City paid $3.25M, but Route may be open soon
ALPHARETTA, GA. – The last piece of Westside Parkway, the major collector that mirrors to Northpoint Parkway on the east side of Ga. 400, could be open by the end of the year, it was announced at the Monday night Alpharetta City Council meeting.
The key artery parallels Ga. 400 and Northpoint Parkway handling thousands of cars on its four-lane with median through the heart of the business district.
But its effectiveness has been stymied several years because the link between Old Milton Parkway and Windward Parkway has not opened. The road is 95 percent completed but the city could not get its hands on it because the property was hog-tied.
Only 1.25 miles lay unfinished, but the road had been caught up in the bankruptcy of Prospect Park – now called Avalon by its new owners North American Properties – until the deal announced Nov. 28.
Part of the trouble lay not with the 1 mile of road North American owned, but with the quarter-mile stretch that still belonged to developer Stan Thomas, head of Thomas Enterprises that went bust trying to get Prospect Park off the ground.
"That stretch of the road and the 10 acres that surround it belonged to him and not his company," said Alpharetta City Administrator Bob Regus. "So we had to negotiate that deal with him separately."
The city paid $3.25 million for the 10 acres, but it was not such a bad deal for the city, Regus said.
"If we had condemned it, we would have had to take the whole 10 acres anyway, and it contains some valuable infrastructure besides the road. The cost of that would have been part of a condemnation," he said.
It contains the detention pond for the entire now-Avalon project and an expensive Con/span Bridge System culvert over the pond.
Alpharetta City Attorney Sam Thomas said in effect the city was paying for all of the improvements Stan Thomas (no relation) had made before the project went belly-up.
North American Properties agreed to turn over the road to the city in return for Impact Fee credits in an amount to be determined through an agreed-upon formula for the value of the road and the right of way.
The city got some help with the sticker shock of Stan Thomas portion, though. The North Fulton Community Improvement District will kick in $789,000 of the cost and the Ga. Department of Transportation has set aside $800,000 for finishing up the "missing link" to Westside Parkway.
With the completed Westside, Alpharetta will have four main north-south arteries – Westside, Northpoint, Ga. 400 and Ga. 9 (Main Street), giving the city a grid that includes east-west routes of Windward, Old Milton Parkway, Haynes Bridge Road and Mansell Road.
The Asphalt was barely dry on Northpoint Parkway before the city and major developer-property owners on the west side of Ga. 400 began huddling to build Westside Parkway in 1996. The engineering and rights of way for the most part had been completed, making it an attractive, ready-made project for GDOT.
Still, it has taken years as the road was completed in phases with the Mansell-Haynes Bridge link completed first.
Labels: Alpharetta, westside parkway
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Brian Vanderhoff @ 8:42 AM
