Members of the Ellijay Downtown Development Authority (DDA) scheduled a public town hall meeting to discuss an impending test run of no parking on the downtown roundabout when meeting at City Hall last week.
The town hall will take place Tuesday, Sept. 21, at the First Baptist Church Fellowship Hall, 164 Dalton Street. It will start at 5:30 p.m. after a short DDA business meeting at 5 p.m.
That test run, during which parking spaces in front of businesses on the roundabout will be blocked by barricades, is planned to last from the week of the first Apple Festival dates through the Light Up Ellijay event usually held in the last week of November.
At the DDA’s Tuesday, Aug. 24, meeting, chairman Reece Sanford and members Melinda Hadden, Sandy Ott, Keith Nunn, Ellen Grant, Sarah Burnette and Josh Moyers discussed the variety of positive and negative responses they’ve heard from members of the downtown business community about a roundabout without parking spaces.
Sanford said he’d talked to 10 different people about the plans and, out of those, seven reacted positively. Removing handicapped parking spaces was a concern that some have, he added.
“One thing I heard a couple of times was cars parked in front of shops just kind of feels like a small town and welcome, we’re open for business. For the two people who said that, I had seven say more street space would be great,” Sanford said. “This all started from a public safety concern, people backing out into oncoming traffic. I think it’s all got to go back to that. It all started from the standpoint of how can we make downtown safer.”
Sanford said the town hall will be an informative meeting about the trial period and why it’s being done. He compared the experiment to a “test market,” which will show how roundabout traffic functions with no parking and without having to make permanent changes first.
“This is a town hall to let you know that, from Apple Festival to Light Up Ellijay, we’re going to have these spots barricaded like they always are during the two-week Apple Festival period,” he added. “It’s where we share (our) talking points with the public, (and) they can voice their concerns. We’ll take that information, and it will help us know what to do during the test period.”
There could be another town hall meeting after the test period has ended, Sanford noted.
“We (can) come back and say, ‘OK, we had this two- month trial period. How did it go?”” he added.