Pardon our growth
Romans and visitors to Rome who have driven down Shorter Avenue or South Broad Street in recent weeks have had to deal with detours and delays as contractors for Georgia Power work on the utility’s Grid Reinvestment Program. The company is investing billions of dollars across the state to try to prevent power outages in areas that have been identified as in need of an upgrade.
Georgia Power’s relatively new Northwest Regional Manager Tony Ferguson says the work being down in the general vicinity of three substations in Rome should be complete by late Spring 2023.
Statewide, the statewide project will continue through 2030, but once the contractors are finished with the local work next year, the Rome portion of the project will be complete.
Aside from some of the grumbling about detours, the most frequent comment I’ve heard from folks is that they wish the telephone lines and cable lines could also be taken underground and a lot of those ugly overhead utility lines would go away.
Alas, that’s just not the case.
It is expected to be the case in the West Third Street/North Fifth Avenue known as the River District when a streetscape project funded by the 2017 SPLOST is completed.
That will be well beyond next spring as the design for that streetscape, being done by Pond & Associates, is still in the design phase.
Some of the merchants along the West Third and North Fifth corridors have been grumbling politely about the water and sewer line work that has been taking place on those streets. The good news is that the water and sewer work will be completed early in 2023. The bad news, for the merchants anyway, is that once the real streetscape work starts, the slight disruptions caused by the water work could potentially pale in comparison to new sidewalk work and relocation of those utility lines.
It’s the small price we pay for progress and beautification.
If only Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, or Leroy “Ed” Parsons (I’ll bet you’ll have to Google the latter) had known years ago that we’d all be doing everything wirelessly!
It won’t be long before the Georgia Department of Transportation puts out bids for the widening of Second Avenue from the Oostanaula River bridge a block off Broad Street to a point just north of the Turner McCall Boulevard and Martha Berry Boulevard intersection. The bidding is expected to take place later this fall and if that timetable holds true, and the bids come is somewhere in the general vicinity of the GDOT engineers’ estimates, that work could begin sometime after the first of the year.
You get the idea that things are beginning to pop in Rome.
And a lot of it is going to be focused in that River District of West Third Street and North Fifth Avenue out to Turner McCall Boulevard.
Don’t forget that it should not be too long before the Four Stones Real Estate Group ( I think they’ve actually changed their name) is going to start construction of their mixed-use commercial/retail/residential development between West Third Street and the Oostanaula River levee.
That’s going to be a game changer for the Greater Rome downtown community. It promises to bring somewhere between 250 and 300 residential units along with heretofore unseen and, for Rome, unimagined arts and entertainment opportunities as well.
Most of the developers in that group have had had ties to the Chick-fil-A conglomerate, which means that it will be well thought out and constructed in a way that should really transform the area between downtown and the Floyd Medical Center, excuse me, Atrium Health Floyd campus.
And then there is the plethora of residential construction that is wedged in the pipeline. I really believe that the proposed redevelopment of the triangle area between North Fifth Avenue and Martha Berry Boulevard may not happen as quickly as some folks might have imagined. Similarly, I’m not sure when those huge residential developments out Chulio Road and near the intersection of US 411 and the bypass east of Rome will get started. I’m guessing later rather than sooner.
It’s amazing to me how Rome got the word out about its housing shortage, coupled with the subsequent response from out-of-town developers.
I asked some of our local real estate gurus at a Rotary meeting this past week where all the new folks are going to come from. All over the place was basically the answer. Over the last several months I’ve spoken with a number of folks who have used the World Wide Web, and Zillow, to name one website in particular, to find Rome.
Seems to me that a lot of folks are moving to the southeast to get away from the high tax, cold weather climate. Rome is ideally situated, just far enough away from Atlanta, to be a very popular destination for folks. That’s a good thing for sure.
Shoot, I haven’t even mentioned the Varsity coming to town!
Saddle up folks, the next five years are gonna be quite the ride.