Building Community, Creating Places, Using Common Sense (here)

A NEW CAUTION: Macon's roadbusters

Familiar fight: Middle Georgia road-builders, many residents are locked in struggle over growth.

Dan Chapman - Staff - www.AJC.com

Monday, May 8, 2000

Macon --- The hairdresser feared her mostly rural community would turn into an industrial park.

The college administrator suspected neighborhood streets might be five-laned.

The housewife envisioned a bulldozer toppling the towering magnolia where her children play.

"What we all have in common," says Suzan Rivers, the housewife, "is a love of this city. We don't want it to get torn up."

They --- housewives, teachers, retirees, preachers, architects, dentists, lawyers, foresters, doctors --- also didn't want this midsize central Georgia city to turn into another traffic- and sprawl-fueled Atlanta. So they banded together to fight City Hall, transportation officials and the road-builders who are spending $320 million paving miles of Bibb County.

"Why can't Macon learn from Atlanta's mistakes?" asks Lee Martin, a small businessman whose 1960s idealism was rekindled by the road-building battles.

Martin, Rivers and dozens of other activists decided Atlanta's history is, indeed, replete with sprawl-busting lessons. Their education can be summed up in a word: CAUTION.

Citizens Against Unnecessary Thoroughfares in Old Neighborhoods --- CAUTION Inc. --- was formed in 1982 to combat plans to build a highway from downtown Atlanta east toward Stone Mountain. If built, neighborhoods like Druid Hills and Candler Park would have been ripped apart.

For 20 years, it was a citizens-vs.-developers battle played out in courtrooms, jail cells, kudzu-filled fields and politicians' chambers. More than 500 homes and untold acres of land were leveled.

In the end, though, CAUTION prevailed. Today, the Freedom Parkway meanders 3.1 miles from the Downtown Connector, past Jimmy Carter's presidential library and public-policy center, before dead-ending at one of Atlanta's most cherished parks.

CAUTION Macon fights strikingly similar --- and, at times, nasty --- battles. Name-calling. Lawsuits. Allegations of wasteful spending, political chicanery, conflicts of interest.

Dan Fischer, a former urban planner and city administrator in Colorado, accuses city, county and state officials of not fully informing Bibb County residents of the magnitude of the road-building projects.

"My experience in local government didn't prepare me for Macon government," says Fischer, now an administrator at Mercer University. "It's when they started doing obviously unjustified damage to neighborhoods that people realized there was something illogical about the process. They were willing to sacrifice the integrity of in-lying neighborhoods strictly to accommodate suburban sprawl."

Hogwash, responds Larry Justice, the longtime Bibb County commissioner who calls CAUTION "an outside group of agitators."

"Here's where I have a problem with these CAUTION people: They do not want growth," says Justice, a commissioner for 28 years. "They're being shortsighted. They're not looking down the road for their children and their grandchildren."

CAUTION has won and lost road-building battles during its two-year fight. Its most recent defeat came in February, when a federal judge dismissed CAUTION's lawsuit to keep a two-lane road from turning into a five-lane thoroughfare. Yet even its critics agree CAUTION has changed the democratic dynamic in once-placid Bibb County.

'We want to catch up'

Robert Fountain gleans different lessons from Atlanta's history. As Bibb County engineer, Fountain ascribes to the grow-or-die theory of economic development. Good roads attract business. New business keeps property taxes down. Lower taxes equal happier citizens.

"Ideally, I see us as a second hub to Atlanta in economic growth," says Fountain, county engineer for 26 years. "We want to catch up. Since the '40s, we haven't spent any money on this town. This is the best thing to happen to this whole community."

Fountain and others envision the transformation of this old mill town into a distribution hub with rail lines and four-lane roads heading in all compass directions. One of the keys, Fountain and others say, is to improve and expand the roads leading to the Perimeter-like beltway.

The Fall Line Freeway would serve as one leg of the triangle-shaped outer belt. Planned as a 215-mile highway linking Augusta with Columbus through Middle Georgia, the stretch around Macon remains in limbo. The road-bulders' preferred route runs through environmentally sensitive wetlands and near the Ocmulgee National Monument and burial grounds.

State and local transportation officials say their route wouldn't unnecessarily damage the 20,700 acres of "cultural property" considered historically important to the Muscogee Indian Nation. They're submitting an environmental assessment to the feds this month for approval.

Roughly a third of the $320 million in state, federal and local road-building money would help finish the Fall Line Freeway. While many a CAUTION member individually opposes the road's local segment, the group hasn't taken an official position.

Macon, whose air grows increasingly polluted each year, is expected to achieve this summer the same dubious air-quality non-attainment distinction that Atlanta already owns. If so, future road-building projects --- and Bibb County's hoped-for growth --- may be slowed.

Yet Macon barely grows now. With 115,000 citizens, it averages less than 1 percent growth per year. Fountain says the region averages maybe 6 percent growth.

But critics consider that insufficient to justify 62 road projects.

"All they're doing is taking federal money and just laying down asphalt without rhyme or reason," says CAUTION's Tom Scholl, an ordained minister. "We want every dime of the money spent. We just don't want them to spend it where they want to spend it."

"Pennies for Progress" is how Macon and Bibb County officials --- with a healthy assist from Atlantan Tom Moreland's engineering and program management firm --- campaigned for their road-building referendum in 1994. With an additional plea for Macon's future economic viability, the 1 percent sales tax proposal garnered a slim majority of Bibb County voters.

