After county engineers found some problems with a piece of property on Harrison Drive that was supposed to be home to new community park, Hall County commissioners have gone back to the drawing board.
Commissioner Jeff Stowe, the representative for District 4, confirmed Monday that he and fellow commissioners are looking for an alternate property to the 21.98 acre site that stretches between Harrison Drive, Athens Street and Interstate 985.
Stowe said engineers found some issues that would have made developing that property cost-prohibitive.
"There's a small lake with a dam [on that property], and our engineers determined the lake would need to be drained and the cost of restoring the creek bed presented several unknowns," Stowe said.
He said there was a leak in the dam that could prove problematic.
In addition, an environmental study lead the county to further explore a part of the property that had been packed with trash.
"It required some borings, and while it didn't come back with anything toxic, there was about an acre and a half to two acres of the site that basically, would have to be remediated," Stowe said. "If we were going to build anything on top of it, the dirt would have to be pulled out, the debris would have to be removed and recompacted because if you built on top of it [as it is now], the debris would end up settling and having other issues."
Stowe said the engineering reports were finished in December and he and the other commissioners physically went to the site to look at it before making a decision to look for an alternate site for the park.
While Stowe knows his constituents in the area will be disappointed, he said he and the other commissioners remain committed to building a park in that area.
"I've already identified another site that we're starting to do some due diligence on," Stowe said.
He said he doesn't expect to lose much time on the project, since the original park site would have had to go through the deannexation process with the the city of Gainesville. Other properties that might be available are already in the county.
"I'm hoping in the next 45 to 60 days, we'll have an alternative to where we are going," Stowe said.
