Residents Come Together To Create "Shared Vision" For Sandy Springs

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Sandy Springs, GA -- A common cold couldn’t keep Sandy Springs Mayor Rusty Paul from greeting and discussing with residents the city’s future during at community workshop Wednesday evening.

The mayor, along with key staff members and consultants, stood by ready to answer questions and field comments from the several dozen residents who braved the cold and traffic to attend the event held at Sherwood Event Hall,.

The Next 10 is the city’s collaborative effort to obtain input on key small area plans as part of the state-mandated 10-year update to its Comprehensive Land Use Plan.

The small area plans -- which focuses on areas such as the Perimeter Community Improvement District, Roswell Road and Powers Ferry Road -- tackles much-needed enhancements that could lead to improvements in areas such as traffic flow and economic vitality.

Citizens got a chance to review the latest results generated from prior community feedback as well as possible solutions to tackling some of the city’s looming issues.

• You can view the details of the items displayed during the workshop by clicking here.

One neat concept that’s grown from community input is transforming the city’s busiest thoroughfare -- Roswell Road -- into a boulevard.

That, said consultant Joel Mann of Nelson Nygaard, would consider remaking the state route into more of an “urban street” that would make it safer for pedestrians. That would include possibly reducing the speed and eliminating the suicide turn lane and replacing it with attractive landscaping.

That move would be done while preserving the current travel lanes.

While the city has already reached 2,500 people over the last several months with its public outreach campaigns, it still has a long way to go in the community engagement process, Paul reiterated.

Wednesday’s meeting was just one of many ways Sandy Springs will seek to “give everybody multiple opportunities to engage,” he added.

It’s the city’s goal to be as transparent as possible since this update also allows for an opportunity for Sandy Springs to create a vision of how the city would like to see itself develop.

Once the plan is set in stone, Paul said he will be more than thrilled to welcome developers into the city if their project aligns with the city’s vision.

Paul said if developers deviate from that plan, it would be rejected by city leaders.

However, if the City Council were to approve such a proposal -- which he said didn’t think would happen since the Council has a “shared vision,” -- Paul stated he’d use his veto power to hold developers and the city to the Land-Use Plan.

“This is the way we are going to build our community,” he said.

Sandy Springs leaders, he added, are essentially seeking consensus from the community to put forth a set of standards developers would be expected to adhere to if they want to move into the neighborhood.

While the city’s current Land-Use Plan was ”well done,” Paul said the city wants to use the opportunity it has now to “get this thing right.”

“We want Sandy Springs to be the most envied community in the metropolitan Atlanta area, and the only way we can do that is by creating a vision that everybody buys into, that we have a consensus around,” he said.

City resident Reed Haggard agrees, adding he came out on Wednesday because he’s “interested” in what’s going on in Sandy Springs.

Haggard, who represents the Riverside Homeowners Association, believes Sandy Springs should focus on maintaining the city as a “livable” community. While the city can have great development and office buildings, it’s still going to be home to the roughly 100,000 residents.

“It’s still got to be a place where we want to live, and not just a great place to work,” he said.

Haggard did address the elephant in the room: traffic. He stated that while a great development is “wonderful,” city leaders should keep in mind that bad traffic is “horrible.”

“You just got to find a balance there,” he said. “I think that the mayor and the council are doing a good job of trying to balance that. It’s a tough thing.”

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Photo: a resident mulls proposed improvements to Roswell Road. Credit: Kristal Dixon