Naughty or Nice?

Denise Starling, executive director of Livable Buckhead, gives us the dirt on PATH400 progress.
I have some great news to share with you today – it appears that PATH400 was on Santa’s NICE list this year! How do I know? Well, we just received the best kind of present – the one you never want to return – cold hard cash – and a lot of it! 

Just how much cash you might ask? (How rude – didn’t your Mama tell you it isn’t nice to talk about money?) Oh well – let’s be tacky anyway.

He gave us enough to finish this bad boy up (assuming there are no surprises and the costs stay right where we expect them to be.) Yep – it looks like we have cobbled together the final funding we need to complete construction of the original 5.2 miles (from Loridans south to the Beltline)! I say “cobbled together” because we scored on two major fronts:

• First – thanks to Howard Shook’s efforts to work with Mayor Reed and the Atlanta City Council, he secured a commitment to put our $5 million into the second year of the TSPLOST which makes them real!
• Second – we decided to bite the bullet and pursue federal funds and thanks to the Atlanta Regional Commission and the Georgia Department of Transportation, scored an additional $6.8 million to finish out the construction and an additional $240,000 to design the extension north to Sandy Springs. Now, I say “bite the bullet” for a reason – this funding has lots of strings – the most significant of which being they are SLOW because they have a lot more red tape with them. This means it will take longer to get the project done, but for this kind of money I think it just might be worth it to sit still and look pretty. There are a few final hurdles we have to clear to get the federal funds all official – which should be done by February.