The Government Finance Officers Association publishes best practices for how local governments should manage economic development, TIF districts (Tax Increment Financing — known in Georgia as TADs), public-private partnerships (P3s), and capital planning. This page applies six of those standards to the documented record in Avondale Estates.
GFOA is the professional association for government finance officers in the United States and Canada. Its best practices represent peer-reviewed standards developed through decades of consulting with local governments. They carry no legal force — but they define what professional governance looks like. All six standards cited here are publicly available at gfoa.org.
The city's general fund reserve meets the GFOA minimum — the one area where standard practice governs the elected government's own finances. The five standards covering economic development, public-private partnerships, TIF management, and capital coordination are not met, or only partially. None of this requires bad intent. It requires only the absence of the institutional structure that would catch these gaps.
| Verdict | Standard | What the Record Shows |
|---|---|---|
| Does Not Conform | Capital Coordination | City borrowed $8.59M for the Town Green while the DDA independently held $6–7M in Georgia Fund 1 (a state-managed investment pool) plus growing Notes Receivable. No joint analysis of whether the city should borrow versus the DDA deploying its existing balance was ever made public. |
| Does Not Conform | Incentive Evaluation | The Dale loan was approved with no public cost/benefit analysis, no competitive developer selection, a below-market 3% interest rate, and a structure where the developer bears no downside risk. |
| Does Not Conform | TIF / TAD Evaluation | The TAD has never been formally evaluated for continuation in 17 years. The commercial share of the tax digest has been flat at 21% since 2019. TAD district expenditures in 2024: $0. |
| Conforms | Fund Reserve Policy | The city's general fund meets the GFOA two-month minimum. The DDA holds no equivalent reserve policy and carries a $10.96M fund balance far exceeding any defensible operating need. |
| Does Not Conform | P3 Due Diligence | No feasibility study for The Dale. No competitive developer selection. Building pad conveyed for $100K with no independent appraisal on record. Loan terms not disclosed before approval. |
| Partial | Public Engagement | The Town Green design process met the standard with extensive public input. The Dale loan terms and Avila development agreement were not publicly disclosed before approval or remain undisclosed. |
Taken together, the pattern across these five failures is not coincidental. It reflects a structural feature of how Georgia's Downtown Development Authorities Law works. The statute places significant public funds outside the city's capital planning process by design. It requires that four of seven DDA directors have a direct economic interest in the downtown — a structural conflict that GFOA's standards would require to be managed with independent analysis and competitive processes. It does not require the professional infrastructure — independent appraisers, fiduciary financial advisors, structured review protocols — that comparable private transactions would deploy automatically.
The result is predictable. Public bodies operating without professional governance standards produce outcomes that diverge from those standards. The DDA's $10.96 million fund balance was accumulated while the city borrowed for infrastructure the DDA was positioned to help fund. A $4.175 million public loan was extended to a preferred developer with no competitive process. A tax district that has not produced its stated outcome in seventeen years has never been formally evaluated for continuation. None of these outcomes required anyone to act in bad faith. They required only the absence of the institutional structure that would have caught them.
The reforms that would address these gaps are described in the Reform Framework. The underlying transactions — with full primary source documentation — are in the Case Studies and Fiscal Analysis sections.
GFOA sources: Coordinating Economic Development and Capital Planning · Establishing an Economic Development Incentive Policy · TIF Evaluation · Fund Balance Guidelines · Public-Private Partnership Due Diligence · Public Engagement in Economic Development
Local record sources: All findings are sourced from primary government records documented in the Fiscal Analysis and Case Studies sections of this site.