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Deny The Pitch
- 2 days ago
- 13 min read
A stadium the city can't park, next to a cemetery nobody fully surveyed, on a road that already doesn't work
The developer's letter to the Woodstock City Council says the city will get a professional soccer team and a stadium "while providing no public money."
Here's what the same agenda packet says.
The stadium land will be deeded to the Woodstock Downtown Development Authority at no cost, a donation the parties value at $3.0 million (packet page 70). The DDA will then lease it to the soccer club. The section of the agreement titled "Additional DDA Commitments" is blank (page 71). "Additional DDA incentives or commitments" is listed as an open item still to be negotiated (page 74).
And the parking arrangement that this entire project depends on moves money to a church. Under the draft Memorandum of Understanding between Woodstock City Church and the DDA (pages 63 through 67, financial terms on page 64):
The developer pays the Church a one time payment of $75,000 toward paving its parking lot.
The DDA pays the Church a $250 use fee every single time the lot is used for an event, and the DDA's obligation to pay is expressly not contingent on being reimbursed by the soccer club. If the club doesn't pay, the public authority does.
The developer designs, permits, and installs a new traffic signal at the Church's own entrance on Ridgewalk Parkway at its sole cost, coordinated so that the Church can use and control that signal to manage its Sunday morning traffic.
The term is ten years, with an automatic ten year renewal.
The soccer club is separately required to host a minimum of thirty ticketed matches every year.
A private institution gets a paved lot, a per use revenue stream, and a traffic signal it controls. The public gets the traffic.
We read all 105 pages. You can too. Monday's full agenda packet, along with every past agenda, packet, and meeting video, is posted here:
We -- and pretty much everyone we've talked to who lives in Woodstock -- opposes Z#167-26 and CUP#094-26. We're asking the Woodstock City Council to deny this application on Monday, August 10.
This is what a church being in bed with city hall looks like
This might make you uncomfortable. You might go to this giant megachurch and not want to admit there is sketchiness happening in the Lord's name with your tax dollars and your already overcrowded roads. Well, grab your whip and get ready to flip some tables, because here's the sequence with the dates attached.
January 31, 2025. Mayor Michael Caldwell delivers his State of the City address at Woodstock City Church, 150 Ridgewalk Parkway. The city's own newsroom describes a sold out crowd.
In that same release, the mayor notes the event took place in the room that serves as his family's voting precinct. Hold onto that one. The sanctuary is a polling place. A room where residents of this city cast ballots is also a room the city charges admission to enter, on property that is about to start collecting money from a rezoning the mayor supports.
January 30, 2026. He does it again. Same venue.
The registration page for that 2026 event lists the organizer as the Mayor at City of Woodstock, GA, gives the venue as Woodstock City Church at 150 Ridgewalk Pkwy, directs all questions to a city staff member at a woodstockga.gov address, shows early registration sold out, and prices walk up admission at the door at $15.
Read that again. The annual public report on the condition of your city, organized by city employees on city time, held on private church property, and you pay fifteen dollars at the door to hear it. ( Oh yeah, and they chased protestors away too, since it is "private property." If you can't use your first amendment rights, it's not a public event. Read more here.)
April 27, 2026. Al Scott, executive pastor of Woodstock City Church, speaks in favor of The Pitch at the City Council hearing.
July 2026. The draft parking MOU surfaces in the agenda packet. Woodstock City Church receives a $75,000 payment from the developer, a $250 fee every single time its lot is used for an event, for a term of ten years that renews automatically to twenty, and a new traffic signal at its own entrance, installed at the developer's sole cost and coordinated so the Church can use and control it for Sunday morning traffic. The soccer club must hold at least thirty ticketed matches a year. The Downtown Development Authority, a public body, is contractually obligated to pay the Church whether or not the club ever reimburses a dime of it.
Same address. 150 Ridgewalk Parkway. The building where the mayor gives his speech is the building that gets paid.
