The Dirt on PATH400

Denise Starling, executive director of Livable Buckhead, gives us the dirt on PATH400 progress.

Today’s theme is fun… Well, fun for me but I’ll let you decide for yourself!

Party on the PATH

Special thanks to all of you party people who joined us to celebrate PATH400 at Party on the PATH on October 1st. We truly had a FUN time!

The 400-piece band was amazing, the food was fabulous, the drinks were tasty, and the weather was (believe it or not) totally perfect! Over 300 people supported the event, and we had a great crowd of friends and neighbors that came out. The best comment I heard that night was “Wow, there are so many people here I need to talk to!”. Oh, wait no – that wasn’t the best one. The BEST comment was “My wife wanted to move, but I told her no because I’m not giving up PATH400!”.  What more could this girl want to hear than those two things! I was in heaven!

BIG NEWS

If you were at Party on the PATH, then you are already in on my little secret. For the rest of you, I have some news to share! This edition of The Dirt started out as “fun” so allow me to set the stage.

I initially thought we had the budget totally covered to continue the trail through to Sandy Springs, but ALAS, that was not the case (because that would make things too easy…certainly not fun). We designed the section of trail from Loridans Drive to Johnson Ferry/Glenridge as a single project because we had to have logical termini.

NERD ALERT: Logical termini means a project must start and end in places that make sense. The boundary line between two cities in the middle of a creek is not one of those places. 

Once we completed the design, we broke it into two pieces for construction – because why not make it more “fun” by having two adjoining sections built totally separate and potentially by different contractors 😁

Are the voices in your head saying “this makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER”. Of course they are, but it is the way it has to be done because I said so. (If you are a parent, you know what that means – I have no rational answer to give you to explain that one.)

To double the “fun”, the split between the two sections wasn’t made right on the actual city limits line. A small piece of the path that’s in Sandy Spring’s portion to build is physically located in the Atlanta limits. Obviously, Sandy Springs isn’t going to pay for that, so we had a pretty significant “miss” on the Atlanta side of the equation. The overall math wasn’t wrong; we just got the short end of the stick on the piggy bank raid. Basically, that meant I had to find some more money – about $400K more.

The good news: I am happy to report that what started out as “fun” ended up as actual FUN as we have received some amazing support from our partners at the City of Atlanta! Justin Cutler, Commissioner of Atlanta’s Parks and Recreation Department, Solomon Caviness, Commissioner of Atlanta DOT, and Councilman Howard Shook all came together to divvy up the needed funding amongst themselves and close our gap. Seeing support like that is definitely in the FUN category!

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

Hard Hat Tour

Coming up on October 27th, we have the next edition of our monthly construction tours. These are one of my favorite parts of my job! I love any excuse to get out there, see what is going on and show the trail off to you guys. So, come on out and join me for more FUN!

Date: Friday, October 27th
Time: 10:00 a.m.
Location: 684 Mountain Drive

Well, I’ve had about all the “fun” and FUN I can handle for this edition. See you again next month… same bat time, same bat channel!

Signing off.