AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) – Augusta Commission members on Tuesday signed a letter of support for keeping the James Brown name on the new arena when it’s built.

The old James Brown Arena was torn down, and a new arena is being built with sales tax revenues.

All along, people made the assumption that the new building would be a new James Brown Arena.

And no one stepped forward to say otherwise.

That is, until the Augusta-Richmond County Coliseum Authority recently dropped the bombshell that the plan is to sell off the naming rights.

That led to an uproar on the Augusta Commission and elsewhere.

We’ve also heard from the estate of James Brown, with family members saying the Godfather of Soul gifted the rights to his name to Augusta.

In a letter addressed to the head of the Coliseum Authority, commissioners express dismay at learning they and voters have been misled about the arena’s name.

The letter questions whether the naming rights for the arena need to be sold to cover costs – or for another, unknown reason.

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At the end, commissioners request that representatives from the authority speak in front of commission explaining their reasoning and plans to honor James Brown.

The authority claimed it has always intended to sell off the naming rights – despite early drawings of the new building that featured the name of the Godfather of Soul as well as a URL on an authority’s website referring to it as the new James Brown Arena.

Authority officials said the rights to James Brown’s name had been sold by the family to an outside company, so the authority couldn’t use that name if it wanted to, officials said.

That company quickly came back and said Brown had gifted his name to the arena free of charge, and the company intended to honor that. The company went so far as to say it was “appalled” the authority would give up the honor just to make some money by selling off the naming rights.

The name on the renderings subtly changed to “Augusta Entertainment Complex” sometime between a failed 2021 vote on a tax plan to fund the arena and a second vote that passed in 2024.

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