Death and taxes may be two certainties in life, but they are not the only ones. When it comes to areas like metro Atlanta, another certainty is traffic. Southwest metro Atlanta is no exception, nor are the rapidly growing problems with the interchange at I-85 and Ga. Highway 74. Attempting to address those complex issues, the Fairburn City Council voted unanimously Dec. 10 to allocate up to one-quarter of the funds needed to finance a Georgia Dept. of Transportation (GDOT) Interchange Modification Report in conjunction with other area stakeholders.

The council agreed to contribute up to $25,000 of the approximately $100,000 likely needed to fund the study. The vote was contingent on the other jurisdictions in the Tri-County Alliance and South Fulton Community Improvement District (SFCID) providing contributions. SFCID has already agreed to match Fairburn’s contribution and will take the lead in securing financial commitments from Tri-County Alliance members.

The study would use traffic counts to identify the various directions of vehicular traffic flow in the immediate area of the interchange, Fairburn city engineer Troy Besseche said, and would make use of several other studies recently completed, such as the Southern Regional Accessibility Study and the Atlanta Regional Truck Movement Study.

“The project will need all of the political and technical momentum that we can achieve in order to get through the bureaucratic labyrinth at GDOT and at the Federal Highway Administration,” Besseche said in a Nov. 29 memo. “Therefore, a broad-based support for the project is vital to the success in the early stages. The Interchange Modification Report will be the first leg in the long process of completing these long overdue improvements. While a 10-15 year schedule is still ambitious, the time to start the process is now.”

Stakeholders needed to revamp the interchange include SFCID and its corporate partners and Tri-County Alliance city and county members ranging from Senoia and Coweta County, to Tyrone and Peachtree City, to Fairburn, Union City and Fulton County.