REIMAGINING THE CHATTAHOOCHEE

125-Mile Greenway Project Promises To Transform Metro Atlanta’s Grand River

For millennia it has flowed from a spring in the Blue Ridge Mountains, meandering through the piedmont on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Indigenous peoples began inhabiting its banks in at least 1,000 B.C., and it serves as a primary source of drinking water for metro Atlanta today. The Chattahoochee River has long been a crucial natural resource for Georgians—most of whom only encounter it when they drive over a bridge.

That’s the conundrum of the Chattahoochee—vital, yet overlooked at the same time. On some stretches of the river, particularly south of Atlanta, public access is sparse bordering on nonexistent. Launch a kayak or canoe, and it will be a while before you’ll have a chance to get out. In many minds the Chattahoochee remains associated with litter, or the giant floating frat parties of the 1970s. When Walt Ray first began talking to people about the Chattahoochee seven years ago, he discovered that some believed Alan Jackson had made up the name in his country hit from 1993.

“I learned early on that the Chattahoochee had a big PR issue,” said Ray, of the Georgia office of the Trust for Public Land.

But what if the Chattahoochee didn’t have spotty access outside of the northern Atlanta suburbs? What if it had pathways, campsites, trailheads, river crossings, water access points and ways to explore and interact with nature? What if it had connections to numerous tributary trails that wound their way into neighborhoods throughout the metro area? What if it had a continuous 125-mile greenway that stretched from Buford Dam to Chattahoochee Bend State Park, much of it hugging the river’s edge, and opening up the waterway to more people than ever before?

That was the idea that Cobb County, the city of Atlanta and the Trust for Public Land initially brought to Mike Alexander of the Atlanta Regional Commission, seeking $1.5 million in funding for a 100-mile study on the project. “It really was audacious,” recalled Alexander, ARC’s chief operating officer. “You don’t typically do corridor studies that link 100 miles. But anytime you get multiple local governments coming together to work on something, well, that’s something we’re going to take very seriously.”

Now, it’s much more than a study—what’s known as the Chattahoochee RiverLands is a fully-formed initiative that aims to transform how Georgians interact with the river. It’s still very much a work in progress and it will take years, if not generations, to complete. But the work of linking together stretches of public and private land is well underway, a number of local municipalities have shown robust support, and a 2.4-mile pilot project along the river in Cobb County is scheduled to open in November.

“I grew up in the Midwest, and we had lakes and rivers everywhere I turned. When I moved to Atlanta about 10 years ago, I was like, ‘Where's my lake? Where's my river? Where do I go for kayaking, or where I can just float around?’ And the Chattahoochee River is really it,” said Erin Thoresen, a Transportation Planner with the engineering firm Gresham Smith, which has been involved with the Chattahoochee RiverLands project. “Frankly, for a long time, the river was not a place where you wanted to be. But it’s come a long way in the last 25 years. And it is this resource that lets people escape the city and connect with nature in a different way.”

‘THAT’S A RIVER, RIGHT?’

If the Chattahoochee RiverLands project has a godfather, it’s Ray, a landscape architect and urban planner hired by the Georgia office of the Trust for Public Land seven years ago to oversee activation and conversation along the entire 285-mile length of the Chattahoochee in the Peach State. He spent that first year meeting with “anyone who had the word ‘Chattahoochee’ in their title,” he recalled, and realized the river had not only access inequality issues, but also a somewhat outdated reputation.

“The northern suburbs have pretty decent access,” said Ray, whose title is Chattahoochee Program Director. “But honestly, if you get to Atlanta south, good luck finding the Chattahoochee River. People would ask me, ‘The Chattahoochee—that’s a river, right? Is that in Georgia?’ Some people loved it, some people thought the Chattahoochee River was polluted and gross. So that kind of redefined my efforts. I decided I wanted to reintroduce metro Atlanta to its river.”

The initial study funded by ARC covered primarily the 100 miles of the river that flowed through metro Atlanta. But over time, in Ray’s mind, the plan grew more ambitious. Why not a greenway meandering for 125 miles from Buford Dam to Chattahoochee State Park, traveling through seven counties and 19 cities along the way? Why not connect all the parks that already exist, creating one continuous public realm that’s accessible through other trail networks, opening it to one million people living within a 15-minute bicycle ride?

“We’ve done a good job as a region hiding the river behind airports, railroad tracks, sewer treatment plants and industrial parks. The river has some hard-to-penetrate land uses along it,” Ray said. “But just across the road, there are thousands of rooftops. So how do we connect all those people who live and work near the river, to where they can play along the river? Tributary trails, like the Silver Comet Trail and the Proctor Creek Greenway in Atlanta, the Big Creek Greenway that goes from Roswell to Alpharetta. That’s how we get all these people to the river through these difficult land uses.”

That’s the master plan, at least, which currently exists as a yellow line on a map. The first real proof of concept is underway in Cobb County, in the form of the 2.4-mile pathway that’s officially known as Phase I of the Chattahoochee River Trail Pedestrian Improvements Project. Thorsen’s team at Gresham Smith— which partnered with SCAPE Landscape Architecture of New York—conducted the initial planning, took stock of the topography, and even incorporated some Civil War archaeology sites.

