County’s transportation plan will help Fayetteville, mayor says

By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com

The projects in Fayette County’s latest transportation plan will help Fayetteville residents by diverting commuters around the city during a.m. and p.m. drive time, according to Fayetteville Mayor Ken Steele.

The plan, which will be administered by the county, has Steele’s seal of approval. The support of the cities for the county’s plan is important, he says, to “present a united front” with regional transportation officials who hold the purse strings.

“That’s where the money comes in,” Steele said, noting that projects put on the Regional Transportation Plan usually have engineering and land acquisition performed in the first year of the cycle, followed by construction in the following two years.

The county can afford to turn it’s attention elsewhere now that Peachtree City is about to have Ga. Highway 54 West widened and the TDK Boulevard extension built to Coweta County also, Steele said. The plan to widen Ga. Highway 74 South is also in the plans for state funding and is therefore out of the equation, Steele said.

Any transportation project in the county benefits everyone, Steele noted.

“For example, I have friends I visit in Peachtree City or I may go to a church function on the south end of the county,” Steele said.

The county’s plan calls for a East Fayetteville bypass and a West Fayetteville bypass which would actually be located in the county’s jurisdiction, Steele noted. The city gets clogged with drive-time commuters who come from east Coweta County, Senoia, Meriwether County, Spalding County and parts of Clayton County, Steele said.

While the bypass roads would help ease commuters around the city, “We still want folks to come here and do their shopping and visit their doctor,” Steele added.

The catch will be finding the local funds for the projects in the county’s plan, some of which will need at least a 20-percent match, Steele said. There has been talk already of a one-cent Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax to fund the projects, but there’s no concrete indication that will be the money source.

“We cannot build these roads on the back of property owners so a different funding mechanism needs to be found,” Steele said, adding that he was not opposed to voters having a say in the matter, which would be a certainty if officials chose to go the SPLOST route. “... I’m not saying I’m for it or again’ it.”

It would be ideal if state officials could figure out a way to evenly distribute transportation funds to counties based on their population, Steele suggested.

But the way the transportation funding process happens now, “there are no easy answers and no quick answers,” Steele said.