Austin’s Daily Commentary – City of Augusta’s Downtown Renovation Projects

Austin: Once again, the traffic engineering department for the city of Augusta seems to be missing the mark for business owners downtown. In a meeting last night where more details are revealed about their downtown renovation projects, certainly, upgrades were expected. There were some repairs that were very much needed to be made and utility lines rerun and replaced in some in some areas. But what was particularly distressing was the parking lot layout or the parking space layout in the new areas. They are designing, on purpose green space that will preempt or cancel out parking spaces.

They're going to lose, on the lower end of Broad Street, about half of their existing parking spaces so they can have new green space. Folks, this is utterly and totally unacceptable. No way in the world should this go on. A number of very important businesses are gonna be impacted. The owners of Luigi's contacted me last night.

They're very concerned about this. The plan needs to be revisited. The last thing in the world anybody needs is a reduction in parking spaces on Broad Street. That is absolutely ridiculous. Folks down there have been busting their tail for years to get increased traffic down there.

It's now started to show up, and then you're gonna take half the parking away. This has to be stopped. Let's call on the officials for the city of Augusta to take another look at these plans. Renovations, we understand. Repairs have to be made.

Utility lines upgraded. We know it's gonna be a mess for a while, but taking away parking spaces, that's ridiculous, inexcusable, and it's gotta be brought to an end. Gotta rework that plan. More on this later this afternoon. We'll see you at three. I'm Austin Rhodes. 95.1 FM News Talk, WGAC.