The Town Center CID (TCCID) Board of Directors met on May 21, appointed two new board members, and elected four officers.

In this article, you will learn the following:

1. Who are the elected officers?
2. Who are the two new board members?
3. What is the Town Center CID?
4. What are CIDs?

The election of officers

Jo Ann Chitty was elected chair; Britt Fleck, vice-chair; Darin Mitchell, treasurer; and Tracy Styf, secretary (ex-officio). Styf also serves as Executive Director of the TCCID.

Chitty is the chief operating officer at Selig Enterprises. She joined the TCCID board in 2016.

According to the press release for the elections:

She also has served as chair of the Kennesaw State University Foundation and is a past president of the University of Georgia Real Estate Foundation. In addition, she is an advisor for Signature Leaders.

Fleck, who will serve as vice-chair, has been on the Town Center CID board since 2018. 

She is the regional director of the metro west region of Georgia Power. In her role, Fleck leads operations, customer service and sales for five counties and approximately 175,000 customers, according to the TCCID press release.

Mitchell is an executive director of middle market banking at JP Morgan Chase. He has served on the board of Town Center CID since 2014. 

According to the press release:

He is also an active board member of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Atlanta and a graduate of Leadership Cobb and 100 Black Men of Atlanta.

“I am honored to continue leading the Town Center CID board, working closely with my colleagues to propel the district forward in a new strategic direction,” said Chitty. “I am excited to welcome our two new members whose fresh perspectives and expertise will undoubtedly enrich our collective efforts.”

The two new TCCID board members

The newly appointed board members are Michael Davis, Post 4, and Nick Porter, Post 2. Both will serve three-year terms.

The press release describes the new board members as follows:

Davis is the co-founder of D&G Development Group. Prior to launching D&G, he held senior management positions at North American Properties, where he helped lead the development of Avalon, a $1 billion mixed-use project in Alpharetta, GA and at Cousins Properties, where he was responsible for the construction of their Avenue retail products.  

Porter is the president of Vanderlande Inc. in North America, a position he has held for the last eight years.  Vanderlande, a Dutch company with global reach, specializes in the design, supply, maintenance and operation of materials handling systems for the airport, parcel, and retail industries. With 40 years of experience in engineering and automation, he joined Vanderlande in 2006, leading the UK business for 10 years before moving to Marietta in 2016.

About the Town Center Community

The Town Center Community includes the Town Center Community Improvement District and the Town Center Community Alliance.

The Town Center Community Improvement District is a self-taxing district with over 275 commercial property owners as of its 2020 annual report. It is the second-largest CID in Cobb, after the Cumberland Community Improvement District.

The district is centered around the commercial and residential communities surrounding the Town Center at Cobb mall and includes Kennesaw State University and Aviation Park.

Its projects include the multi-phase South Barrett Reliever, and corridor studies for Chastain Road and Bells Ferry Road.

Town Center Community Improvement District recently celebrated its 25th year birthday. 

The “placemaking” partner of the TCCID is the Town Center Community Alliance, a 501(c)(3) that is focused on “bringing quality-of-life improvements and programs to the Town Center Community.”  TCCID is able to solicit donations and grants for its programs.

About Georgia’s Community Improvement Districts

Community Improvement Districts are districts in which the local businesses self-tax to support infrastructure projects that could not be otherwise achieved with government funds or grants.

Most of the projects by CIDs are transportation-related and include building roads and bridges, pedestrian features such as sidewalks, traffic signalization, and paths.

The Federal Highway Administration describes the origins of Georgia’s Community Improvement Districts as follows:

In 1982, a local developer and prominent property owner, John Williams, began looking for an answer. He collaborated with State Rep. Joe Mack Wilson, a native of Cobb County who helped champion the Downtown Marietta Development Authority. They modeled their solution, Community Improvement Districts (CIDs), on Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in Virginia and development authorities in Georgia. CIDs are special purpose, autonomous, nonprofit, public-private partnerships with the power to self-tax industrial and commercial property owners within their districts and pool those funds for public improvement projects.

Williams and Wilson galvanized local business owners around their solution and, in 1984, CIDs were submitted as a Georgia constitutional amendment. The following year, the creation of CIDs was incorporated into the Georgia Constitution.

The first CID in the state was the Cumberland Community Improvement District (CCID), formed in 1988 after the state passed the enabling legislation.

Georgia now has more than 25 CIDs, most in or close to metro Atlanta.

To learn more about Georgia’s CIDs, download this PDF from the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Innovative Program Delivery.