Wednesday, January 14, 2004
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004 |
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New look for PTC's west side is near J. FRANK LYNCH If Peachtree City’s chief planner has his way, in 20 years much of the city will look like the Ga. Highway 54 West corridor from Ga. Highway 74 to the Coweta County line. Of course, if David Rast has his way, in 20 years that 1-mile stretch of highway won’t look anything like it does today. Instead, the highway will have been transformed into a four-lane, landscaped boulevard, serving as the main gateway into the city from Coweta County and points west. At night, dramatic lighting effects designed by Peachtree City-based Cooper Lighting will ignite the sky and illuminate a cable-supported cart path bridge stretching across the highway like Peachtree City’s own “Golden Gate,” connecting meandering pedestrian paths that will wind along both sides of the highway. Motorists looking for Home Depot or the Peachtree City Tennis Center or one of a number of new upscale shops and restaurants in the village-type commercial buildings planned for the area will know where to turn, thanks to “monuments” placed at just three intersections allowed along the stretch of highway. Rast, who has spent two years working on the Westside Overlay District design guidelines with a citizen’s advisory panel, believes the end result along Hwy. 54 will be so positive, the community will want to apply the same attention to detail to redevelopment efforts throughout the community as Peachtree City ages. A final look at the working proposal will be offered in a public hearing on Thursday at 6 p.m. at City Hall. The City Council is scheduled to take up formal adoption of the guidelines later Thursday in the regular business meeting, starting at 7 p.m. The Westside development plan, sometimes referred to as the “Gateway Project” or the “Westside LCI” project, was really made possible by support from the Atlanta Regional Commission, said Rast. The ARC awarded the city more than $1 million in various grants over the past two years to conceive the plan, including a controversial $480,000 offer to build the bridge across Hwy. 54 near Wynnmeade that was quickly dubbed “the bridge to nowhere” by opponents. Rast said a team from the ARC will be at Thursday’s public hearing to share their vision for LCI, or Livable Cities Initiative, a unique campaign to apply new, creative uses to old, ugly urban spaces throughout metro Atlanta. The city’s planning commission gave its endorsement to the plan in November, after members expressed some concerns about whether the proposal was a little too heavy-handed. The beauty of the project, Rast has said, lies in the fact that legally there is little the city can do to compel existing property owners to comply with the design controls, but most seem excited about the potential to improve their investments. “We’re letting people know about it and finding out that there is very little opposition out there to this,” he said, acknowledging that property owners aren’t being forced into redevelopment right away. Instead, the entire project, if completed as perceived by Rast and the ARC, will be a “work in progress” for several years to come.
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