- Alpharetta City Council voted 4-3 to rezone North Point Mall for a 20,000-seat NHL arena
- An NHL team has to commit to the site by August 2031 or the project dies
- Read below for what the council said and how Forsyth County fits in
The NHL’s road back to Atlanta cleared a real hurdle this week.
Alpharetta City Council voted 4-3 early Tuesday to rezone the 99-acre North Point Mall site for a mixed-use district built around a 20,000-seat arena. The meeting ran more than six hours and the gavel came down just after 1 a.m.
Jamestown is the developer, and most of the mall comes down. The plans call for a 4,000-seat music and performing arts venue, a community ice center that would double as an NHL practice facility, two hotels, offices, shops, restaurants, 1,385 rental units and 26 acres of parks and trails.
City officials keep comparing it to The Battery Atlanta, the district wrapped around the Braves at Truist Park.
Mayor Jim Gilvin cast the deciding vote, and he spent the night pushing to be sure the thing would actually get built:
“If, by God, when we walk out of here, I want to be confident that what we’ve agreed and what we’ve approved is going to happen. It’s not a dream.”
There is a catch, and it is a large one. An NHL team has to commit to the site by August 2031, or the project does not move forward.
Councilman John Hipes gave his final thoughts before voting yes and pointed straight at the size of the market, per The Hockey Writers, which had a writer in the room:
“I absolutely believe the NHL is coming to Atlanta. I absolutely believe it’s coming to either here or Forsyth County. We’re the seventh-largest TV market in the country. Houston’s the sixth largest. They’ve signaled that they’re going to expand.”
Here is where the paperwork goes next:
Zoning was the hard part. The design review board comes next, which is a much quieter room than a council chamber holding 100 people at midnight.
Not everyone bought the timeline. Councilman Douglas DeRito voted no and said the five-year window looked thin to him:
“We could be looking at six to 10 years down the road before we can put a shovel in the ground.”
Competition is close by, too. The Gathering at South Forsyth sits about seven miles up the road, where Vernon Krause’s group wants its own district anchored by an arena of more than 18,000 seats. Two north metro projects, one hypothetical team.
Atlanta has been without a team since the Thrashers left for Winnipeg in 2011. Gary Bettman and Bill Daly have spent the summer talking up a 34th franchise, and we laid out where Phoenix and Atlanta stand in that race. The mall site now has a deadline. The league does not.
