The Augusta Coliseum Authority celebrated the groundbreaking of the Bell Auditorium on Thursday morning. The Authority joined the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce at the worksite on Telfair Street to commemorate the Bell’s expansion, as the venue is slated to undergo renovations for a year.
“You all have always supported the dream of a new arena, and we wouldn’t be where we are today,” said Coliseum Authority Chairman Cedric Johnson, lauding several guests including Augusta Commissioners Brandon Garrett, Alvin Mason and Catherine Smith-McKnight, and Mayor Garnett Johnson.
A new grand lobby — a kind of private event space — is among the renovations slated for the project, alongside additional restrooms and a concourse connecting the building to the James Brown Arena.
The launching of the Bell’s restoration comes on the heels of the Coliseum Special-Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (C-SPLOST) having passed in the Georgia House last month. The referendum, slated for the ballot in November, would determine whether the city would impose a .5% sales tax to fund redevelopment of the arena.
Chairman Johnson calls the groundbreaking a “dream come true” for him and vice chairman Brad Usry, and said that they have been seeking to update or replace the venue for nearly as long as they have both been in the Coliseum Authority.
“We realized that… the James Brown Arena had outlived its useful life,” he said, noting several repair issues. “We said, ‘We’ve got to do something.’ So we actually started, then, looking and trying to find different ways that we could have a new facility.”
That journey has been long and winding, from the Augusta Commission voting down a proposed new version of the arena at the Regency Mall site in 2017, to Augusta voters rejecting a SPLOST raising property taxes to fund its reconstruction in 2021.
If the C-SPLOST wins the vote in November, the Coliseum looks forward to a revamped James Brown Arena with 10,000 seats, premium boxes, a three-acre park and, ultimately, a merging with the Bell Auditorium into the Augusta Entertainment Complex — an effort estimated to cost more than $250 million, that Usry calls “the biggest project in the history of Augusta.”
“We’re going to push hard to get that arena built,” said Usry, who also underscored that 91% of the costs of the roughly $20 million Bell renovation would remain in Augusta, as local companies McKnight Construction and J & B Construction are partnering to work the project. “It’s exciting to get started, but it will also show the community how we can be good stewards of the money.”
Provided voters favor the C-SPLOST, the Coliseum Authority aims to start reconstruction of the James Brown Arena in the first quarter of 2024. The Bell Auditorium renovations are expected to be complete by July of 2024, Johnson said.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
