Commission Approves Agreement with GDOT; Expect N. McDonough Streetscape in 4-7 Years
Decatur Metro | March 22, 2011You may think that because the City Commission just approved an “agreement” with the Georgia Department of Transportation at their meeting last night – which will provide $1,415,867 in federal funding (through the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Livable Centers Initiative) for the North McDonough streetscape improvements – that you might see bulldozers and men decked out in orange down by the high school any day now.
And you would be so very wrong.
According to Decatur Deputy City Manager Hugh Saxon, construction on the project will not begin for 4-7 years.
And it’s not for a lack of trying by the city. They’ve already hired a design firm (which is being paid for with MARTA “off-set” funding) – the same design firm that’s doing the railroad crossing designs – and have held multiple meetings with residents about what they want to see along North McDonough in the future.
The hold up is due to just one adjective in my first sentence: “federal”. As Mr. Saxon explained to the City Commission last night, because this is a federally funded project, the city will be required to jump through countless hoops (a full environmental review that was mentioned last night) over the next few YEARS in order to finally get the money in hand to pay for the physical improvements.
So, if you have kids in high school, you might want to break the news that they probably will never walk along wider sidewalks up to the Square before they graduate. HOWVER, if you’ve got a 7 year-old, get that kid jazzed because in 7 years time “Streetscapes baby!”.
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(Humming “When I’m Sixty-four”.)
I suggest we get out of the habit of requesting federal funding to complete these kinds of projects. We need to come up with some better fund-raising ideas and/or elect people who can think outside of that particular cookie jar…
It’s like the old joke “Why rob banks? Because that’s where the money is.”
Why get Federal grants? That’s where the money is. The alternative here would be a) not do the streetscape or b) pay for it locally (might = more taxes).
And it’s not like we don’t all pay federal taxes here. We ought to at least get our fair share of federal funding for reasonable projects. It’s not like we are just proposing a project in order to ask for some funds.
This is a good point. It’s like growing a beard to treat a cold. One has no affect on the other.
A particular community (such as Decatur) refusing federal dollars does not change the process by which we distribute tax money. If your issue is extravagant or wasteful government spending (the legitimacy of which I’m making no comment on here), there are far more impactful ways to go about addressing it. For better or for worse, the recent midterm election results certainly reflected a lot of people putting a lot of effort into influencing federal policy in ways that could produce meaningful results.
The only things the refusal of federal money is good for are political grandstanding or willful attempts to put your community at a competitive disadvantage with others in your region. Or both.
Word.
Well, gee…where does the $$ for the Federal grant come from? We’re paying taxes into a great bottomless pit that we then have to go begging for to support projects in our neighborhood. My fantasy is that one day I pay in State taxes what I now pay in Federal taxes…and vice versa.
This time frame (4 to 7 years to implement a straight forward project) is not unusual for a Georgia Department of Transportation project. I do not thing the delay should be blamed on it being federal funds. Look at how this DOT has been managed these past 9 years.