No roads really lead to Georgia’s Rome, at least no direct ones from I-75. And years of attempts to change that have stalled amid a modern-day gladiator match between a powerful Georgia family and a powerful Georgia bureaucracy.
O. Wayne Rollins, the late co-founder of Atlanta’s Rollins Inc., amassed more than 1,800 acres in northwest Georgia for a family vacation home in the 1970s and 1980s. His powerful family spent the next few decades trying to block the state’s effort to build a road linking to Rome that would cut just south of their prized fishing lake.
If just about anyone else owned the land, it would probably already have a busy street running through it. But the Rollins clan, which controls a multibillion-dollar company specializing in pest control, has waged one of the most aggressive campaigns in state history to block a road project.
The clan has assembled a team of lawyers, strategists and scientists who have pulled off impressive feats. They have lobbied to turn a chunk of the property into a state-recognized wilderness area, persuaded a federal agency to declare a nearby mine as a historic landscape, dispatched engineers to highlight potential engineering problems and sent biologists to illustrate how construction could threaten birds and wildlife.
It’s left metro Rome’s roughly 100,000 residents and business leaders waiting for the dust to settle.
“They have pulled out all the stops. We’ve never seen anybody fight us this hard,” said Albert Shelby, the state transportation official who manages the project. “I’m actually impressed. They’ve fought the good fight. But from our standpoint, we’ve got to follow the protocol.”
Subscribers can read our full report on the high-stakes fight over Rome’s roads in Sunday’s AJC or on our subscription tablet app.
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