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Project History
| Holliday v GDOT -- Case Dismissed -- October 22, 2013 |
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Judge dismisses Holliday suit
in Forest Hill Road case
Published: October 22, 2013 http://www.macon.com/2013/10/22/2732591/forest-hill-road-lawsuit-underway.html By MIKE STUCKA mstucka@macon.com Bulldozers could rumble down Forest Hill Road in just over a month. Lindsay “Doc” Holliday’s lawsuit against a widening of the road crumbled in court Tuesday, when Bibb County Superior Court Judge Edgar Ennis ruled that Holliday had no way left to win his case. Holliday claimed the state was pursuing unsafe designs for the road. Holliday went into court this week without an attorney because he and the CAUTION Macon road advocacy group ran out of money. He called himself as a witness first, but his other two witnesses undermined his legal case. Court proceedings began Monday, but the case was over Tuesday afternoon after just three and a half hours of opening statements and testimony. Ennis asked attorneys for the Georgia Department of Transportation to draft a proposed order that could lift an injunction against road construction after 35 days. That would give Holliday enough time to file a notice of appeal and seek another injunction from the Georgia Court of Appeals, Ennis said. Though a jury was selected Tuesday, it never made a decision. Holliday told The Telegraph he doesn’t know what he’ll do with the case. “I’ll talk to my friends and neighbors and I’ll decide where to go from here. We’ve got almost 35 days to decide,” he said. Russell McMurry, Georgia’s chief engineer, said the Georgia Department of Transportation will talk to the contractor that bid $8.4 million for the widening work and determine when construction could begin -- and whether any costs will be assessed against the state. “We’ve been to court here today. We’ll be able to move this project forward,” said McMurry, who’d planned to spend the entire week in court. The planned widening of Forest Hill Road would build a center turn lane between Northside Drive and Wimbish Road. The lawsuit did not address a planned four-lane widening between Wimbish Road and Vineville Avenue. The trial got off to a rocky start for Holliday. He was interrupted during his opening statements three times. Twice the state’s attorneys forced him to steer his opening statement around limitations of his evidence, while the judge redirected Holliday another time on his own. Holliday said the state incorrectly picked outmoded, unsafe designs for a widening of Forest Hill Road, adding that he could point to better designs. “When you know how to do something better, why not do it better?” Holliday asked jurors in his opening statement. He kept running into objections and limitations on his evidence. His witnesses hurt his case, such as when he called Todd Long, a former state transportation planning director who is now a deputy transportation commissioner. Holliday asked Long if he would feel comfortable walking on the sidewalks of the state’s design. Long replied without hesitation, “Absolutely.” Holliday searched for a response or follow-up question. Later, Holliday asked, “This is a neighborhood, putting traffic through it at 45 mph. ... Does that seem reasonable or logical?” Long said it did. Holliday’s other witness was Van Etheridge, a professional engineer who has led Bibb County’s road improvement program. That, too, backfired, as Etheridge testified that the road would be safer because the center turn lane would prevent many rear-end collisions. “In my 50 years of building roads, I think this is about as nice a road as you can build,” Etheridge testified under cross-examination. “It’s going to be a nice project.” Without legal help, Holliday often needed guidance from the judge on how to proceed. He sat alone while seven people working for the state gathered in a clump to debate which potential jurors to strike from the jury pool. Macon attorneys M. Devlin Cooper and John Draughon Sr. raised frequent objections to Holliday’s efforts to describe the widening’s public opposition, or to suggest that he represented anyone other than himself. Some potential jurors said the Forest Hill Road widenings had been delayed long enough, and safety was at stake. One of them seemed to wonder why the entire jury pool didn’t know of the issues. “I don’t know how you can live in Macon and not hear about it,” she said. She also was not picked as a juror. In the end, that didn’t matter. To contact writer Mike Stucka, call 744-4251 |
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Holliday’s ‘Impossible Dream’ Published: October 25, 2013 http://www.macon.com/2013/10/25/2736986/hollidays-impossible-dream.html Thus it comes to an end -- well almost. Lindsay Holliday’s 18-year quest to get the Georgia Department of Transportation to alter its plans for Forest Hill Road has just about run its course. Tuesday, Superior Court Judge Edgar Ennis, dismissed Holliday’s lawsuit against GDOT. The agency’s contractors are prepared to start cutting down trees that have graced the neighborhood since before Holliday was a child. While his quixotic battle is on life support (he has 35 days to file an appeal and seek another injunction), Holliday has run out of time -- and most importantly -- money. He backed up his words with his own wallet, but that was not enough. He was finally reduced to representing himself in the court case that began Monday. The old adage, “He who represents himself ...” is appropriate here. However, Holliday did not take up the legal mantle out of foolish hubris, but necessity. Tactical mistakes undermined his case and Judge Ennis had no recourse but to end this chapter in the long-running street fight. Holliday is Macon’s “Man of La Mancha.” He fought the unbeatable foe and ran where the brave dared not go. And he paid for it out of his own pocket. He was willing “To fight for the right, without question or pause ...” And, he marched into Hell, for what he thought, was a heavenly cause. Even in defeat, you have to applaud the effort. - Telegraph Editorial Board. |
