The Fayetteville City Council is expected to approve an intergovernmental agreement with Fayette County Thursday night that will put in motion the $600,000 Lafayette Avenue Signal and Extension project at North Glynn Street funded by previously collected 1-cent sales tax revenues.
The project will have a traffic light installed at Lafayette Avenue at North Glynn Street, just north of Lanier Avenue. The project will extend Lafayette eastward across North Glynn to Church Street some 800 feet away. LaFayette is best known as the short street that runs in front of the old Fayette County High School, now known as Lafayette Education Center.
The council last month voted to transmit an intergovernmental agreement proposal for the project to the Fayette County Commission. The commission last week approved the measure.
Both the city and county responsibilities for the project will come from previously collected SPLOST revenues. The city’s portion of the project includes the costs for engineering, design, bid documents, traffic analysis and right-of-way acquisition totals and construction. The county’s portion of the project includes solicitation of bids, and construction management.
Fayetteville Director of Public Services Don Easterbrook said the project has a two-part timeline. He said it should take three to four months to complete the design work and get the project to bid. Once awarded, the actual construction time should require approximately three months, though that estimate did not necessarily include the time required to have the traffic signal installed.
Easterbrook said the Lafayette extension project does not include any widening on Church Street.
The Lafayette project is not the only transportation project designed to mitigate the increasing numbers of vehicles traveling each day through Fayetteville.
A second, more expansive, measure is the proposed Ga. Highway. 92/Hood Avenue/Jeff Davis Connector project. With funding also coming from previously collected 1-cent sales tax revenues, the project would link North Glynn Street area to Jeff Davis through a number of new and existing street segments and roundabouts.
Current plans west of North Glynn Street call for the moving the traffic signal from Hwy. 92 a short distance south to the intersection with Hood Avenue. West on Hood Avenue just a short distance from North Glynn would be the location of a roundabout that would funnel traffic northeast and northwest onto Hwy. 92.
Motorists at the new traffic signal at Hood Avenue would be able to continue east across the intersection on what is proposed to be an extension of Kathi Avenue that would, via another roundabout, link with North Jeff Davis to the east and with Church Street to the south.
Cost estimates for the project are not expected for another three months. The city will take up the issue once those costs are in.
