Council Workshop Addresses City Development Options
By Jonathan Copsey / STAFF
Alpharetta city council held a workshop last Monday to review the status of several projects that are in the works. Being a workshop and not an official Council meeting, there were no decisions made. All Council members were present with the exception of Doug DeRito.
First on the agenda was a look at the Senior Livability Project, which aims to help the senior population of Alpharetta. Community development director Diana Wheeler explained:
“We’re interested in getting information about how we can make this a more livable city especially for our seniors. And in order to do that we need to know what their needs are and assess what our senior population actually looks like in Alpharetta.”
The Atlanta Regional Commission is in charge of gathering the information, which, according to the members present at the meeting, may be a tough task. According to the ARC, such numbers that Alpharetta is asking for either do not exist or are woefully out of date.
To address these problems, a survey is being compiled to be circulated among the senior population of the community to determine how the city is currently meeting the needs of its seniors and what more needs to be done.
Mayor Arthur Letchas and the council provided some comments and instructions to the ARC members, which will be used to complete the survey. Results are expected in August.
Downtown
URS Corp, the city’s consultant, presented their recommendations for the improvement of the downtown area. Among the suggestions of the three month study were to change the MARTA routes to move the buses closer to residential areas, continue to ensure that the city is sidewalk equipped, increase the amount of bike lanes, and increase parking options in the historic district.
By far the most controversial of the recommendations was what to do about Highway 9, which runs straight through the center of downtown Alpharetta. URS suggested that by far the best solution would be to extend Haynes Bridge Road north from Academy Street to curve around and meet up with Main Street, getting much of the traffic away from the historic district. Sadly, as council pointed out, that option is immensely expensive. The next best alternative was simply to designate Haynes Bridge Road as Highway 9, thus moving some traffic out of the historic district from Old Milton Parkway to Academy Street.
Blueprint
Blueprint North Fulton, the master plan for this area of the county, was discussed by members of the North Fulton Community Improvement District, a consortium of commercial property owners who are trying to keep all the cities of North Fulton working together to create a cohesive area. To that end, the Alpharetta portion of the study, which follows Ga. 400, was divided into three separate “nodes” in order to deal with each section better. The North Point Mall Area, Old Milton Parkway Area and the Windward Parkway Area will all be addressed, with the ultimate goals being to maintain the high quality of life in North Fulton, facilitate more balanced, sustainable development, create more walkable, high-character places and establish a list of public improvement projects to be prioritized for CID funding.
The CID will return to the city with their findings at a later date.
OSSI
Alpharetta police announced that they were well on their way toward implementing another new toy. The OSSI Computer Aided Dispatch and Police Records Management System was expected to be partially up and running by April 21. This system integrates the emergency services with a more intuitive design and better software and tracks statistics and data while using GIS to locate vehicles.
The system is 90 percent installed and officers began training last week. The CAD system is expected to be fully operational on May 28 and the RMS will be fully online June 3. A command and control center currently being built is expected to open September 1.