Lawrenceville city planners are trying to figure out how to turn their relatively sleepy county seat into a bustling college town.

The maps spread across a board room table Wednesday at Lawrenceville City Hall showed the path city leaders think Georgia Gwinnett College will take as it expands its campus. The City Council and downtown development authority figure the school is coming south, across Ga. 316, toward the city's historic downtown center.

Planners want to widen roads linking the city and the campus. Collins Hill and Northdale roads may become wide avenues if the city can find about $7 million to acquire right of way. Then the chronically jammed streets could become four-lane roads.

"Now we need to find the money," Mayor Rex Millsaps said.

The city may consider requesting grant money from the Atlanta Regional Commission's Livable Centers Initiative, but funding may come from closer to home.

"It looks like SPLOST to me," Millsaps added, referring to local sales taxes used for school and infrastructure improvement.

Along with bike paths and potential zoning for an entertainment district between the school and the city center, the group planned to leave room for a multimodal train station near the intersection of Depot and North Clayton streets. The station is part of the long-planned, long-delayed "Brain Train," a commuter rail link through Lawrenceville between the University of Georgia at Athens and Georgia Tech.

The train project requires millions of dollars in state and federal funding to move forward. Local leaders like the idea, particularly Lawrenceville-based real estate developer Emory Morsberger.

The gathering among some City Council members and the city's Downtown Development Authority was more of a bull session than a formal planning meeting.

While Lawrenceville's planners appear to expect the school's development to come south to meet them, Georgia Gwinnett College's development plans aren't quite that clear, its leaders say.

The school might be able to see swaths of land between the highway to the courthouse square under it's care 20 years from now, but there's nothing in the plans right now for acquisitions south of Ga. 316, said Gordon Harrison, vice president for advancement and president of the Georgia Gwinnett College foundation.

"We are not attempting to acquire the land right now," he said. "There's other land around that we would love to acquire, but [financial] realities are there."

Still, there's clearly a need for the community to add more amenities for students, faculty and staff at the college, given its projected rate of growth, he said. The school has about 1,000 students right now. College administrators are planning for as many as 12,000 students at the school in five years.

Beyond the basics like water and power, traffic could become a nightmare if it isn't addressed right now, Harrison said.

"If they don't fix it, we're going to be walking up and down [Ga.] 316 and walking to Lawrenceville in a few years, because we won't be able to drive it."