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Concrete Plans: Battling to Save Macon from GDOT
Chris Horne
 If everything goes well for Caution Macon—and they would say for the city of Macon too—then they’ll have walked into the Bibb County Courthouse for the county-ordered mediation session and walked out with a victory for Forest Hill Road hours before anyone has even read this.
But if everything had gone well from the beginning, it wouldn’t have taken 14 years just to get to this point. With that in mind, they speak guardedly about their date with retired Georgia Appeals Court judge Dorothy T. Beasley.
“I don’t want to get my hopes up,” says Caution Macon co-founder Lee Martin.
Other citizen-activists are quick to echo him, venting their side of the issue’s history, which is full of obstacles and abstruse plans. The complaints begin with the absence of a public hearing prior to the 1994 SPLOST that birthed this project to the group’s attempts to get information from Moreland-Altobelli Associates, the firm that manages Bibb County’s road improvement fund.
As is, Caution Macon’s inner circle is worried. At a strategy meeting two days before the mediation, they air doubts about whether or not it will matter. Even at its supposedly best outcome, which would be an acceptable agreement between the representative citizens and Moreland-Altobelli, the mediation itself may be a moot point.
In a conversation with Gerald Ross, the Georgia Department of Transportation’s chief engineer, Dr. Lindsay Holliday, the group’s most visible member, was told that Moreland-Altobelli doesn’t have the authority to negotiate on behalf of GDOT.
“He said, ‘Why are you even bothering with the mediation?’” Dr. Holliday recalls, “‘What are you going to do when they agree to a design that we cannot or will not build?’”
That’s what Dr. Holliday asked the mediating judge, who has since decided that the reason to go forward with the mediation is because the County Commissioners have decided it needed to be done.
Lonzy Edwards, Bibb County’s newest commissioner, instigated the mediation process. Being a lawyer with experience in mediation, he said he felt that this was the best step, provided both sides bring flexible proposals to the table. “I am assured that we have all the ingredients to resolve this problem.”
While Edwards hopes that Moreland-Altobelli will bring something that “the residents can all agree on”, Ward III councilman Tom Ellington spoke out at the latest City Council meeting about what he called a “shocking lack of information.” His words came in support of a resolution that would create a review requirement for Macon-Bibb Road Improvement Projects within city limits, making these projects subject to approval from council’s Public Works and Engineering Committee. City Council approved that resolution unanimously.
 “I wasn’t necessarily expecting to be convinced that this project, as it is currently conceived, is a good one,” Ellington says. “But I expected, at the very least, to be presented with some evidence and even that was lacking. What I’ve seen has been very disappointing.”
Ellington, who co-sponsored the resolution with Nancy White and Lauren Benedict, says he believes that Forest Hill Road might need some work but that “the data that I have seen suggests that the kind of project that they apparently have in mind is not justified.”
Council person White agrees. “Nobody is trying to obstruct the improvement of Forest Hill and the safety of Forest Hill—it does need paving and it probably needs a third lane—but it doesn’t need six lanes. It’s been really frustrating for the year and a half that I’ve been in the process. You can’t get information you want, and it just seems one-sided—it’s ‘my way or the highway’, pun intended.”
Even this resolution, which would be a boon to Caution Macon’s mission, isn’t making anyone optimistic yet. The reason is that Mayor Robert Reichert hasn’t signed off on it.
Reached for comment, the mayor is out of town, but his Director of External Affairs, Andrew Blascovich, after conferring with city attorney Keith Moffat, says it isn’t a deliberate move to thwart the resolution.
“The mayor is just concerned about the way the resolution would affect GDOT’s ability to do work in Macon.” Blascovich contends that the mayor simply wants more information on the matter and that his research into it has only been delayed by the fact he is out of town.
During the waning moments of Caution Macon’s strategy meeting, spurred by an email from Judge Beasley, another concern arose about whether or not they would even be allowed to offer their alternative plans to Moreland-Altobelli. The official proposal, which the media was not allowed to see from either side prior to the mediation because of confidentiality rules, was put together by Dan Fisher, a former city manager, and Cindy Martin, Lee’s wife. On that proposal, the group has hung its hopes, believing that the only way for them to negotiate is to start from what they want.
“If we negotiate down from a bad plan, we lose,” Lee Martin says. And that becomes their latest concern, that if all the pieces are in place to have a good faith mediation, that they will be forced to start from Moreland-Altobelli’s plan, which hinges on expanding Forest Hill Road. That, they say, will destroy the neighborhood.
 The airing of concerns subsides when Dr. Holliday calmly but strongly says, “I don’t mind just going in there and torpedoing their plans.” Which Caution Macon has hired an expert to do.
