441
59
75
GEORGIA STATE EDITION
Cornella 19
A Supplement to:
Rome 85 27
Athens 441
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20
Madison Augusta
85
20
Griffin 1
129
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75
La Grange
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301
185 19
16
Dublin
Swainsboro Oak Park
Columbus
Statesboro
341 441 16
Lyons Americus
April 17 2013 Vol. XV • No. 8
301
1
82
Dorchester
341
Cuthbert
75
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84
Douglas Tifton
82
95
82
Blakely
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319
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1 441
Your Georgia Connection: Rich Olivier, Atlanta, GA • 1-800-409-1479
New Infrastructure Improvements to Traverse State Two major Coastal Georgia mobility projects — a long-anticipated new Back River Bridge between Savannah and South Carolina and the widening of a portion of the Golden Isles Parkway at Brunswick — along with $15 million of interstate highway resurfacings in northwest Georgia are among 19 infrastructure improvement projects announced April 5 by the Georgia Department of Transportation. The Back River Bridge project — on the
U.S. Highway 17/State Route 404 Spur crossing from Hutchinson Island to South Carolina just north of Savannah — will replace the existing, narrow 59-year-old span with a significantly wider bridge featuring 8-ft. (2.4 m) shoulders in each direction. Shoulder lanes will allow for faster clearance of breakdowns and incidents, which now often require closing the entire bridge. Some 19,000 vehicles utilize the bridge each day and that number is expected
Senior Center Work Starts By Cindy Riley CEG CORRESPONDENT
Two decades after it was first envisioned, construction has finally begun on an $8 million Senior Life Enrichment Center in Albany, Ga. The Southwest Georgia (SOWEGA) Council on Aging’s new facility includes an educational area, activity rooms Man lifts are being used by all trades, along with and more than 60 office boom trucks at the exterior for steel erection. spaces and is being built at property for the organization to use as the the site of the former Byne Memorial site of the planned Center, which involves Baptist Church property in Dougherty an adaptive reuse of a three-story school County. renovated to accommodate the project’s “I am most looking forward to seeing needs, along with an addition being conpeople come to the Center, their reaction structed on the front of the building. and excitement about the building and the “Site and building demolition is comopportunity to participate in all of the plete for the most part, and site underactivities,” said Kay Hind, the Council’s ground storm, sanitary and water systems executive director. “Even though this will are complete,” said Jake Reese, project be the completion of a dream, it’s also the manager of general contractor LRA beginning of a new era in senior program- Constructors. “The existing building inteming. I’m excited about having the facili- rior wall framing and mechanical, electrities to provide for the expansion of exist- cal and plumbing rough-in is roughly 80 ing services, as well as new and innovative percent complete overall. Drywall is scheduled to start at the first floor midprograms.” In 2008, Phoebe Putney Memorial April. The new addition foundation, strucHospital donated $1.2 million worth of see SOWEGA page 6
The Back River Bridge project will replace the existing, narrow 59-year-old span with a significantly wider bridge featuring 8-ft. (2.4 m) shoulders in each direction.
to increase to as many as 35,000 in coming years. The new structure will be built by Balfour Beatty Infrastructure Inc., of Fleming Island, Fla., at a cost of $14.4 million. Federal funds will cover 80 percent of the project’s cost; Georgia and South Carolina will proportionally share the remainder. The existing bridge will remain in service until the new structure opens, scheduled to occur by January 2016. Among other new projects announced are: • A $7.9 million widening and extension of 2 mi. (3.2 km) of the Golden Isles Parkway/State Route 25 Spur just west of Interstate Highway 95 at Brunswick from one lane in each direction to two. Plant Improvement Co. Inc., of Brunswick, Ga., will perform the work, which also includes reconstruction of the new route’s intersec-
tion with State Route 99. Construction should begin this summer and is scheduled for completion in January 2015; • Two contracts for resurfacing nearly 16 mi. (25.7 km) of Interstate Highways 59 and 24 in Dade County. Both jobs, valued at a total of $14.8 million, will be done by C.W. Matthews Contracting Co. Inc., of Marietta, Ga. Work is to be complete on both by next March; and • A $1.1 million safety and mobility improvement project in Columbia County — the construction of a roundabout at the intersection of Wrightsboro Road/State Route 223 and Appling-Harlem Road/U.S. Highway 221/State Route 47. Pittman Construction Company, of Conyers, Ga., is the contractor; completion is scheduled for next March.
New Falcons Home Near? ATLANTA (AP) The city of Atlanta’s economic development arm has voted to approve issuing more than $200 million in bonds to help finance a new stadium for the Atlanta Falcons. WSB-TV reported that Invest Atlanta voted to approve the bonds. One
board member, Julian Bene, opposed the bonds, saying the stadium would create “surprisingly few’’ jobs. Approval from Invest Atlanta sets in motion the process of preparing bonds to sell to investors and approving various agreements between the city, the team and the Georgia World
Congress Center. The deal calls for city hotel-motel taxes to cover about 20 percent of the expected $1 billion construction costs. Negotiations to buy the land for the stadium just south of the existing Georgia Dome are ongoing.