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May 2007
Lake Lanier at 50: Aging gracefully?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I made a wish a few weeks ago and it was granted.
It had been a hectic weekend. My daughter graduated from University of Georgia on Saturday (hooray!). We had out-of-town guests and all of the logistical planning and celebration that entails.
By the time Sunday (Mother’s Day) rolled around, my family asked me what I would like to do.
“I want to go and just sit and watch the water,” I replied.
So we gathered the ingredients for a picnic, headed for one of the parks beside Lake Lanier and set out lawn chairs. I sat and watched the water. All afternoon. Even waded a bit. It was wonderful.
I love the water — the sight of it, the sound of it.
I grew up enjoying the backwaters of the Chattahoochee River. Not Lake Lanier, which was created by the construction of the Buford Dam on the river, but further downstream near Columbus - places with names such as Bartlett’s Ferry and Goat Rock.
My family had a cabin - back when cabins were truly cabins and people rarely lived on the lake. Friends’ families had them as well, so many summers and weekends were spent sitting on wooden docks, swimming, dangling from rope swings, skiing and hanging on to big black inner tubes behind boats.
Before I was old enough for any of that, my family would concoct a bed in the bow of our ski boat with plump orange life jackets, and I would nap to the drone of the motor.
The variety of boats was less extensive then — inboard, outboard, sail, fishing or skiing, wooden or fiberglass, an occasional cabin cruiser or pontoon. There were no ocean-sized vessels, no Jet Skis or “personal watercraft vehicles” on the backwater.
The best part of the day was early or late, when few were in the water and the lake was smooth as glass.
I thought about all of this as I watched the activity on Lake Lanier. I thought about the time a few years ago when a friend took us out on his pontoon boat. Two monstrous vessels came racing up beside us, creating wakes that almost capsized us. I thought about friends who moved to Lake Lanier but won’t go out on weekends or holidays because of the crowd.
Still, despite the growth, the traffic, the noise, the lake wields magic.
Old-timers will tell you that Lake Lanier once was like my downstream memories. On some days, in some spots, it still is.
Lake Lanier turns 50 this year. On June 17, 1957 generators at Buford Dam produced their first electricity. A dedication ceremony was held Oct. 9 of that year. Since then, water levels have gone down and up. Usage has climbed. Development has soared.
The lake’s mission to provide water and power for the ever-growing Atlanta area is far more vital than the recreation it provides. But fun also is part of the lake’s heritage. As is the magic of sitting and watching the water.
What do you think? After 50 years is Lake Lanier aging gracefully?
Permalink | Comments (43) | Post your comment | Categories: Susan Gast
Do medians affect your shopping decisions?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We all have monster roads and means of dealing with them.
In Snellville, my monster is U.S. 78. My key to taming it is how I handle left turns and reversible lanes.
Reversible lanes can work if everyone knows how to use them. They don’t. So I stay out of them. I also avoid turning left onto U.S. 78 except at traffic lights or at 2 a.m. when volume has slowed to a trickle. I’ll turn right and find a place to turn around instead.
Considering these behaviors, I don’t think I will be affected much by the medians planned for the road. I’m already doing what medians force drivers to do.
The construction phase of those medians, however, is a different matter. The roadwork will affect everyone.
Bids for the work were opened last week. If the review of the apparent low bid — submitted by C.W. Matthews Contracting Co. at $31.5 million - finds no glitches, construction should begin this summer near the west end of the project at Park Place.
The project not only will remove the reversible lanes and place raised medians in the road, it will include sidewalks, intersection improvements landscaping and high technology traffic synchronization.
The Evermore Community Improvement District also is working on providing better connecting access in areas along the sides of the road so drivers do not have to get back on the highway to go from one store to the next.
The Evermore CID, an organization formed to improve the 7-mile stretch of U.S. 78 from Stone Mountain to Snellville, is working with Georgia Department of Transportation to minimize the inconveniences construction will bring.
The work is to be done in off-peak and evening hours. It is to be done in stages, with never more than two stages under way at the same time. There will be additional police available for traffic control; there will be Highway Advisory Radio (an AM station that provides information to motorists). There will be signs and other efforts to ease the pain.
