Even in the creative political wordplay that abounds in the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” and “Cop City” protest controversies, it’s pretty special when the words “park reopening” don’t mean what you think they means.
DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond last month announced a $1.8 million “plan to reopen” Intrenchment Creek Park, which he ordered closed in March to evict “Defend the Atlanta Forest” protesters. Yet details are so mysterious a group of government officials and environmental activists are begging permission to walk through the park this weekend to assess its condition for themselves and press for an immediate reopening.
Dutifully parroted by major media despite lacking basic details, the reopening announcement was yet another sleight-of-hand political move in the shell game of government “Cop City” counterprotests. There is, in fact, no reopening plan for Intrenchment Creek Park per se. There is a two-year-old plan still in the design phase, which recently got that $1.8 million earmark, for a new Michelle Obama Park that includes part of Intrenchment Creek while cutting out another part in a controversial land swap with a private developer that is the subject of a pending lawsuit. Even that new park might never open with the amenities as currently conceived because the lawsuit could kill all or part of the swap deal, which itself is one target of the Defend the Atlanta Forest protests.
The current park, the one that really exists right now and did before all the swapping and protesting, remains closed with no reopening timeline in sight or express reason for it to stay shuttered. DeKalb District 6 Commissioner Ted Terry, who has led political efforts to reopen the park and is pressing for the weekend walk-through, says administration officials have said the protest security concerns cited by Thurmond in his original park-shuttering order have been resolved. “So it doesn’t make any sense for the park to be closed,” Terry told me last week.
Granted, the multiple overlapping land controversies in that area are complex and confusing, and there is plenty of public pressure to open at least some of the new Michelle Obama Park as well. The would-be new area is essentially a big cleared space along Bouldercrest Road and an adjacent spur of the South River Trail, following a stall triggered by the 2021 lawsuit challenging the County’s land swap with developer Ryan Millsap and occupation of the area by protesters focused on Atlanta’s public safety training center. District 3 Commissioner Larry Johnson pressed that point at a May 9 Board of Commissioners (BOC) meeting in a discussion about a stalled resolution from Terry about reopening Intrenchment Creek.
“I know it’s become part of the whole mix with the training [center] and Millsap, but we do have a part that we can get started on [and] that is hard because we’ve made all of these parts connected, and they really are all three separate entities,” said Johnson. He said “there is a part of the park that needs to be constructed” and could be sectioned off to do it.
However, that was not hashed out in the CEO’s “reopening” announcement. Instead, it was an old project spun as new and presented as applying solely to an existing park rather than a concept still being designed. The timing was handy, too, coming the day after the Atlanta City Council sparked protest movement backlash by approving larger-than-promised public funding for the training center, which would neighbor the current and future DeKalb parks.
Distracting executive fiats are a tactic we’ve seen before in Defend the Atlanta Forest controversy. When DeKalb approved an initial land-clearing permit for the training center in January, Thurmond and Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens tried to couch the enormously controversial decision by announcing a secretly written and signed agreement about design, environmental, and hiring standards that contained numerous errors and appeared largely unenforceable and subject to change.
In Atlanta, the training center has become, in part, a culture-shifting, symbolic battle over the way government operates: democratic populism or backroom deals between mayors and corporate leaders. When it takes two weeks of reporting to decipher a public park’s “reopening” status, it’s clear that DeKalb is ripe for a similar discussion about whether the role of local government is to herd and placate rather than inform and empower.
There are similarities in political tactics as well. The Dickens administration has attempted to soften the training center plan by blurring its input process with the conceptual – and partly competing – South River Forest green space vision. And a tactic of training center development is building as quickly as possible to render legal challenges moot. The announcement of Michelle Obama Park plans as an Intrenchment Creek reopening has a similar blurring. And speed also appears to be a factor in moving ahead on building them despite the pending legal challenge, where one argument is that current amenities must be replaced on the swap-gained property before they are removed.
