It’s all residents’ fault that “Downtown” is rapidly morphing into a claustrophobic heat island with traffic flow problems, according to the brilliant minds at City Hall. They laid it all out in a report unveiled at the June 2023 City Council Work Session to approve an almost $2 million contract to build an approximately 500-foot road between Alton Tucker Boulevard and Highway 20, and install a traffic light at Highway 20 and Stanley Street.
I remember seeing citizen feedback requesting more places to eat. I do not recall seeing citizen feedback requesting six (6) new apartment complexes in the middle of town, one of which (Solis, the 300-unit complex dwarfing City Hall) has increased the City’s debt by millions of dollars while getting a 15-year tax break. Nor do I remember seeing people asking for a traffic light to help two of those six apartment complexes at the expense of everyone else in Gwinnett County who has to use Highway 20.
Had Sugar Hill residents been informed that this mess was the high cost of getting a handful of restaurants, I suspect their response would have been a hard no.
And by the way, this same document mentions “improvements to West Broad Street.” What improvements? Certainly not the widening it so desperately needed before the brilliant minds at City Hall started building this “vision”.
But I guess that’s all the residents’ fault, too.