But there will be pain. There will be delays. The inconveniences will last until the project is complete, which C.W. Matthews states will be by Oct. 31, 2009.
Once we reach that point, once we have survived all of the construction woes, what then?
I thought about this as I perused the website for the Evermore Community Improvement District the other day (www.78cid.org/editorial.htm). An editorial on the site quoted various studies of median projects across the country that caused little or no loss of business to merchants along the routes.
Brett Harrell, executive director of the Evermore CID, points out that the Mall of Georgia area, the hottest shopping spot in the county, faces a road (Ga. 20) with medians. If planned properly, a median road can be an asset, he said.
There are, of course, other opinions. We’ve all heard them from business owners along Memorial Drive and Jimmy Carter Boulevard when medians were installed there.
Most susceptible are businesses, such as gas stations, that depend on drive-by or impulse purchases. If access is tricky, drivers may keep moving, hoping for a more convenient one up the road.
What do you think? Do medians affect your shopping decisions? Do you think they will help or hurt U.S. 78?
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment | Categories: Susan Gast
Mom, the inmate is calling again…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My apologies to Chris.
I don’t know Chris - at least I don’t think I do. But according to an MCI phone recording, he is an inmate at an out-of-state correctional facility.
Chris has been calling my home phone “collect” for more than a week — several times on some days. We never accept the call; we always hang up.
We would have told Chris he had the wrong number. But to do that, we would be billed a $3-plus minimum charge in addition to per-minute charges plus various and sundry fees.
I found that out the hard way months ago when another inmate by another name that escapes my memory somehow found our number and began calling. I tried to ignore those calls, but when I finally heard the inmate’s plea, “You could at least pick up,” my heart got the better of me, and I accepted it to tell him he had the wrong number. He thanked me and hung up.
I called MCI after that first encounter to see if they could waive that fee (a request they emphatically and enthusiastically denied). I also suggested that MCI’s recording could give people a “wrong number” option, for instance: “Press 1 to accept charges, press 2 if this is a wrong number; hang up if you do not wish to accept charges.”
The customer service reps saw no merit in the idea.
So when Chris started calling, we just hung up, hoping he would figure it out.
Tuesday night, however, after receiving one call after another, I called MCI and had them block my phone number from correctional institution calls.
This decision did give me pause. Although correctional institution rosters are currently free of my relatives’ names, you never know when a colorful family member might stray from the straight and narrow. Were that to happen, would I want my number blocked? Yeah, probably so.
Plus, the vision of my phone number etched on a prison wall was disturbing.
Paul Czachowski, public affairs officer for the Georgia Department of Corrections, said Georgia’s 39 correctional facilities are among those that contract with MCI for phone service. The population of those facilities is closing in at 60,000, so “that’s a whole lot of calling going on.” he said.
Anyone receiving repeated calls from an inmate in a Georgia facility can call the Georgia Block Manager for MCI at (toll-free) 1-877-269-9175 to block their phone from calls from state correctional institutions.
If it’s just a wrong number, though, you hate to do that.
A representative of my own phone company mentioned that inmates often know they have the wrong number but call it anyway. I asked Czachowski about that.
There may be rare cases in which an inmate does that, hoping you will forward his call to a number not on his approved call list, Czachowski said. “But most of the time, they have just copied the number down wrong.
Too bad we can’t tell them that.
Have you received misdirected inmate calls? Should an inmate be notified that he’s dialing the wrong number?
Permalink | Comments (77) | Categories: Susan Gast
Is your home stuck between commercial growth and neighborhoods?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When country goes commercial, there are direct hits, and there are innocent bystanders.
In Snellville, a direct hit is Ga. 124.
North Road is an innocent bystander.
Ga. 124, also known as Scenic Highway - which elicits snickers these days - is a once-rural road intentionally sacrificed for strip malls, restaurants, big box stores and bumper-to-bumper traffic.
