Green plans have to include downtown

Published 10:38 pm Monday, June 6, 2011

Dalton has recently received $600,000 in state and federal grants to help it carry through with its plan to link some of Dalton’s major attractions with a series of bicycle and walking trails.

Kick in the $120,000 in required matching money from the local government, and area pedestrians and bicyclists should soon be able to start enjoying a greener and friendlier city.

City Administrator Ty Ross told The Daily Citizen that a $500,000 federal grant through the Georgia Department of Transportation will be used to create greenway trails from downtown Dalton to the Crown Mill area, which was recently designated as an arts and cultural district. If funds permit, that greenway would extend on to Mill Creek.

The City Council last month approved plans to use some $210,000 of the city’s federal community development block grant (CDBG) money this year to build a new park on an abandoned railroad spur in the Crown Mill area that could be linked by the trails.

A separate $100,000 grant from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources will be used to create five miles of bicycle and walking trails on Mount Rachel. The city’s plans ultimately call for trails linking downtown, the Crown Mill area, Mill Creek, Mount Rachel and Haig Mill Lake.

“We hope for a snowball effect, where other parties see what is happening and take an interest and the funding could grow and expand,” said Ross.

We hope so too.

The city’s plan to improve Dalton’s quality of life by making the city greener and more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists is a good move. It is made even better by its aggressive pursuit of state and federal grant money to help pay for it.

Creating more recreational opportunities within the city for people to enjoy will help attract people to this area and make the city more livable for us all.

But as the city is pursuing this part of their greenways plan, we can’t help but wonder whatever happened to the downtown part of the proposal.

When the greenways plan was unveiled by Mayor David Pennington a year ago, a key part of it was creating a green pedestrian walkway on Crawford Street.

The original plan proposed creating a median down the center of Crawford Street between Selvidge Street and Pentz Street and last summer interns from the Savannah College of Art and Design and the University of Georgia expanded that proposal into an outdoor mall that would stretch down Crawford from Harmon Field to a proposed new park just east of the railroad tracks.

While we have no problem with building biking and hiking paths on Mount Rachel, making downtown more attractive and creating a more inviting destination for people to come to should still be the focus of the city’s efforts.

Towns all across the nation have revitalized their downtowns, and brought in more merchants and shoppers, by making them more pedestrian friendly and creating more outdoor opportunities for things like concerts and other events to happen.

The goal of making Dalton greener is too attract younger people and new businesses who will want to take advantage of our quality of life.

A big part of making Dalton more attractive to these young professionals and businesses is revitalizing downtown.

If we do all of the other work but ignore the city’s core, it could end up being a lot of work for nothing.