Hall County officials are attempting to move forward with a study that would look into the possibility of a bypass road connecting several major roads in the north end of the county.
The "North Hall Bypass", as it is being referred to in documents, would span east to west from Sardis Road to Highway 365, crossing other major thoroughfares like Thompson Bridge Road and Cleveland Highway. A preliminary corridor study was originally planned to be conducted in Fiscal Year 2022, but the Gainesville Hall Metropolitan Planning Organization's Citizens Advisory Committee recommended that the study be moved up to 2019.
The GHMPO's Technical Coordinating Committee voted on Tuesday to put the study into its draft of the Fiscal Year 2019 Unified Planning Work Programs. That decision, though, did not come without a lengthy discussion.
Officials said that they believed the $200,000 study could be funded with the help of a 20 percent match from participating municipalities. Gainesville, Oakwood and Flowery Branch city officials said they believed the Hall County government should be the only municipality to pay for the study, since the project would not span any roads within any of those cities.
"I can't commit the city Oakwood to pay cash for a North Hall bypass," Oakwood City Manager Stan Brown said. "I'm just looking at other studies that have gone forth, we've had a request that the local jurisdiction that's going to pay the match basically adopt a resolution by their governing body to commit to the money and then it comes through this process...I guess I'm trying to rationalize why we would do this one different."
Hall County Planning Director Srikanth Yamala said he didn't have enough details about how the study would be financed to answer the questions of other officials at the meeting. He asked that an item seeking funding for the study be removed from the committee's agenda at the Tuesday meeting and eventually a motion was approved to adopt the 2019 draft plans with the study included.
Before the vote, several citizens at the meeting spoke, urging officials to push the project forward as quickly as possible.
"I think discussion of delaying something for three years on account of a few thousand dollars per jurisdiction seems bureaucracy getting in the way of taking important decisions for the quality of life for the citizens of Gainesville, and probably for other people in Hall County too," Gainesville resident Robin Terrell said.
Yamala said after the meeting that no early draw ups or concepts have been made, saying that even the size of the project is difficult to estimate at this time.
"We are in infancy stages here," Yamala said. "Until we do the real planning, you know, with engineers and planners, and the citizens of course, it's very hard to even forecast the magnitude of the project. I mean, you're talking about a new corridor stretching and connecting all the way to (Highway) 365."
He said he would have more details to offer the other local officials at the committee's next meeting on July 17.