Focus of controversies
Intrenchment Creek Park, located at Constitution Road and West Side Place/Bouldercrest Road, is part of a complex nexus of wooded sites and political controversies in Southwest DeKalb. The protest movement is heavily focused on what it calls “Cop City” — Atlanta’s controversial public safety training center pegged for a site on Key and Constitution roads that is owned by the City but outside its limits in unincorporated DeKalb.
The park is right next door to the east. In the 2020 land swap, Millsap gained 40 of its approximately 125 acres in exchange for adjacent land along Bouldercrest to the north. After public input, the County in 2021 announced a renaming of the park for former First Lady Michelle Obama and a master plan that included a new trail, trailhead, pavilion, playground accessible to children with disabilities, and some other amenities. Those new amenities are almost entirely on the new land gained in the swap, not in the unswapped portion of the existing park, which would remain wooded and wild. Millsap’s development plans remain unclear.
But that same year, members of the South River Watershed Alliance (SRWA) and the South River Forest Coalition (SRFC) sued Millsap and the County, alleging the land swap was illegal and void. The lawsuit is still pending, according to DeKalb County Superior Court records. Debate has continued over whether the swapped section is public or private land in the interim. A DeKalb County Superior Court judge last year declined to stop Millsap from bulldozing some amenities. The central, unswapped section surely is public, but it lacks obvious natural boundaries with the swapped section.
Meanwhile, protesters descended on the entire area to oppose both the training center and the land swap. Many of them camped in the woods on both the training center and park sites as a civil-disobedience tactic to prevent tree-cutting. The protesters dubbed the swapped section of Intrenchment Creek as the Weelaunee People’s Park and used it for concerts and other public events.
The park has been the site of some of the biggest controversies for both sides about intimidation, violence and destruction. A large, perpetual police presence around the park has been likened by activists to a police state, while some protesters barricaded park entrances and set up checkpoints for access. Some protesters tossed rocks or Molotov cocktails at or near construction workers and police officers and set up booby traps to disable vehicles and prevent tree-cutting. Hundreds of protesters in March left a concert at the park to conduct a mass vandalism assault on the training center, resulting in arrests on domestic terrorism charges of concertgoers who claimed they had nothing to do with the incident.
Most controversial of all was the Jan. 18 killing of protester Manuel Esteban Paez Teran – known as Tortuguita or Tort – by Georgia State Patrol troopers in an alleged shootout. Teran was camping in the park at the time.
All of that, along with training center site-clearing starting in earnest, was the backdrop for Thurmond’s March 24 executive order indefinitely closing the park and several other County-owned properties in the area. Thurmond’s announcement focused on a sweep to evict protesters and concern about “hidden traps or other devices designed to injure, maim, or cause the death of adults, children and pets on the property.”
The closure had other legal and political implications, especially regarding the killing of Teran. The armed raid that led to the incident happened in the park during opening hours, leading to questions about its legality and safety from local activists. Teran quickly became an international environmental protest martyr, and officials, in the wake of the park closure, allegedly destroyed a makeshift memorial on the shooting site that included the protester’s ashes.
Terry — who is also a party in a legal appeal of the training center permit — and local activists have pressed for the reopening of the park and questioned why it has remained closed for months after a police sweep. An online petition circulated by SRWA’s executive director garnered 888 signatures, while Terry’s reopening resolution has been kicked around BOC committees.
Reopening or opening?
Then came the June 6 press release in which Thurmond appeared to answer all the concerns by announcing “a $1.8 million plan to reopen Intrenchment Creek Park.”
“I know everyone is eager to get back to participating in recreational activities in the Intrenchment Creek Park, so we are thrilled to receive this funding to improve the quality of life for the citizens of DeKalb,” said DeKalb County Parks Director Chuck Ellis in the press release.
The rest of the announcement made little sense. It made no mention of resolving the protest safety issues allegedly behind the park closure nor the long-planned Michelle Obama Park. Instead, it mentioned the “construction of new amenities” that match those planned for the future park and gave the address as Bouldercrest Road, which is the access point for the swapped land, not the current Intrenchment Creek Park. And despite trumpeting a “reopening,” it gave no schedule for doing so beyond Thurmond claiming the County “will work to expedite construction.”