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I read the 1st three paragraphs in this additional Telegraph editorial today below, and I was expecting it to illustrate how our citizen-proposed Bike-lanes, Roundabouts and Traffic-Calming for the Forest Hill Road Project would have prevented the horrendous and permanent injuries suffered by this young man. - But the article is not about prevention of injury, it is about coping after injuries have occurred. - Lindsay. It’s personal not
politics
Published: October 25, 2013 http://www.macon.com/2013/10/25/2736984/its-personal-not-politics.html By STEVE SPRIGGS Special to The Telegraph “You need to get to Sacramento now. Your son was hit by a car on his bicycle. All I know is that he is alive, that he had emergency brain surgery and that he is in intensive care.” These are words that no parent can prepare for. It turned out that a 16-year-old driver had run a red light at 50 miles per hour. That was back in 2010 when our son Matthew was 22. Today Matt has two metal plates in his skull and suffers from symptoms of the traumatic brain injury. His lower leg was reconstructed using donor cadaver bone and multiple titanium rods and wires to hold it all together. Five disks in his lumbar spine are severely damaged, but doctors say he is too young to have the discs surgically fused. Matt lives with constant pain and his future will require extensive medical care and additional surgery. To date, his injuries have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I am fortunate to have employer-provided health insurance that covers my wife and son at a reasonable additional cost. My son would have been dropped from my policy when he graduated from college, but the Affordable Care Act allowed him to stay on our policy until his 26th birthday. Without it, we would be bankrupt today. Matt turns 26 in April and will be dropped from my policy. For decades the congressional Republicans have done nothing to restrict insurance companies from insuring only healthy people. The rest of us continue to pay dearly when hospital emergency rooms provide basic health care for everyone else. Covered California provides my son with many insurance choices that exist nowhere else. As a father, I am relieved that my son now has a way to avoid becoming a burden upon society when I am gone. The ACA may not be perfect, but it gives us hope that our son has a shot at a future with basic health care, less pain and fewer limitations. Yet there is a vocal group of petulant Republican congressmen doing everything in their power to delay, defund and ultimately destroy what they disparagingly call “Obamacare.” These reckless ideologues have shown that they are willing to bring down our government and to crash the world’s financial systems in order to keep millions of American citizens uninsured. These self-described “Christian Conservatives” offer nothing constructive (or Christian) to address the problems that have been destroying families for decades. These regressive efforts are not for the greater good. This obsessive desire to undermine and kill the Affordable Care Act is not rational and it is not patriotic. These extremist representatives are trying to harm my family in a very direct and personal way. It is just plain immoral. My own congressman wanted to appear reasonable, so he recently labeled tea party Republicans as “lemmings.” But contrary to his words, he voted in lockstep with his radical colleagues more than 40 times to prevent my son from having a healthy future. And he is fine with shutting down the government and threatening the world’s fiscal stability to prevent my son from having health insurance. He says that he is doing this for our own good. Rep. Devin Nunes, you are wrong. Your efforts to obstruct pending laws that you do not like may be understandable in a purely political sense. But your incessant attempts to undermine a legally enacted and court-tested statute that protects my son (and millions of others) from a life of pain and poverty are unforgivable. You provide no viable alternative and seem content to let our families suffer. This is not political to us. This is personal. This is my son’s future. Steve Spriggs of Clovis, Calif., is a professional charity fundraiser. He wrote this for the Sacramento Bee. |
http://www.macon.com/2013/11/27/2801626/no-forest-hill-road-appeal-so.html
No Forest Hill Road appeal, so bulldozers coming By MIKE STUCKA mstucka@macon.com November 27, 2013 The litigation over Forest Hill Road’s widening appears to have ended Wednesday with neither sound nor fury. Bulldozers weren’t ripping out trees, and Lindsay “Doc” Holliday didn’t file an appeal before an injunction lifted. A Bibb County Superior Court judge had given Holliday 35 days to appeal the decision in his Superior Court lawsuit. Holliday’s case quickly crumbled in court as he worked without attorneys because he and his supporters had run out of money. But questions of money -- and the Thanksgiving holiday -- also will keep bulldozers at bay for a matter of days, said Mark Spence, project manager for contractor R.J. Haynie & Associates of Lake City. The company, which won the widening contract nearly a year ago, had locked in price guarantees only through its expected completion date. The company can claim cost overruns through the Georgia Department of Transportation, which administers the contract and was sued by Holliday. “We’ve got 10 days from the 27th to submit all documentation of any claims we’re making. It’s forthcoming, then we’re going to be taking trees down,” Spence said this week. “This being the Thanksgiving holidays too, we’re not going there. My guess is that’ll come in December.” The contract calls for Forest Hill Road to be turned into a three-lane section between Northside Drive and Wimbish Road. The original contract was for $8.4 million. Spence said the work, scheduled to have been completed by March 2015, is likely delayed at least a year. Holliday argued that the Georgia Department of Transportation’s design was more dangerous than a design he preferred. He also argued that the roadwork would destroy the road’s tree canopy and pollute its streams. It was those environmental claims that led to the injunction. To contact writer Mike Stucka, call 744-4251 |
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