The newly

created traffic impact task force conducted its first

meeting earlier this week, hoping to find some solutions

to a problem that Mayor Bob Lenox acknowledged is

"not going away for a long time."

The group

will meet at 4:30 p.m. each first Monday, with the next

meeting set for Dec. 6.

No major

decisions were made at the first meeting, which was

mainly for organizational purposes. The next meeting

should see the members armed with more information and

materials to study while assessing the traffic situation.

Data from

an ongoing study by traffic engineers Dames and Moore

will be available at the next meeting, along with

information from the Georgia Department of Transportation

concerning the status of the ill-fated road widening

project on Ga. Highway 54 West. It is possible that some

engineering work had already been done when the federal

air regulations shut down the project along with dozens

of others in the metro Atlanta area.

But Lenox

pointed out that even if the government were more

lenient, road building is a lengthy process, with

engineering, right of way acquisition and actual

construction. "Five years is a rush job," he

said.

Lenox said

that Fayette and Coweta counties have officially agreed

to the Hwy. 54 corridor being the top road priority in

the area right now, a move that he thinks is a good step.

The initial

brainstorming session included some discussion of

possible options such as extending Crosstown Drive and

TDK Boulevard into Coweta County, connecting it with Hwy.

54 and relieving some of the Fayette-Coweta traffic on

that route.

Also

mentioned were some of the suggestions put forth at a

recent City Council meeting by Dames and Moore, such as

extending the left turn lane on Ga. Highway 74 at the

Hwy. 54 intersection and making the right turn lane a

through lane for a few hundred yards.

Traffic in

the Hwy. 54 corridor is not just the responsibility of

those in the corridor, Lenox said. "It's a city-wide

problem."

The mayor

believes that the city is taking huge steps to address

it, however. He said that he knows of no other city in

Georgia with a traffic model in place such as the one

Dames and Moore is putting together.

Questions

were raised about the possibility of the task force

addressing land-use issues, but Lenox said that nearly

all of the land in the city is already set as far as its

use. Some time will be devoted in the next meeting to

identifying each parcel in the corridor and its status as

far as zoning and other issues.

"We'll

need to eat this apple one bite at a time," said

Wynnmeade resident John Dillihunt. "We need to see

what we can do in the here and now."