County spokesperson Quinn Hudson did not directly answer a question as to which park the press release meant, but his description of the project plainly applied to the future plans. He said the amenities are those presented to the public in the 2021 “master plan conceptual design” – the Michelle Obama Park vision, approved the same year as the park renaming – and described them as excluding the land swapped to Millsap, saying that “approximately one-half of the original trail is no longer on county parkland.”
The $1.8 million was part of a hotel-motel tax appropriation by the BOC to capital projects approved without discussion in a May 23 vote. Kelly Cato, Terry’s chief of staff, said that money was earmarked for an extension of the Michelle Obama trail and a trailhead, which are the origin of the park renaming.
While Thurmond spoke of an expedited process, Hudson said there is no timeline, as the project remains in design by WSP Global, Inc. in Tucker. “We will be able to update the timeline for completion when the design phase is finalized,” he said. “… It is too early to determine requests for proposals to install amenities until the design phase has been completed.”
Again, a major challenge to all of this is the pending lawsuit against the land swap. Another is an unusual amenity mentioned by the press release and Hudson: a new runway for remote-control airplanes. That is specifically intended as compensation for the Atlanta Radio Control Club, whose longtime use of a runway site in the swapped part of Intrenchment Creek is an underappreciated major sticking point to the deal and redevelopment. The club also had significant conflicts with protesters who destroyed some of its equipment.
While the County press release presented the “reopening” plan as new, the airplane club says it has heard nothing new about the runway replacement – and still wants to stay where it is on the swapped land.
“We heard the same, but those gears are turning slowly,” said club vice president Brad Gibson of the County’s runway plan, as mentioned in the press release. “We do expect to be included in the talks about rebuilding/reopening the park… There are no details as yet. We are going to ask to use the current space if possible.”
Mysterious amenities and courtroom disputes aside, none of this explains why the County cannot at least reopen the unswapped section of Intrenchment Creek. Hudson did not respond to a question about the reason for waiting indefinitely for construction, which would not affect most of the wooded park. Terry said administration officials in BOC committee meetings have said such dangers as booby traps have been cleared out, and safety is not a concern. He said they also indicated that work like trail construction could begin no sooner than early 2024 without explaining why that prevents park access in the interim or during work.
Terry says that if there’s a reason for the park to remain closed, it “at least should be open for naturalist walks and scheduled activities.”
In a new tactic in that vein, Terry, on July 13, sent Thurmond and other top administration officials a letter “humbly and formally requesting access” to lead a July 29 “guided naturalist walk through the park.” The tour group would include a naturalist from the organization EcoAddendum and representatives of such groups as the Sierra Club, the DeKalb County Soil & Water Conservation District, and the Muskogee Native American tribe. Another named participant is Amy Taylor, who is affiliated with the SWRA, is a member of a City advisory committee on the training center, and filer of an appeal against its land-disturbance permit. Another is Joe Peery, an SRFC member and recent reviver of Friends of Intrenchment Creek Park, who is also involved in the “Vote to Stop Cop City” signature-gathering. Some reporters would attend as well.
“This naturalist walk will include a forestry inventory and a stop at the over 200-year-old Champion Tree, known to many parkgoers as the Grandmother Tree,” wrote Terry. “This educational outing is of utmost importance to ensure forest health, allow Friends of ICP to survey the park before construction, take account of trash and the efforts needed for cleaning, and conduct a full inventory of damages to the park.”
As someone involved in the land-swap lawsuit, Peery says the Michelle Obama Park amenity construction is not the “reopening” he had in mind because “we don’t need that” if the court challenge is successful. Noting the large police presence, he said that there is “no shortage of security if that’s what their issue is.” The idea of the tour, he said, is to “get some people in the park” to assess its condition, including a claim that some of Millsap’s bulldozing of trees occupied by protesters was in the unswapped portion of the park.
Hudson did not respond to questions about the administration’s response to the tour request, and Terry’s chief of staff said on July 24 there had been no reply.
