SPLOST 2017 is already outdated. While it addresses a wide variety of built infrastructure in our community such as upgrades to roads and storm water controls, it does not upgrade and expand our Green Infrastructure.
Green Infrastructure does many things; improves the economy, provides a healthier lifestyle for people, provides habitat for wildlife and sustains our community’s clean air and water.
Greenspace is just as necessary to design and plan for as other built infrastructure in advance of metropolitan growth. It is more important in fact, as the tree canopy is threatened daily of being bulldozed down.
We need a system of parks, connecting wetlands and riparian areas with urban green spaces. The benefits to our community are innumerable: visual relief, separates incompatible land uses, complements the placement of new buildings, roads, and other city infrastructures, shapes urban form and reduces opposition to development, especially when planned in concert with other open spaces.
SPLOST 2017 designates over $24 million for stormwater management problems that have been caused by manmade structures deteriorating. These millions of dollars will not be spent to enhance our community and in years to come the manmade stormwater controls will continue to require costly repairs. By planning for parks and preserving tree canopy our community can reduce flood control and stormwater management costs while subsequently improving our community aesthetically and economically.
$8 million of SPLOST 2017 is for Fayetteville’s water treatment plant. When the plant was built, surely money was set aside over the years knowing that maintenance and repairs would be necessary? Surely, supplying clean and sufficient water was not left up to the vagaries of a SPLOST?
$2 million of SPLOST 2017 is for a roundabout to be built in front of a new subdivision that Commissioner Oddo is having built. Roundabouts are for cars, not people. Continuous traffic flow is dangerous for pedestrians and personally, if a four-way stop is safer for pedestrians, cheaper to build and maintain and already in place, keep the four-way stop. To tie repairs to a necessary infrastructure like a water treatment plant to a unnecessary roundabout is imprudent.
SPLOST 2017 money would have been perfect for the county and municipalities to use to acquire land and prioritize saving tree canopy. SPLOST 2017 is not forward looking. It is the “old” way of doing things and creates more stress on citizens who watch as their natural life support system is stripped away, leaving our community without biological diversity, essential ecological functions and economic sustainability.
I cannot support SPLOST 2017 and will vote “NO” on Tuesday, March 21, 2017. While roads are paved, pipes are replaced and other repairs of built infrastructure is perpetual, the same cannot be said for our rapidly disappearing greenspaces and tree canopy.
SPLOST 2017 needs to fail for the good of the community and I hope our elected officials will go back to square one and make preserving green space and tree canopy their priority when it does fail.
Mary Carroll
Fayetteville, Ga.
