For the first time in 15 years, the Georgia State Patrol will soon have a home in Gwinnett County.
Some 35 troopers will be stationed in Duluth starting next month as part of a $5 million pilot project that will shift the response to accidents and disabled vehicles on Interstate 85 from county and city police departments to the state patrol.
Gwinnett County commissioners on March 5 agreed to lease 2,900 square feet of office space for the new post. It will be in a portion of the old Edwin Watts Golf Shop on Pleasant Hill Road.
The lease will cost county taxpayers $31,000 a year, plus the cost of refurbishing the space. It is unclear how much that will cost and when the work will be completed, said Mike Plonowski, the county’s director of facilities management.
Commission Chairwoman Charlotte Nash said its a good deal for the county because the arrangement will keep more county and city officers available for response to other calls, and often allow accidents to be cleared from the highway more quickly.
“It appeared to make a lot of sense, so we wanted to take advantage of it,” Nash said.
Col. Mark W. McDonough, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Safety, said 16 of the troopers who will be assigned to Gwinnett County graduated from the academy March 22. They will be paired with more veteran officers over the next several weeks to begin patrols and familiarize themselves with the county.
McDonough said the troopers will be in donated space, also in Duluth, for about three months until the county finishes the restorations.
“A lot of times the response to accidents is not as expeditious as it could be if you had a dedicated group for those calls,” McDonough said. “We won’t have other priorities. That will get accidents cleaned up quicker so there will be less backups and fewer traffic jams.
“It will keep things moving and that’s good all across the board.”
The Georgia Department of Transportation is covering the $5 million cost of the program.
The state patrol instituted a similar program in Cobb County in December, and McDonough said there has been about a 30-percent decrease in response times to interstate incidents.
Officer Mike Bowman, a spokesman for the Cobb County Police, said the program has “absolutely” been a benefit to his agency as well.
Gwinnett County police will still help troopers with accident reconstruction. The program, called Open Roads, will run through at least 2016.
McDonough said that the old Gwinnett County post was moved to Forsyth County in the late 1990s. He said it’s time for the department to have a presence in Gwinnett again.
“There’s been tremendous growth in population … and everybody finds themselves in times of constrained resources,” McDonough said.
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