During the citizens comments portion of the meeting, Carol Jones spoke before the board and asked- why has Spalding County animal shelter been dropped from getting free spaying and neutering for our animals? She also asked- Is the county Marshall's position vacant now, and if so, how much does it pay? The former Marshall was recently fired for shooting a small Boston bulldog in the owner's front yard. He is under investigation. Residents cannot find out anything on your county web site.
There was no reply to any of her questions by the commissioners.
In other action, the board was asked to approve new guidelines on codes of ethics and conflicting interests. After some vague discussions, Gwen Taylor explained what this was about. Taylor said- The chair of our elections board is also contracted to oversee all our county computer work and makes millions of dollars off the county, which could be a conflict of interest. The board voted to pass one part of the ethics proposal but table a 2nd part with conflict of interest, until it could be re-written.
The board heard several proposals given by Shawn Fleet on future GDOT road projects regarding the Hwy 155 area in east Spalding County. Fleet said the goal is to get truck traffic out of downtown Griffin.
One idea is to widen Hwy 155 from McDonough coming into Griffin, and have it meet Hwy 16 / Arthur Bolton Parkway. With this, truck traffic would still flow thru Griffin to get west on Hwy 16.
Another route may take a west turn north of Griffin, cross Hwy 3 and go out to Hwy 16 west of downtown to bypass the congested downtown area.
And another idea was to create a southern bypass near Orchard Hill area, to cut thru the southern side of downtown and intersect with Hwy 16 west of Griffin. All ideas are under study and likely won't get started until 2034 and completed by 2050.
Fleet said the project was taking in to account the new proposed Griffin airport, which GDOT brought to a halt in Jan. 2016. The new airport project was begun in 2011 and was supposed to be open to air flights by June of 2020 but GDOT drug their feet and basically stopped the project since 2016. All of the land for the 500-acre airport has not been purchased yet. GDOT mandated that Griffin and Spalding County first invest $7mil of taxpayer’s money into starting up the new airport project, which they did, but GDOT has yet to provide the $60mil in promised FAA funds to the project.
No comments:
Post a Comment