I have lived throughout the country. Moving throughout my childhood as my father climbed the corporate ladder gave me the opportunity to experience life in many different types of communities.

Before living in PTC I lived in a planned community developed by Irvine Company in California that I have to say was not as nice as Peachtree City has turned out.

When my father was transferred to Atlanta, he came across Peachtree City, another planned community, when hunting for housing. My father convinced me to get my money out of the volatile California market of the ’80s and invest in a home here where I could raise my two small daughters safely after a difficult divorce.

When I moved here the DOT was working on building Ga. Highway 74, taking it from downtown Tyrone through a more direct route to reach I-85. I am sure some of the original residents here had reservations about the impact of that road expansion on both Tyrone and Peachtree City at the time. But there was a different community spirit then.

There was a feeling of coming together and working toward a common goal and building a wonderful community that we could all be proud of. Many volunteered their time and expertise to make the plan a reality. These people were builders, owners of factories and small businesses and, yes, land developers.

They all worked hard, some for profit, some just for the sake of creating a wonderful community to raise their children in, and others to create a larger base in the surrounding community to bring to their struggling businesses.

This community had a soul and a sense of pride that you could feel from the moment you came here. I had my reservations when I moved here. It was small and at times very lonely for a young single mother in her mid-20s, but it was safe and it had potential. It was fun to watch it grow and develop into the wonderful place that it is today.

Despite its esthetic appeal, the community I lived in out in California never quite achieved this spirit, nor was it put together as well as this community has turned out.

I want to take a moment from my busy life and thank all the people who have worked so hard to make Peachtree City what it is today. Yes, I did say thank them from the bottom of my heart for creating a safe, beautiful, small-town community with all the conveniences of living in a larger city without the hassles and crime. I am proud to call this community home.

I realize that many of the men and women involved volunteered their time endlessly to committees, boards and councils doing whatever the community asked of them when they were asked to do it. They did this because they felt it was important to give back to their community in which they lived and that was supporting their businesses.

I don’t resent the profits that the builders and developers made, for, without them and their businesses, your neighborhoods, schools, recreation centers, amphitheaters, stores and businesses wouldn’t exist. Peachtree City wouldn’t exist.

We all must have liked something about it when we moved here or we wouldn’t have bought a home here. Every hour given by the individuals who worked to make this town what we all enjoy today deserve our appreciation and thanks, not our criticism and hostility.

Some people who have moved here late in the game seem to think that they should be the last person allowed in and they want to slam the door shut. However with out progress we either stagnate or regress. Our businesses will suffer or the business we work for will suffer.

We can’t control the growth in the surrounding communities. The community slated to be built in Coweta County will go in whether the road extension at TDK is built or not. People in Fayette County don’t get to decide what people in Coweta County will put within their boundaries.

The people in Fayette County need to take a hard look at what will happen to the traffic counts on 34/54 and Hwy. 74 when that community is built if the TDK Extension isn’t put in.

Slamming the door shut to our community won’t help our business to thrive. Without thriving businesses, our community’s property values will decline along with our tax base. You know, the tax base that supports our schools, maintains our roads, and recreation centers and our way of life here.

Those of us who tremble at the thought of a new community bringing down home values need to realize that those of us who have been here while all of this development has gone on know that if it is handled with efficiency, progress doesn’t have to be painful.

Good examples of this type of growth would be The Avenue, Wal-Mart and Target shopping centers. The community worked together with developers to find solutions to concerns that each neighborhood had with regard to each of those developments. There are legitimate political and legal processes through which people can address these concerns without criticizing the hard-working people who have worked to build this community.

Although I did not agree with the position that my neighbors took against Target, they went through this process and won several legitimate concessions.

Looking at the proposed plan for the Coweta development, the developer seems to want to mirror PTC to at least some degree. Property values have not been hurt by our shopping developments and we certainly enjoy frequenting them.

Many people who live in Coweta County work in our community in the industrial areas that are hidden throughout it. Out of sight, out of mind? Those businesses need those employees to thrive and those businesses provide a large portion of your community’s tax base.

Do we want to experience the painful traffic jams that we went through when they were expanding 34/54 all over again? When the community is put in Coweta it will attract people who want to live closer to Peachtree City. These people who purchase homes in the Coweta community will need to get to the businesses that they work for.

For those employed in Peachtree City, wouldn’t it make more sense to bring them in directly through the industrial area rather than up our already crowded highways? There will of course be some who need a route to Atlanta living there, but don’t we all? It makes more sense to have three routes to choose from instead of two simply because it reduces the strain on all of them and helps to move traffic through our community more efficiently.

When we plan ahead we avoid bringing down our property values. That is the whole purpose behind being a planned community.

We shouldn’t attempt to stop growth but rather try to work out our concerns with developers in a constructive manner that doesn’t tear apart the soul and spirit of our community in the way that the offensive and highly accusatory letters that have blanketed our community newspapers with baseless innuendo for the past six years has. The accusations made in these letters are not concrete fact but rather assumptions. We all know what assuming does.

Unfortunately, a lot of people believe what they read whether it is fact or fiction. Right or wrong, perception is everything. The piles of baseless accusations that have been hurled at the people who worked so hard to build our town have all but destroyed the true spirit of community that we all have enjoyed in Peachtree City.

Unfortunately a few individuals have made us look like a Peyton Place that can’t govern ourselves in a constructive and cooperative manner. I would like to see less of the back-stabbing rhetoric and mudslinging and more constructive solutions to legitimate concerns from our citizens so that we can grow with our surrounding communities with the same cooperative spirit that built our community.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this. I realize that I may have gotten on my soap box, but I feel that as a community, we need to appreciate what those who came before us sacrificed and accomplished so that we could enjoy the fruits of their labor and dreams. Thanks again to all of those people who worked so hard for the rest of us. Without you we wouldn’t have the lifestyle we enjoy and the property values we have today.

Name withheld