More than $130 million has since been raised locally.

Grass-roots effort

Graders and dump trucks crisscrossed Bibb County. Downtown roads were expanded and repaved. Front yards in intown, suburban and rural communities were ripped up to make room for two-, three- and five-lane roads. The goal remains to ease congestion and make smooth the drive from city to suburb to country.

By September 1998, the road-building revulsion had crested. CAUTION Macon was formed, largely with the moral and technical support of its Atlanta kin --- including Tom Marney, Jim Chapman and Mary Norwood --- and the financial backing of more than 1,000 Maconites.

The grass-roots organization mobilized quickly and effectively. Core members focused on specific topics. Scholl, for example, crunches traffic counts and growth projections. Rivers researches historical precedents. Susan Hanberry, a middle-school teacher, is the environmental whiz. The Internet is tapped for information about road battles across the country, as well as to keep CAUTION members and journalists informed (www.cautionmacon.org.).

Neighborhood associations and politicians were mobilized. In historic College Hill, neighbors tied hundreds of yellow ribbons around threatened magnolias. Similar acts of protest took place in the predominantly black neighborhood surrounding Jeff Davis/ Telfair Street.

CAUTION railed against poor planning, in general, and unfaithfulness to the county's land-use plan, in particular. The crux of CAUTION's discontent, though, was a feeling that the integrity of intown neighborhoods was being compromised to further suburban sprawl and the industrialization of Bibb County.

Justice, the chairman of the county commission the last 11 years, scoffs at CAUTION's assertion, insisting traffic counts and Macon's development as a regional job, entertainment, medical and educational hub justifies its road-building largesse.

"All this hoopla about sprawl is ridiculous," he says. "We don't want to see another Atlanta in Macon. But at the same time, we do want to see good, solid growth."

CAUTION, further miffed that some projects changed dramatically post-referendum, was fed up. A show of force was needed.

Roughly 1,000 people showed up for CAUTION's September 1998 kickoff rally in front of Macon's courthouse. Their grievances were many. But their immediate demands --- most of which were met --- were few.

They wanted nationally renowned and environmentally sensitive urban planner Walter Kulash hired as a consultant. They wanted finished road projects better landscaped. And they wanted only elected officials to serve on the road-building executive committee.

Even state officials complained of the lack of citizen participation.

In a November 1998 letter to Macon's mayor, former state historic preservation officer Mark Edwards wrote "there seems to be a lack of meaningful public participation in the local transportation planning process, at least concerning impacts to historic properties." Edwards later accused a top Georgia Department of Natural Resources official of "making a mockery out of the democratic process" in his "zeal" to build the Fall Line Freeway.

Bibb County's engineer acknowledges that public officials should've been more considerate of citizens' concerns.

"We had a lot of (input), but the timing may not have been the best," Fountain says. "If I could do it all over again, I would set up a system to bring in neighborhood (residents) at the very, very beginning of the project."

Unmollified, CAUTION decided to get tough. They needed a fight. They found one on Houston Road.

A crushing blow

Traffic is light along Houston ("How-stun") Road as a minivan full of CAUTION members wends through south Macon. They point out their homes, their churches, the pecan orchards and cotton fields. They ignore the yellow bulldozers, the scraped-flat fields and the powerfully sweet smell of uprooted trees.

CAUTION latched on to Houston Road as the most egregious of road-building projects. Prior to the referendum, residents were told that only a turn lane would be added to a 3.2-mile stretch of road. Post-referendum, they learned Houston would become a five-lane thoroughfare.

"Little by little, it went from two lanes to three lanes to five lanes," recalls Marilyn Meggs, a housewife-turned-activist. "They told us it was a done deal."

CAUTION filed a lawsuit last October to stop the $8 million Houston Road project. The group said the Georgia Department of Transportation failed to adequately consider the road's environmental impact. Kulash, who was hired by project manager Moreland Altobelli, testified against Houston Road, saying it would encourage strip development.

Kulash's switch fueled a conflict-of-interest charge lodged by the road-builders. They also said Kulash designed projects without a Georgia engineer's license --- even though he'd worked with them for months.

In February, a federal judge denied CAUTION's request to halt the Houston Road project. It was a crushing blow, but not a fatal one.

CAUTION is an undeniable force in Macon life. It has forced road-builders to scale back projects in working-class west Macon, upscale north Macon and historic downtown Macon.

Citizens in neighboring Monroe County now seek CAUTION's advice on ways to combat road projects. The nonprofit sponsors "smart growth" forums to gauge candidates' views.

It's investigating ways to legislatively ensure road-builders don't steamroll other smallish communities. CAUTION members know once Macon's fight ends, road-building battles will continue in other Georgia towns with growth-at-all-costs politicians and pliant, unsophisticated citizens.

"This is little ol' Macon," says Suzan Rivers. "If this is happening here, it's happening all over Georgia. Think how many neighborhoods all over Georgia are being destroyed."

http://www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/epaper/editions/monday/business_93617573249d203910d2.html 

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/tcalm/index.htm

  http://www.lincolninst.edu/home.html

http://www.smartgrowthamerica.com

http://www.kunstler.com

http://www.clf.org

http://www.ejrc.cau.edu

http://www.georgiastats.uga.edu