In the face of a building binge that will bring thousands of new workers and residents to Dunwoody, the city is pitching a new road to connect office parks and other projects to I-285.
The proposed Westside Connector would relieve congestion at the new diverging diamond interchange at Ashford Dunwoody Road and along Hammond Drive, city leaders say. The road would take westbound motorists from I-285 under Ashford Dunwoody to Perimeter Center Parkway near State Farm’s new corporate campus. The road would also feature an eastbound lane that will provide motorists another option to connect to westbound I-285.
Planners also envision a 12-foot-wide paved trail to provide pedestrian access to the Dunwoody MARTA station from nearby office parks.
Cost of the project, which involves tunneling under busy Ashford Dunwoody Road, is estimated at $16 million to $21 million, including engineering. Owners of a planned redevelopment site are in talks to donate land valued at about $15 million for the connector. Mayor Mike Davis said the city, which has an annual budget of about $31 million, will seek state and federal funds to help complete the project.
The city has been in discussions with state transportation leaders for about a year, he said. The road would take five years to design, permit and build, and will require state and federal approvals.
It could open about a year after the completion of the massive $1 billion overhaul to the I-285/Ga. 400 interchange, a project to add lanes and bridges to one of the region’s most notorious bottlenecks. Construction on that project is expected to start next year and be finished in 2019.
Davis said without adding new east-west connectivity, the region risks “killing the golden goose.”
The Central Perimeter area near Perimeter Mall is metro Atlanta’s largest office submarket, home to major corporations such as UPS and Cox Enterprises, the parent company of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While the Great Recession put the brakes on development, the region has seen a resurgence.
Insurance giant State Farm plans up to four new office towers in Dunwoody, and developers are eyeing potentially millions of square feet of new office, retail and residential development in Dunwoody and neighboring Sandy Springs.
The Perimeter Mall area also recently wooed the U.S. headquarters of German luxury automaker Mercedes-Benz. The automaker’s temporary offices are in Dunwoody, and its permanent home, to house 800 to 1,000 workers, is planned along Abernathy Road near Ga. 400.
Boston development firm GID Urban Development Group in 2007 proposed High Street, a blend of 3,000 mid- and high-rise residences, hotels, office towers and street-front retail on more than 40 acres. The company planned to start construction in 2009, but the project was delayed.
Davis said the city expects GID to come forward with development plans for the High Street site in the coming months and to create a street grid to better connect the project to the surrounding community.
The AJC currently leases a building on the High Street site at 223 Perimeter Center Parkway across from Perimeter Mall. In January, the newspaper announced plans to move about a mile away to Cox’s Sandy Springs campus in 2017.
The connector road would be south of a strip of retailers that includes a Best Buy, Rooms To Go furniture store and Nordstrom Rack, and just north of the former Gold Kist headquarters facility.
The road would help bring new access to the Gold Kist site and provide a new entry way to the State Farm development. The latter could have some 8,000 workers over the next several years.
A partnership, including noted real estate developer Charlie Brown, acquired the Gold Kist site a few years ago and pitched it for future office towers. Brown and partners will donate land to the connector project, helping to hold down expected cost of development. The new road, in turn, is likely to make the Gold Kist site more attractive to would-be tenants and more valuable.
“It provides us access … but it adds access to the whole area,” Brown said. “It reduces congestion and it makes (all developers’) sites better.”
The vast majority of motorists using the road will be workers and residents at other developments, he said.
The Dunwoody project and another street planned by the city of Sandy Springs from Peachtree Dunwoody Road to Perimeter Center Parkway are expected to handle thousands of cars that currently clog Hammond Drive and Ashford Dunwoody Road during the morning and evening commutes.
Many of the area’s infrastructure challenges stem from zoning decisions made for land around Perimeter Mall in the years before Dunwoody became a city in 2008, Davis said.
The mayor said Wednesday in an editorial board meeting with the AJC that the proposed connector is one plan for the city try to address the gridlock problem.
“We are not just sitting on our hands,” he said. “We are proactively trying to fix this.”
The Perimeter Community Improvement Districts, two self-taxing business districts that handle infrastructure projects, helped fast-track plans for the 285/400 project. Although the CIDs are not expected to invest in the connector road, program director Jennifer Harper said she was excited about the possibilities.
“An additional grid is a good thing for us,” she said.
Bob Voyles, a board member of one Perimeter CID and developer of Perimeter Summit mixed-use complex in Brookhaven, just south of I-285, was more guarded in his analysis of the project. The main beneficiary, he said, of the road might be one developer: Brown’s group.
The connector, he said, needs to be examined to ensure it benefits the broader region and doesn’t make traffic worse, noting the potential to disrupt Ashford Dunwoody Road.
“If it helps make overall traffic flow work more efficiently, we ought to take a serious look at it,” he said.
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