Several weeks ago, I searched the county website looking for expenditures for the East and West Bypass projects. While doing this search, I came upon information that shows a road proposal between those two projects; I’ll call it the North Bypass.
A bit of history regarding the two main projects includes Open Records Act requests by me prior to construction of Phase II of the West Bypass. All of the above projects were laid out in the 2003 Fayette County Transportation Plan. But despite two searches by county staff, no files could be found.
My conclusion is that somewhere around the year 2000, perhaps a bit earlier, a grand plan was conceived to create a loop road to circle the city of Fayetteville.
This loop consists of 8 listed phases or segments plus 2 additional segments that I expect were or will eventually come about. Let me take you on a hypothetical road trip starting with the East Bypass and see if you agree.
• East Bypass; Phase I, McDonough Road to Highway 54. $28.5 million.
• East Bypass, Phase II, Hwy. 54 to Kenwood Road. $33.120 million.
• North Bypass, Segment I, East Bypass to New Hope Road. $6.488 million.
• North Bypass, Segment II, New Hope Road to Highway 92. $1.593 million.
• North Bypass, Segment III, Hwy. 92 (Lees Mill Road) to West Bypass. $1.653 million.
• West Bypass, Phase II, Hwy. 92 to Phase I. $10.542 million.
• West Bypass, Phase I, to Hwy. 54. $6.4 million.
• West Bypass, Phase III Hwy. 54 to Hwy. 85 at Harp Road. $38.6 million.
The above information comes from the county website and totals $126.896 million. Of this total, $16.942 million has been spent on Phase I and Phase II of the West Bypass. The remaining $110 million is to come.
Of that total, $61.620 million for the East Bypass exists as remainder of the 2004 Transportation SPLOST funds.
To complete the total loop road, two additional segments would be necessary; one from Harp Road at Hwy. 85 to Hwy. 92 near Goza Road and then an additional segment from that point to join the south end of the East Bypass including part of Inman Road. Based on costs for the North Bypass segments, I estimate that these two pieces would require an additional $25 million.
During the heated exchanges over the West Bypass, many of us asked, and later demanded to know where that “road to nowhere” was going. The real answer is in fact nowhere!
The idea is to make a circle around Fayetteville, so there never was a purpose other than to get on the circle and get off when and where you need to — very much like I-285. In fact, if you draw the above loop road on a county map, it looks very much like that infamous interstate.
Let me add that there is more, or at least I think there is. Fayette County now owns a 200-acre golf course; a new bridge has just been completed at Kenwood Road; part of the East Bypass will go right through an existing wetland mitigation bank, which means we will have to pay to mitigate for the mitigation, if that makes sense; and there are steep legal costs incurred by the county to condemn multiple properties from unwilling sellers along the West Bypass, and more may be spent for similar land grabs on all the other parts of the loop.
And most likely, there are many other expenses, especially road alignment studies and intersection improvements that are not included in the main list.
To summarize, $17 million has already been spent, $61 million more is in the pipeline, $49 million is in the plan and perhaps another $25 million will be needed in the future.
That is in the vicinity of $152 million taxpayer dollars and nobody told us it was in the plan.
Most likely, none of the current county commissioners is aware that they are participating in such a huge plan. The information in the current transportation plan is scattered, to make it difficult to connect the roads, I’m sure. And, of course, there is no clear outline of this road complex.
Dennis Chase
Fayetteville, Ga.
