The final agenda item at the Feb. 23 meeting of the Fayette County Commission deals with relocating a county water line on Ga. Highway 54 for the widening by the Ga. Department of Transportation (DOT) of Hwy. 54 from McDonough Road to Tara Boulevard in Clayton County. But there will be more to the presentation dealing with a planned DOT widening of McDonough Road.
The utility relocation portion of the agenda item deals with moving a county water line which is situated in the DOT right-of-way and will have to be relocated for the road to be four-laned from McDonough Road and into Clayton County.
Hwy. 54 is currently a four-lane road from east Fayetteville across the county to the Coweta County line in Peachtree City, one that will be the subject of a resurfacing project in the coming months.
A separate DOT project, the widening of McDonough Road to Tara Boulevard, previously came with county staff awaiting DOT’s response to county questions about mitigation and project impact issues. The project has been on hold due to DOT changing consultants, county staff said.
The agenda item will also include information provided by Fayette Commissioner Steve Brown, who will show documents from a 2007 Atlanta Regional Commission report outlining a Regional Strategic Transportation System that would establish a Metro Arterial Connector system around metro Atlanta.
The widening of McDonough Road, temporarily to be called Ga. Highway 920, is part of the connector network envisioned by ARC. While the other roadways around metro Atlanta are identified, only the roadway in central and north Fayette and south Fulton County were listed, in 2007, to be determined.
Brown in the presentation will provide a July 2013 letter from Fayette County Public Works noting 14 concerns about the Hwy. 920 widening.
Maintaining that the project’s purpose is to increase vehicular capacity in Clayton and Fayette, Brown questions the effect of having increased traffic through Fayetteville and north Fayette by having that roadway serve as the local leg and Metro Arterial Connector for the Regional Strategic Transportation System.
