Transportation Town Hall Meeting is Tonight

Gwinnett County residents will have the opportunity to offer opinions regarding a regional transportation project list during tonight's telephone town hall meeting.

Members of the Atlanta Regional Transportation Roundtable executive committee are currently in the process of whittling down a 445-item, $22.9 billion "unconstrained" list of suggested transportation projects into a "constrained" list that can be funded by the $7 billion in revenue a proposed 1 percent transportation sales tax is expected to generate for regional projects.

Next July, voters will be asked to approve the penny sales tax to fund a specified list of regional transportation projects. The tax, if passed, will remain in effect for 10 years.

The roundtable is soliciting citizen input regarding the project list during a series of telephone town hall meetings. According to an announcement on the Atlanta Regional Roundtable website, over one million people will be called over six evenings and asked to participate in a phone discussion with local roundtable representatives. Gwinnett’s telephone town hall meeting is scheduled for tonight, June 20 at 7:15 p.m. To participate, residents may be randomly called or may choose to call 1-888-886-6603. The PIN for the Gwinnett call is 16724.

Local governments, transit agencies and other organizations from the 10-county metro Atlanta region submitted their suggestions for the transportation special purpose local option sales tax or TSPLOST project list earlier this year. The City of Dacula including replacing/widening the Dacula Road Bridge at Highway 29, widening Harbins Road to four lanes, extending Sugarloaf Parkway from Highway 316 to State Route 20 and building a Winder Highway bike trail from Dacula to Athens. Only one of the City of Dacula's projects, the $301 million Sugarloaf Parkway extension, made the unconstrained list.

Two also made the cut. A $50.7 million project to widen Hamilton Mill Road from two to four lanes from Buford Highway to Braselton Highway made the list as did a $160.2 million project to widen Braselton Highway from Highway 20 to the Barrow County line.

For more information, visit the Atlanta Regional Roundtable website.