A Smyrna-based company wants to replace grass at two medians in Cobb County with synthetic turf.
ProGreen pitched this idea to Cobb commissioners at a work session on Monday.
Laura Everett with ProGreen told commissioners that the company would use its K9 Deluxe turf. She said that, yes, this model is made for pets to use as their toilet, but it’d also be just fine for the medians of Cobb.
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She said the K9 Deluxe “drains at a better rate than natural grass” and has a “short, freshly mowed look.”
Ross Cavitt, county spokesman, said the next step would be for a commissioner to bring this idea forward as an agenda item.
Credit: ProGreen
Credit: ProGreen
The two proposed test sites are a strip of Austell Road near the hospital and a half-mile stretch of Cumberland Parkway.
She said the Cumberland median being between two and three feet wide highlights the turf’s main advantage over natural grass.
“The No. 1 reason is safety,” Everett said, noting that turf needs much less maintenance than the real stuff and would also be cheaper.
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“The maintenance costs are huge because they have to use a hand mower,” she said. “ ... And it’s much more dangerous because the median is so narrow.”
Everett presented some numbers.
She said she once saw a newspaper article — giving no attribution nor detail about the article — that allegedly said two sites in Cobb had an annual landscaping cost of $50,000 year. So she used that as her jumping off point for a cost analysis she presented to the commissioners.
In that cost analysis, she said the turf would pay for itself in three years.
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She said the installation cost for the turf is $8.50 per square foot and it would last between 20 and 25 years.
Everett also said that they did such a project for Chino, California, after a road worker was killed. She added that ProGreen hasn’t done a median turf project in Georgia.
ProGreen did do the dog park in Atlantic Station and another in Alpharetta.
With this model, she said, “fecal matter would have to be picked up or eventually if it just drained through that’d be fine, too.”
In other Cobb County synthetic turf news, soccer complexes in Acworth and Powder Springs are closed for transitions from grass.
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