North Road has the misfortune of running parallel to Ga. 124. It is a residential street that in recent years has become a victim of the next-door development, its two lanes invaded daily by hundreds of motorists trying to avoid the commercial chaos.
In spots, its residential nature has given way to offices and the backs of Kroger, Home Depot and other stores. During the wee hours of the morning, tractor-trailer deliveries to those stores wake up nearby residents.
For many who live along North Road, the time to get out is now. But there’s a problem.
In most areas, the road remains under residential zoning. If homeowners sell under that zoning, they must sell it as a home, and they say no one will pay what their property is worth because of the traffic and nearby commercial environment. Interested buyers are mainly investors who pay low dollar for the homes, rent them out, and then - when the area eventually goes commercial or office/institutional - sell for a significant profit.
Homeowners — at least the large group of them who attended a meeting at Snellville City Hall on Monday — would rather sell directly to buyers who want the property for commercial enterprises.
That same day they submitted a petition to the city asking that the North Road area between Dogwood Road and Pharr Road be designated for commercial use on the city’s land use map. Some would like to see the commercial designation extend the entire length of North Road.
Joe Bell, a resident of North Road, is spearheading the drive. The petition has about 60 signatures on it, he said. He estimates there are about 120 homes along the road.
The meeting Monday night was an open house for the City of Snellville’s 2030 Comprehensive Plan, which includes guides for future land use. North Road issues dominated the comments from the standing room only crowd of about 150.
The tentative comprehensive plan unveiled on Monday currently calls for preserving the neighborhood quality along North Road, but adding traffic improvements, sidewalks and other changes. The exception is at the south end of the road, where the land can be used for office development.
Homeowners said they hope the petition will sway the council to change its land-use plan.
One thing is clear: North Road has become a priority issue for Snellville.
What do you think? What should happen when a neighborhood doesn’t want to be a neighborhood any more. What should be done for areas catching commercial runoff? What should happen to North Road?
Permalink | Comments (11) | Categories: Susan Gast
This report card brought to you by Equifax?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I was grabbing a bite at a popular Loganville lunch spot the other day.
While waiting for my cabbage, corn and biscuit, my eyes wandered, checking the place out since I hadn’t visited in a while.
Soon, my attention rose to the ceiling, where I couldn’t help but notice that the removable ceiling panels had been turned into mini billboards.
Advertising for real estate agents and other services loomed over the diners.
The next night I went to a Braves game. They lost. But the outing was not a total waste. I experienced the Piedmont Hospital Injury Report, the Delta seat upgrade, the Holiday Inn Look Again rerun, the AFLAC Trivia Question, the NAPA Cap Shuffle, the Delta Dental Smile Cam, the Termidor (termite defense) Defensive Play of the Game, the Rinnai Tankless Water Heaters’ “Who’s Hot?” and the Mastercard “What’s the Charge?”
On the way home, I heard the Coolray heating and air traffic report.
The encroachment is not new. Advertising is everywhere — in college bowl names, on downtown buses, at high school football games and on the fences at youth sports.
It got me thinking. There are few remnants of life untouched by commercial advertising. And maybe those that do remain could benefit by giving in.
Take schools. School systems need more money to meet growing demands. Instead of looking to taxpayers, maybe they could persuade Equifax or Experian to sponsor “The Report Card Moment.” The credit agencies could pay for their name to appear on student report cards carried to thousands of homes throughout Gwinnett.
If nothing’s sacred anymore, perhaps churches needing more than offering plates provide could open up advertising opportunities — think a Decca Records Doxology or NoDoz Pews.
Kleenex could weigh in at weddings and funerals, helping to dab up the huge expenses those emotional events bring.
In Gwinnett County, Morton salt could chip in for our stormwater runoff costs, in return for use of its slogan, “When it rains, it pours.” Home Depot and Lowe’s could sponsor a Code Enforcement Officer of the Week program. The county could give Kodak exposure through its red light camera program.
The opportunities are endless. Reality can’t be far behind.
What do you think? Will there ever be a saturation point for advertising? Is its growing presence effective?
Permalink | Comments (26) | Categories: Susan Gast
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