I found Terry D. Lawler’s Letter, ‘Commissioner Brown is running with scissors’ very interesting.
Mr. Lawler represents the Regional Business Coalition of Metro Atlanta. Automatic question is what is it? Answer is a coalition of 15 Chambers of Commerce.
For those who remember past letters of mine, I noted the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce was developing a marketing campaign for passing the TSPLOST before the first Roundtable Meeting ever occurred. So, yes, Mr. Lawler represents a special interest group.
Next obvious question to ask, is the Fayette Chamber of Commerce a member of the RBC? Yes, it is, but you will have to ask them what their official position is on the TSPLOST.
Finally, a question which I doubt will be answered. Who asked Mr. Lawler to respond, especially so quickly after Commissioner Brown responded to Ken Steele’s letter criticizing me?
He claims 92.27 percent “will be returned to Fayette County for highways and other non-transit uses within Fayette county.”
Well, right off the bat 7.73 percent has just been admitted to not being returned. The amount not returned is actually much higher. Plus there are a lot of projects Fayette simply does not want. Elections were lost in part because of those projects.
As for the 123.13 percent by including other projects, that is such a non-argument. Those projects are in other counties. I can hear them trying to sell those projects there by saying if you include the projects in Fayette County your getting a whopping 1XX percent return!
Indeed a Fayette SPLOST could not fund projects in other counties nor should it. But, as I said before, voluntary partnerships with other counties to accomplish needful things for us could.
Now, let us take a real close look at his reference to the 74/85 intersection. First of all, it never was a Fayette project. More importantly it isn’t even a TSPLOST project any longer because there were not sufficient funds to pay for it, only $11.5 million per his own reporting.
It is now a federally and state funded $22 million project that is going to happen whether the TSPLOST passes or not. You folks saying that is the justification to vote for the TSPLOST, time to reconsider.
Which brings up a point everyone should be concerned about. After the public viewing of the GDOT proposals, I put in my preference for Concept 1 while adding information on why their proposal would not succeed as is. I also challenged them, since Fayette was declared the origination point of most of the traffic, to look at an alternative. The response was an eye-opener.
There never was a traffic origination study to determine from where exactly all the traffic was coming. They had only looked at ARC goals and plans and the Fayette and Coweta County Transportation Plans.
They then assumed Coweta did not contribute a significant number of cars to Hwy. 74 traffic. They had no idea that Coweta had made all those efforts to get TDK and other avenues open to get more traffic out of Coweta onto Hwy. 74 faster to allow for more development on our border with them.
Misdirection and sleight of hand gimmicks are not appreciated. We do not want to be a donor county. We do not want to be urbanized into Atlanta per Plan 2040.
This whole TSPLOST is ill-planned. We need a new approach, not trying to add more roads to increase congestion where it cannot be handled today.
If Commissioner Steve Brown was running with scissors Mr. Lawler, somehow managed to fall on them.
Don Haddix, mayor
Peachtree City, Ga.
