Mayor: ‘It is our time’
Construction is booming in Adairsville, a town that finds itself in a sweet spot between major cities.
Construction is booming in Adairsville, a town that finds itself in a sweet spot between major cities.
Adairsville finds itself in a sweet spot off I-75 halfway between Atlanta and Chattanooga. The city is experiencing a mini-boom in commercial and residential construction activity in addition to the widening of Ga. 140 from northern Floyd County to Interstate 75. “It is our time, we’re ready for growth,” said Mayor Kenneth Carson.
The mayor said the combination of good planning, led by City Manager Pam Madison, and a general turn-around of the economy have played key roles in the growth spurt the city is seeing now.
Carson also said the opening of the massive new Shaw carpet tile plant has helped put the city on the map of economic developers.
“There are a lot of jobs coming to Bartow County,” Carson said. “We started doing capital projects (several years ago) preparing our infrastructure for growth. We got a GEFA loan to upgrade our sewer capacity to 2 million gallons a day,” Carson said of the Lewis Springs water source.
“We don’t even know what our capability for water is. Our infrastructure can more than handle the growth.”
The mayor said the
city has been systematically replacing sewer and storm water lines throughout the city. “We knew that things would start to grow again,” Carson
said. “If you don’t have growth you’ll become stagnated and you’ll cease to exist.”
Rome real estate developer and restaurateur Wayne Robinson has just started a new Bojangles’ in the North Bartow community. “Adairsville is just a good market that seems to be growing, and we’ve had a lot of requests out of my Calhoun store that drive from Adairsville, so I felt the demand was good enough to put a store there,” Robinson. “This is the very first of a new drivethrough concept.”
Robinson found a location right on U.S. 41 and expects to have a foundation poured and most of the building framed up by the end of this week. He said the new drivethrough concept will be totally different from drive-through-only restaurants on Redmond Circle in Rome and off U.S. 41 in Cartersville. “It is a little bit bigger and this is primarily all brick. It won’t look anything like the existing stores,” Robinson said. He hopes to have it open in earlyto mid-December.
A new Gordon Hospital physicians building will open around the same time. The new facility is located right on Ga. 140 about half a mile off I-75.
The new physician’s center will allow Gordon Hospital to expand its presence in Adairsville.
A strip has been cleared for potential development across Ga. 140 from the Gordon physicians center and is currently still on the market.
Rome’s Harbin Clinic has also broken ground for a new physician’s office building off U.S. 41 on the north side of town, just past the Food Lion shopping center.
Ben Simmons, the facilities manager for Harbin Clinic, said the Adairsville building is slated for completion in May and would host four health care providers. Carver and Carver personnel were on site last week doing foundationrelated plumbing work at the site.
Atlanta developer Price Muir has cleared a 220-acre site in the Georgia North Industrial Park, which sits off Ga. 140 less than a mile from the interstate.
When Muir acquired the property in the spring of 2016 he said one of the most attractive aspects of the tract is that it is flat. “You could almost go out there with an axe and a weed eater and get it pad ready,” Muir said in June of 2016.
That property has been sub-divided on the Bartow County tax records
with the 124 acres on the east side of the property — closer to the interstate — are listed as property of Adairsville Logistics Center LLC. The 95 acres closer to U.S. 41 is listed in another name, Ka-Bar Holdings LLC.
Adairsville Elementary School Principal Melissa Zarefoss is looking forward to being in a new school building in the heart of downtown Adairsville next year. The current facility houses 680 students and the new school is being constructed
to house up to 900.
“I would say that we will be at 750 by the end of next year. It’s going to grow pretty quick,” Zarefoss said. “We get new children on a regular basis.”
Residential construction, which ground to a halt a decade ago, has picked back up with a vengeance in a couple of subdivisions.
“I live in Cartersville, so driving by those areas I see what’s going on. New families are definitely moving this way.”