And it isn't the only church in this deal. Exhibit C of the packet is a letter from First Baptist Church Woodstock thanking the developer for proposing to donate a portion of the project site directly adjacent to Enon Cemetery. First Baptist owns that cemetery. So the developer is handing land to one church while cutting a twenty year payment arrangement with another, and the objection that might have stopped this project on burial grounds now runs through an institution that has been offered a parcel by the applicant.
None of these facts are hidden. They are on the city's website, on the city's own event registration page, in the Cherokee Tribune's coverage of the April hearing, and on pages 63 through 67 of the packet the council is voting from Monday night. We're simply the first people to put them next to each other.
We don't need to allege a conspiracy and we're not going to. We're describing an arrangement. A private religious institution has become the venue for civic life in this city, and now it stands to be paid, for two decades, out of a deal that dumps thirty nights of stadium traffic a year onto the road the rest of us drive.
If any other private landowner in Woodstock had hosted the mayor's speech two years running, housed a voting precinct, and then turned up in the packet with a $75,000 check and a private traffic light, this city would have a conflict of interest discussion on its hands. Being a church doesn't change the math. It just makes people reluctant to say it out loud.
We're saying it out loud.
Why deny instead of adding conditions
Because nothing about this application is finished, and a rezoning vote is the last moment the city has any leverage.
The parking solution is a draft its own lawyers haven't finished. The MOU has a blank effective date and no signatures. Section 11(a) still contains a bracketed instruction reading, in substance, confirm with counsel whether the parties intend this MOU to be legally binding in whole or in part. The traffic answer for a 2,500 seat venue is a document whose drafters haven't decided whether it's a contract.
The pedestrian crossing is deferred until after approval. In April the council tabled this case specifically to get answers on traffic, pedestrian safety, and ADA accessibility. Condition of Zoning #13 pushes the plan for pedestrian access across Ridgewalk Parkway, and the executed parking agreement, to Site Plan submittal. That happens after the zoning is locked in. The council asked a question and the answer is a promise to answer later.
The site doesn't park the stadium at all. The applicant's own site data shows two separate parking counts: 278 spaces provided for the 185 apartments, and 134 spaces provided for the commercial buildings. That is 412 spaces, every one of them already spoken for by residents, restaurant patrons, retail customers, and office tenants. Not one space on this site is allocated to the stadium. A venue built out to 2,500 seats, hosting a minimum of thirty ticketed matches a year, is parked entirely on somebody else's lot across a five lane parkway. That isn't a detail. That's the design.
The cemetery study was scoped to the fence line, not to the property. Enon Cemetery holds over 1,000 burials and its history isn't in dispute. It was founded in 1837 as the churchyard of Enon Church, which moved into downtown Woodstock in 1879 when the railroad arrived and was renamed Woodstock Baptist Church in 1884. Today it's First Baptist Church Woodstock, and First Baptist still owns the cemetery.
Woodstock's own town historian, Juanita Hughes, wrote about Enon in the Cherokee Tribune. Only 26 markers carry death dates from before the 1879 move. The earliest marked burial is an 1845 death. And she states directly that many of the graves there are unmarked.
That's the town historian, not an activist, saying the number of unmarked graves at this site is unknown.
Now here's what the developer had done about it. On November 20, 2025, an archaeologist he retained delineated the northwest, west, and southwest boundaries the cemetery shares with the tract. The method was a four foot tile probe inserted at one to six foot intervals, plus surface inspection, within roughly 20 to 30 feet beyond the existing fence.
We'll tell you what he found, because we'd rather you trust us than agree with us. He found no graves in that corridor. Graves abut the fence in places but none appeared to cross into the tract, and his conclusion was that additional graves beyond the shared boundary are unlikely. He also wrote that small graves, or graves in heavily disturbed areas, can go undetected.
The problem isn't his work. It's the question he was hired to answer. That study asked whether the cemetery's graves cross the fence. It was never scoped to ask whether unmarked burials exist anywhere else on the 12.81 acres. The report is titled "Partial Physical Boundary Delineation," and partial is the operative word. Nobody has surveyed this tract. A twenty foot probe corridor along one edge isn't a survey of a property where the town historian tells us the count of unmarked graves is unknown.
