Sugar Hill’s Big 'L'
The City Prepares to Build an Unconventional Pedestrian Bridge over Highway 20.
In late August, about a month before the City obtained its permit for the bridge from the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), the City issued an “Invitation for Bid”, notifying contractors they would be accepting sealed bids for “all labor, equipment, and materials necessary to complete the HIGHWAY 20 PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE.”
The City has been quietly working on plans for the bridge for quite some time. It has been included as a line item in the City of Sugar Hill Capital Improvements Plan budget since at least 2016.
The final design from Atlas largely resembles a large “L” over Highway 20 because it uses two long ramps to achieve compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards instead of elevators at either end of the bridge.
This strategy resulted in a design with more ramp than bridge.
And in case you’re worried that people might not know whose taxpayers are funding the maintenance of the Big “L” in perpetuity, fear not; the plans account for a City logo (the new one with just a branch instead of a full tree, quite apropos) on either side.
According to the Staff report from Assistant City Manager Troy Besseche, while “the design intent of the bridge seeks to functionally convey pedestrians across the expanse of Highway 20, it also communicates the sense of arrival to a unique place with message of genetic strands that gives Sugar Hill its own DNA." 🧬
City Manager Paul Radford repeated that at the October City Council Work Session on Monday, October 7. 🧬
The northernmost ramp will be located adjacent to a commercial complex that just received Design Review approval from the City of Sugar Hill in September. The complex is being built in conjunction with the Novare Group apartment complex at the end of Stanley Street.
It remains to be seen how the bridge will affect the commercial development, but most businesses want more visibility, not less. Any location right off of Highway 20 readily enjoys that…unless it has a big bridge ramp in front of it.
Elevators
Real Deal Sugar Hill asked about the lack of elevators for the bridge. Besseche explained that the City chose not to use elevators in the initial construction because “elevators not only have a high up-front cost, they have a high operating cost.” When asked for a ballpark estimate of the construction cost, Besseche figured as a rough estimate it would be about $300,000 to have elevators on both sides of the bridge.
Real Deal also asked if it would be possible to install elevators in the bridge after construction was completed, perhaps in the large support pillars on either side. Besseche thought there would be room in there for equipment to run an elevator.
The Bids
The due date for the bridge bids was October 1. The City received three bids from contractors Ohmshiv Construction, who recently did all of the work in conjunction with the Alton Tucker Extension in “Downtown,” Reeves Young (who built Ridge Lake Park), and ER Snell.
According to Besseche’s report, the City’s “engineering consultant” estimated the costs of the project to be $5.5 million earlier this year. The average of the actual bids was about $2 million more. The report does not indicate whether that “engineering consultant” was an Atlas engineer, an engineer at one of the City’s other on-call engineering firms, City Council Member Taylor Anderson (civil engineer and owner of Blue Landworks), or Besseche himself, who is also a civil engineer.
Let’s just hope that whoever it was is better at bridge math than money math.
All of the bids were over the City’s 2024 budgeted amount of $6,055,000 for the bridge. Ohmshiv Construction was the lowest bidder and the City intends to work with them to get the project in line with that amount.
The Budget
The City of Sugar Hill included the item in its 2024 Capital Improvement Project (CIP) budget that was assembled and approved at the end of 2023. They budgeted $6,055,00 for the bridge in 2024 and 2025. (This conflicts with the staff report which says it was “set right at $6M” revealing the government’s view that $55,000 is inconsequential.)
In previous year’s CIP budgets, the funding for the bridge was always split between SPLOST and the City’s General Fund (where your City property tax dollars are deposited).
According to the 2024 CIP Budget, a little over $2.5 million of the budgeted amount was anticipated to come from Special Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST), and almost $3.5 million was supposed to come from developer funding. However, no one ever revealed the identity of that developer. In the end, it seems that developer is the City itself.
The staff report presented at the October City Council Work Session indicates that 42% of the bridge funding will come from SPLOST, while 58% will come from what remains of the $9,192,882 in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds that the City received in 2021 and 2022 from the Federal government’s attempt at "COVID relief" and placed in the General Fund.
Since the City didn’t even actually incur $9 million in expenses from COVID, they instead spent a large chunk of the money on changes to the stormwater pond next to The Bowl. Any leftover money not obligated by December 31, 2024 must be returned to the United States Department of the Treasury.
City Council Work Session
The City Council discussed the pedestrian bridge at their Work Session on Monday, October 7, in anticipation of voting on approval of the contract award at the monthly Council meeting on Monday, October 14.
At the beginning of the discussion, City Manager Paul Radford presented the staff report and recommended that the Council approve awarding the contract to Ohmshiv Construction.
At the Work Session, it became increasingly clear that Council Member Taylor Anderson is very invested in the bridge, at least emotionally. The staff report regurgitated one of his oft-repeated obfuscations regarding old discussions about a pedestrian tunnel that never came to fruition. During the work session discussion, his primary concern was that the process of reducing the cost of the bridge might cause it to “become vanilla or look like a highway overpass.”
When Council Member Meg Avery asked which areas would be served by the bridge, Anderson jumped in to take the question and said they used the Gwinnett GIS to figure out how many people were within a one-mile radius around the bridge.
Council Member Joshua Page indicated that since there was a deadline for obligating the City’s remaining ARPA funds, the decision seemed to be pushed by finances and time and echoed Anderson’s sentiment about losing anything during the process to reduce the cost of the bridge.
In response to those concerns, Mayor Brandon Hembree asked Anderson and Page to work with staff during that process. Given that the bridge already lacks elevators, it’s currently unclear what the City will give up in order to retain the bridge’s DNA spirals of which they seem especially proud.
Avery concluded the discussion by asking the City Manager to provide a list of other options for the ARPA funds in case the bridge doesn’t go through. Given the enthusiasm that he, Hembree, and Anderson have shown for pushing this ‘L’ on the public, I doubt they’ll be bridging that informational gap.