’t aware of what had been happening here.”
After speaking out at a town hall meeting Davis held at Dickerson Middle School, the Walton softball parents went public at a board meeting in February.
Davis said the negotiations with McClure bogged down on price, but she wouldn’t be more specific except to say that the process included a property appraisal.
The 15 acres has some longstanding historical significance. According to Cobb property deed records, Felton McClure purchased the property in 1977 from Lannie Murdock, the daughter-in-law of Bill Murdock, who once had more than 200 acres of farm land in the area that now includes Walton, Dodgen Middle School and surrounding subdivisions.
The Walton campus is situated on nearly 46 acres on Bill Murdock Road at Pine Road, and has been undergoing a major transformation. In addition to the new classroom building, the school recently christened a new theatre and gymnasium complex where the original classroom building stood.
Private funds are being raised for a new athletic fieldhouse.
Walton softball and the boys and girls tennis teams have been playing their home competitions since 2015 at Terrell Mill Park.
The district potentially faced some issues with Title IX—a federal sex discrimination law in education—with the softball field off campus, since the baseball field was relocated to another part of the Walton campus.
Davis said there’s not a particular timeline for now on when the softball and tennis facilities would reopen near campus.
“We’re purchasing a lot of land,” she said. “These were facilities that were on campus that had to be moved. And now we’re bringing them back.”
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