Ask for ground penetrating radar across the full parcel before any land disturbance permit issues. The only protection currently written into the zoning is Condition #16: if human remains are found during grading, work stops and the coroner is called. That's what you do after an excavator has already hit someone.
A resident has also entered a detailed argument into the record, printed in the packet at page 78, that nineteenth century burials of Black and Native residents at sites like this were relegated to unfenced outer ground in shrouds and pine boxes marked with fieldstones and plantings rather than stone. We haven't independently confirmed that specific claim about Enon. We note that it's precisely the kind of burial a boundary probe was never built to find.
Sewer capacity is unresolved. The developer's engineer wants the required capacity study narrowed to the segment between the site and the pump station. The city hasn't agreed. The city has no as built drawings or GIS data for 55 manholes on the route and no flow meter data at all. The meeting to resolve it has been requested and never scheduled (page 77).
Noise and lighting leave the council's hands entirely. Condition #10 states that hours of operation for events, including lighting and noise, will be addressed in the private lease between the DDA and its tenant. Not in the zoning conditions. Not in anything the public will ever vote on or read.
And the zoning can quietly evaporate. Condition #2 provides that if the Development Agreement is not executed within one year, all entitlements are void and the zoning reverts, with no notification and no council approval process required.
None of these are details to be cleaned up in the morning. They're the entire substance of the application, and they are all still open. A council that votes yes on Monday is approving a stadium district on the strength of a $3.0 million land transfer, an unsigned parking license, a blank commitments section, and a cemetery boundary that was checked to twenty feet.
What to do before Monday night
The vote is Monday, August 10, at 7:00 PM, at The Chambers at City Center, 8534 Main Street. The Pitch is Item 8, under Old Business.
1. Email the council today. This is the highest impact thing you can do.
The agenda packet was compiled Friday evening. It's closed. Comments sent to city staff now will go into the case file, which matters for the record, but they won't be in the printed book council members carry into the room. To reach them before the vote, write to them directly.
Contact information for the mayor and all six council members is here:
Write to your ward's member and to the full body. Short is fine. Short is better. Here's something you can copy, paste, and edit:
Subject: Please deny Z#167-26 and CUP#094-26, The Pitch Mayor Caldwell and Members of the Council, I am a resident of [YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD OR STREET] and I am asking you to vote no on The Pitch on August 10. This application isn't finished. The parking agreement in your packet is an unsigned draft that still contains a note asking counsel whether it is legally binding. The pedestrian crossing plan you asked for in April has been deferred to Site Plan submittal, which is after your vote. The sewer capacity study scope hasn't been agreed to and the city has no data for 55 manholes on the route. The section of the development agreement listing the DDA's commitments is blank. The cemetery study in your packet delineated only the fence line Enon Cemetery shares with this tract, out to roughly twenty to thirty feet. It was never scoped to survey the 12.81 acres themselves. Woodstock's own town historian has written that many graves at Enon are unmarked. Please require ground penetrating radar across the full parcel before any land disturbance permit, rather than a stop work order after remains are found during grading. I don't want the traffic on Ridgewalk Parkway, and I don't think the city should approve a 2,500 seat venue whose overflow parking plan depends on an agreement nobody has signed. Please vote no. [YOUR NAME] [YOUR ADDRESS]
2. Put it in the case file too
Email planning@woodstockga.gov with Z#167-26 and CUP#094-26 in the subject line. Comments to planning staff are saved to the case file and forwarded to the Planning Commission and City Council. It won't make Monday's printed packet, but it becomes part of the permanent record of this decision, and that record matters if this goes further.
3. Be in the room
Come at 7:00. Understand going in that you won't be able to speak about this item. Open public comment is for matters not on the agenda, and The Pitch is on the agenda. The public hearing on this case was held and closed on April 27, and there isn't another one.
Come anyway. A full room is read instantly by every elected official in that chamber and remembered at the next election. You don't need a microphone to be counted.
Yes, It's Exhausting. No, We're Not Leaving.
Y'all, this is exhausting.