The process required a little inventiveness, employing some ideas Gresham Smith used while building bridges and boardwalks in the Florida Keys. “It was really a testing ground for all these ideas,” Thoresen said. “And then we kind of took what we thought was kind of the best approach to creating a natural, wooded, scenic experience. We knew this was a small site, but we didn’t want it to be a trail to nowhere, so it connects to the walking paths in Cobb County Park off Discovery Boulevard. But we also knew that eventually, it would connect to much larger trails on either end. So we wanted to use that as an opportunity to showcase the nature and the surrounding settings.”

And while the Cobb County trail is designed to be a small example of the larger Chattahoochee RiverLands project, there are bound to be variations over the course of the trail’s proposed 125-mile length—due to differences in topography and river access, but also because local municipalities are each responsible for their individual sections. The connective tissue will be signage that is consistent throughout, letting visitors know that they’re in the Chattahoochee RiverLands, just like the white blazes that always identify the Appalachian Trail.

“We tried our best to strike a balance that was flexible, yet kind of kept it within the spirit of the overall vision, knowing that John's Creek is going to do things differently than the city of Atlanta, which is going to do things differently than Chattahoochee Hills,” Thoresen said. “But all of those areas need to be able to kind of speak to one another. I think that's why the signage piece was so important—that component of the design guideline will be one of the signature ways to kind of tie all the different segments together.”

EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS

The scope of the Chattahoochee RiverLands project is immense, and not just because of the proposed 125-mile length of the greenway and all the other elements—water access points, trailheads, river crossings, restrooms, campsites and so on—that go along with it. There’s also the not-so-small task of knitting together the numerous municipalities that lie along the greenway’s route, a task which falls to ARC.

As Alexander explains it, a certain percentage of federal gasoline taxes go back to states and regional commissions, with some of those funds specifically earmarked for transportation alternatives like walking and biking paths. ARC then allocates those dollars in the form of grants to help individual municipalities fund their respective sections of the Chattahoochee RiverLands, with those municipalities needing to meet specific performance goals along the way.

The response thus far has “very much exceeded my expectations,” Alexander said.

“Cobb County, Gwinnett County, most of the cities in Fulton County, DeKalb County, Henry County, Clayton, they all have their own trails plans that they're implementing,” he added. “Gwinnett’s is very audacious—if you look at the budget summary for Gwinnett County, it says this year, they're doing a $2.3 million trail study, and their goal is to build 300 miles of trails. So they're doing it as well, and we get to play this coordinating role with this goal of having a regionally connected system.”

In March, the program received another financial boost: $3 million from the Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Program, a state fund that offers grants to cities, counties and nonprofits to build parks and protect wildlife habitats. The funds come from tax revenues on outdoor equipment, and will be used to expand the current 2.4-mile pilot project in Cobb County into a 100-mile section of the Chattahoochee RiverLands with a projected opening date of 2026.

The greenway’s proposed route will travel for 20 miles within the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, in some cases using existing trails. It will employ existing bike infrastructure that runs along 49 miles of roadways, 39 miles that are along existing easements, and 38 miles along parks and greenspaces. According to the Trust for Public Land, 70 percent of the trail’s proposed length—approximately 87 miles—is within land that is currently publicly owned.

So what about the 30 percent on privately held land? “There are five or six slots we need to get. We've talked to the property owners, and let them know we’ve drawn a line on their map,” Ray said. “We ask, are you like, ‘Oh no, over my dead body,’ or ‘Maybe, let’s talk?’ So we're in contact with them. The nice thing is I'm not in a hurry. There's enough public land that I can play with that I don't have to put pressure on private individuals yet. And this will take a generation or two to build—we can wait for people to inherit and have maybe a more positive outlook on the project. There's no hurry.”

Indeed, there’s no hard-and-fast timeline on the completion of the full 125 miles. “There are going to be some communities that are more successful in implementing the vision than others,” Thoresen said. “There may be places where they do nothing for 25, 35 or 45 years or at any point. But the Trust for Public Land spearheading some of the implementation gives me a lot of hope. Their philanthropic resources and their ability to bring people together is really helpful to this process.”

Georgia is no stranger to doing trail work at scale, Alexander said, citing the 61-mile Silver Comet Trail as an example. He said the PATH Foundation, a nonprofit that helps create trail systems in Georgia, uses a machine that can pour a mile of concrete trail per day after ground preparation. “Think about that,” he added. “They are pouring concrete right now on the Silver Comet, heading toward the city of Atlanta, and crossing the river at South Atlanta Road. I’ll be able to leave Capitol View, get on the BeltLine, and go up to the Chattahoochee in the not-too-far future.”

What about Ray, who has been shepherding this program for seven years now? The Chattahoochee RiverLands project is massive, he admits, but it also has a lot of momentum behind it—including more than $250 million in investment from public and private sources. The finish line is years in the distance, if it’s ever reached. But the project is alive, and funds are flowing, and a number of area municipalities have responded with gusto. Right now, that counts as progress.

“My goal is to establish this enough so when we say ‘Chattahoochee RiverLands,’ people know what we mean,” Ray said. “And you people who come next, who are making these decisions after me—I've given you a good go-by, so carry on.”