Atlanta's 14th Street bridge under construction, crossing Interstate 75. (Dave Bender/file)
Georgia’s Department of Transportation is putting a major Bibb County highway project on hold. The DOT has a shrinking budget.
That's why the department put the planned interchange at Interstate 75 and 16 in Macon back on the shelf. DOT spokesman David Spears says it could sit there upwards of a decade:
“Principally and primarily, of course, it’s about funding; that’s in excess of a $320 million dollar project, and we’ve been working on it 20 years and we need to get it built, but we just don’t have $320 million dollars that we can apply to it right now.”Macon officials expressed disappointment over the decision, but say there are smaller projects that could be dealt with before 2018.
State Transportation officials told the Federal Highway Administration that Georgia has a number of projects they’d want included in any potential economic stimulus package by the incoming Obama Administration.
“We have identified – just of our own projects within the department – about $2.2 billion dollars worth of work have begun, “shovel-ready,” so to speak, by sometime in the middle of next year,” Spears says.Spears says adding in other state transportation-related projects including aviation, MARTA, and commuter rail could bring the total to almost three and a half billion dollars.
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