It's exhausting to read 105 page packets on a Friday night because the agenda says 236 apartments when the ordinance says 185. To learn the item you thought was dead in April got quietly put back on a calendar in August. To find out on page 64 that the traffic plan is a draft with a question mark next to the dollar figure.
And we shouldn't have to. This city employs planners, engineers, and an attorney. Community Development has a whole department. Their job is to be the check on the applicant, long before anything reaches a vote. When unpaid residents reading a PDF at midnight are the ones who notice that the agenda says 236 and the ordinance says 185, that isn't a story about how dedicated we are. It's a story about who didn't do their job, on salary, with your money.
The exhausting part isn't losing. It's that the burden of proof got reversed. A project this unfinished should have to earn a yes. Instead it's the people who live here who have to earn the no. The people who pay the taxes, sit in the traffic, send kids to schools that are already full, and watch the trees we moved out of Atlanta to be near get bulldozed for another surface lot. We have to prove, over and over, on our own time, why this shouldn't happen. Meanwhile an applicant from out of town shakes the right hands, spends a year in meetings we were never invited to, and arrives with a staff recommendation already in hand.
And every time we say that, somebody shows up to tell us that if we don't like it here, we should leave.
Nobody spends a Friday night reading a rezoning packet about a place they don't love. You don't learn what a conditional use permit is out of spite. Caring enough to read the fine print is the opposite of not wanting to be here.
"Leave" isn't a rebuttal anyway. It's a concession. It says out loud that this city is being run for somebody other than the people in it, and that residents should get out of the way. We aren't accepting that, whatever you think about soccer.
The standard here isn't radical. A city government exists to serve the people who live in the city. Not the applicant. Not the applicant's attorney. Not the consultant hired to produce the traffic study. Asking for a burial ground to be surveyed before the excavators show up isn't obstruction. It's asking your government to do the one thing it exists to do.
And notice who actually gets told to leave around here. We just get told to shut up. Right now about 130 households at Ansley Park are being told to leave for real, so Weekley Homes can put 220 houses where their homes are. That's what "you should leave" sounds like with a bulldozer behind it.
We're staying. We're going to keep reading the packets. But we're not going to pretend it's fine.
The thing we actually need from you - well, that YOU and your neighbors need from you, too
Woodstock right now has active applications for this stadium district, a warehouse rezoning, four downtown residential projects, an annexation of 220 homes on Dupree Road, additional units at Holbrook, and the initial zoning of the entire Dixie Speedway property. That's one city, in one summer. Cherokee, Cobb, Bartow, Forsyth, and Pickens are all running their own calendars at the same time, alongside surveillance contracts and data center proposals.
We can't watch all of it. We're not going to pretend we can.
What works is a lot of people each watching one thing.
Adopt a meeting. Pick one body and read its agenda when it posts. Woodstock Planning Commission. Woodstock City Council. The Downtown Development Authority. The Cherokee County Board of Commissioners. Your own city's council. You don't need a law degree. You need to notice when something looks wrong.
Adopt a case. Pick one active application and follow it from the public input meeting to the final vote. Every one is posted here, with site plans and applicant statements:
Agendas, packets, minutes, and meeting video are here:
Watch for the word "tabled." This is the exact trap that caught The Pitch. A case tabled indefinitely drops off every schedule and can return on a routine agenda posting with nothing else. If a case you are following gets tabled, write down the case number and check the Active Projects page every few weeks. That page carried the August 10 date well before most of us saw it.
Then tell us. Reach us at https://www.ngacan.org or hello@woodstockcan.org and we will verify it against the primary documents and put it in front of everyone on this list. We aren't the ones who catch everything. We're the ones who can take what you caught and make the whole county see it.
Seven council members vote Monday night. Not a committee, not a study, not a process. Seven people, in a room on Main Street, deciding whether an unfinished application gets the last thing this city has left to give away.
They will all have to run again. They will all have to explain this one.
Write to them today.
Thank you for doing this. I just emailed the Mayor, City Council and the Planning Department. See you Monday Night.
Debbie Perdue
Former HOA president of Linton & Main, across from Starbucks on Main