Oxendine revisits East Atlanta highway project

By Ariel Hart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Does any road project ever truly die?

Case in point: Building a highway through east Atlanta from Ga. 400 down to about I-675, parallel to the Downtown Connector.

John Oxendine, Georgia’s insurance commissioner and a candidate for governor, says the state should consider such a project again, a video pitch he made online on how he would address the state’s transportation issues.

With congestion choking our growth and northeast suburb residents forced to drive the Connector to traverse Atlanta, “vision” is called for, he said.

It would be “controversial,” he conceded.

Indeed it would, said Al Caproni, an Inman Park lawyer who helped lead a pitched battle against that road and a sister project, and defeated the best laid plans of the state and federal governments. The result was a mediation that produced the Freedom Parkway — a mere one lane each way as it passes the Carter Center — and park belt, built in phases in the 1990s.

“A legally binding settlement agreement...said, this is what you’re going to do and you can do no more,” Caproni said. “Anything to try to change it at least in the area [the neighborhood coalition] was involved in would be violating the settlement agreement made back then, and I have to believe would meet with stiff opposition.”

Oxendine said that “We would have to look at what the limits are” of the settlement. He added, however, that bulldozing houses in some of those neighborhoods “is not feasible,” though beyond Ponce de Leon some might welcome the economic benefits of a highway. He noted possibilities such as highway tunnels or a highway sunk in a deep trench.

He emphasized that other roads he suggested were his proposals — an “east-west connector” like a more northern Northern Arc (“I did not use that word,” Oxendine said); an improved Fall Line Freeway; and a far western bypass to get around the Atlanta region. The road parallel to the Connector was not his proposal, he said, but something that should be “studied and considered.”

“I am not proposing that that road be built,” Oxendine said. “I’m saying we’ve got to find a way to deal with a Downtown Connector that is beyond capacity.”