DEMOREST — Demorest Mayor Rick Austin said he hopes courteous drivers will help alleviate a recent problem with downtown travel.
“One of the things that we did about three years ago was to move our city hall from the previous location where Sweet Breads Restaurant is located now and move into the old Community Bank & Trust building,” Austin said after Tuesday night’s work session. “A great move for us, because it freed up some retail space. It gives us a vault, and it also gives us a drive-through.”
But that move is not without its complications.
The relocation of city hall to a building with a drive-through window has created some traffic issues in the busy area.
Demorest City Hall is located just off Business 441 on the left side of Georgia Street from the intersection and has a drive-through window in an alley between city hall and the post office.
“It re-established a problem that used to happen in downtown Demorest on Georgia Street, with people going south on 441 turning onto Georgia Street trying to turn [left] into city hall to make drive-through water payments,” Austin said.
The problem on bill due dates is reminiscent of busy days when the bank was in operation downtown, with traffic backing up into Business 441.
Austin said he doesn’t want to see divider posts reinstalled to prevent left turns into the alley if they can be avoided.
“We had a conversation about how best to address people who are turning and who are coming out of Georgia Street turning onto 441, and what we might do, because sometimes cars end up being stuck in the middle of 441 and that leaves us with a little bit of a dangerous situation,” Austin said.
When the bank was in operation, the first block of Georgia Street off Business 441 was wider. A StreetScape project completed under the previous city administration increased the sidewalk area in front of Demorest Post Office, adjacent to city hall, and eliminated the parallel parking spaces located along Georgia Street.
“When StreetScape was done, there used to be on-street parking on the post office side,” Austin said. “The StreetScape, for whatever reason, decided to make the sidewalk area much larger and, to be honest with you, as downtown continues to grow, those areas become great congregation sites, great places to put outside dining, seating, those types of things, and those are important. But at the end of the day, we lost some parking spaces and that adds to the issue of trying to determine how we’re going to deal with people turning into and out of city hall.”
Councilman Sean Moore, participating in Tuesday night’s work session by telephone, asked if the StreetScape could be modified to allow for either a turn lane or some other means of traffic relief downtown.
Austin said that’s another possibility city officials could explore if necessary.
“While government oftentimes provides solutions, I think the solution to this is probably in just people being very aware of their surroundings and realizing that sometimes people are trying to make left turns into city hall to make a payment, and if they can look in their rearview mirror and see that cars are stuck in 441 that they might perhaps pull forward, make a bit of a U-turn – which our police chief has said as long as it’s done safely we don’t have a problem with – and allow people to get out of that street,” Austin said.
“We just ask people to, in the meantime, whether we implement some type of solution to that or not, to be aware and to be courteous to the drivers that are around them as we deal with a lot of people that come in and utilize that very valuable service of our drive-in window to make a water payment,” Austin said.
Also discussed at this week’s work session was a tall speed hump on the other side of Georgia Street near Demorest Police Department.
“We’ve got a speed bump that tends to be construed as being a bit aggressive, and I would agree, so what we talked about were a couple of different potential solutions to soften that speed bump out,” Austin said. “We all agree that that speed bump needs to be there. We talked about turning that speed bump into more of a speed table that’s less aggressive and still slows traffic down, and at the same time provides the safety, particularly to parents and children as they park and try to access our city park.”