The basis of their argument is that the traffic counts that were projected by GDOT and Moreland-Altobelli are woefully inaccurate. Their expert, Rick Chellman, is a new urbanist, meaning he promotes walkable, neighborhood-based development as an alternative to sprawl. With his 25 years of experience in zoning, civil engineering, land-surveying, consulting, traffic engineering and development/urban planning, Chellman intends to prove that there is no justification for widening Forest Hill Road.
Martin and Holliday are both eager to point out that the projections for traffic down Forest Hill created GDOT’s basis for expansion, but that the estimates are way off.
“Since we’ve had 14 years of this, we have all this data to look through to see if their projections were right,” Dr. Holliday says.
Martin adds, “And they’re not. They just flatten out.”
Caution Macon shows that GDOT’s own data on traffic counts, which is divided between markers on Forest Hill, trends to a plateau and in some places, has decreased. They say that this includes traffic in the Macon Mall’s hey day, which they point out has clearly passed. The reason behind the expansion project was to create a thoroughfare to the Mall. Because of that, Forest Hill has been classified a minor arterial road instead of the collector road it historically has been.
Regardless, even if the traffic count was increasing and the Mall’s business wasn’t shrinking, it still wouldn’t require expansion, Martin says. “You know out on West Paces Ferry, where the Governor’s Mansion is, that’s only a two-lane and they refuse to expand it. It gets 30,000 cars a day. Forest Hill Road doesn’t even get half that.”
Here’s what they want—it’s what they’ve wanted all along—it is the minimum that they’ll agree to at the mediation. Caution Macon wants Forest Hill Road to remain a two-lane road with roundabouts or dedicated turn lanes where necessary. They believe it would be necessary at Lokchoppee and Old Lundy, and at Forest Lake Drive and Newport Road. On the roundabouts, Dr. Holliday is especially adamant, saying they are markedly safer by slowing down traffic in the residential neighborhood and would actually allow traffic to move more quickly since there would be no stop lights.
If mediation doesn’t prove to be a viable means to resolving this issue, there are other causes for optimism. One is that there won’t actually be enough money to go through with this project. The money from the SPLOST is gone, and GDOT is facing a major budget shortfall. They require local governments to submit a list of priority projects for review. It isn’t known whether or not Forest Hill Road would be on that priority list, but common sense would suggest it could not be.
There is also hope that, if push came to shove, the city government would play hardball, which the county commission doesn’t seem willing to even consider. After all, 90% of the road is within city limits, the county points out, despite Bibb County being the entity that manages the road improvement fund for both the county and the city. In that light, there is speculation that the city could refuse to accept Forest Hill Road back from GDOT who designated it a state road to shore up Federal and State money. Former mayor Ellis agreed to but some say that agreement isn’t legally binding. That would be a move that could finally end the project.
Even at the strategy meeting for the Forest Hill mediation, Caution Macon is mindful that there’s another fight with GDOT just over the horizon.
Last December, GDOT unveiled its plans to expand the I-16/75 connection. If it is built according to plan, opponents say it will rival the size of Atlanta’s infamous Spaghetti Junction, reaching up to 16 lanes in width with 12-foot sound barriers. In addition to being an eyesore, it could ruin Downtown Macon’s growth and alter or destroy some historic neighborhoods.
Councilman Rick Hutto, who represents East Macon and lives in Shirley Hills, says GDOT has tried to keep information and drawings of the plan out of the public sphere because “the more people see it the more upset they are.” He cites the destruction of the Pleasant Hill neighborhood when I-75 was originally installed, and says that the new plans would require tearing down Little Richard’s childhood home.
Hutto adds, “They’ve decided they are not going to have any environmental review except for a letter that says no environmental review is necessary. Yet they’re going to be putting hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete in the Ocmulgee River.”
History and the environment won’t be the only thing to suffer. According to Jim Barfield, a resident of Shirley Hills and the director of the Rose Hill Cemetery Foundation, which would be impeded upon by the monstrous construction, local businesses will hurt the most by the proposed collector lanes. “Do you know where you’d have to get off in order to go to Fountain Car Wash? Ocmulgee East Boulevard. I don’t think the guy that owns Fountain Car Wash knows that yet, but he will,” Jim says. “Every business in Downtown Macon should oppose this.”
Opponents believe that the design of the project is best suited for moving people through Macon, not bringing them to Macon. That, they believe, means it must be stopped.
“The I-16/75 Expansion Project? That’s our next big battle,” Martin says.
If these prognostications are accurate, this will be a fight for the very life of Macon.
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