Soon pedestrians and bikers alike will be able to safely and easily travel from The Grove at Towne Center to T.W. Briscoe Park
Funding for the second phase of the city’s Greenway Trail was approved by Mayor and Council, Monday.
“This is the award of a bid to build phase two of our trail system which will build a trail from City Hall to Briscoe Park,” Mayor Barbara Bender said, “So we will have a trail from our downtown and our city park.”
Alpharetta-based Tri Scapes, Inc. was the lowest bidder with a bid of $606,367.40 to create a trail from the corner of Oak Road and Highway 78 to T.W. Briscoe Park off of Lenora Church Road. The new trail way will link to phase one of the project which runs through the Historic Cemetery, behind Wisteria Drive and into The Grove at Towne Center.
The cost of the project will be covered by $385,000 in Community Development Block Grant money and Special Local Option Sales Tax funds.
Last year, Mayor and Council approved a $1.1 million contract to the Dickerson Group for Phase 1 of the Greenway Trail.
Phase one of the project, the Towne Center Spine, is a .7-mile trail running parallel to Wisteria Drive along a mostly dry creek bed. Phase two of the project, the expected to start within a month, will travel from Oak Road to Main Street on the side of Church on Main – the former First Baptist Church Snellville - to Church Street to Fremont Street. It will then connect to a path off Fremont Street into the Briscoe Park public use area. Phase two could be completed within nine months, City Manager Butch Sanders said.
For the future, the Greenway Trail Plan also calls for a 4.5-mile path from Snellville to Lawrenceville mostly following North Road and Old Snellville Highway, providing an additional connection to Alexander Park, outside Snellville city limits.
There are also plans for a Main Street West / US-78 trail. At almost 5 miles in length, this is the longest and most ambitious of the greenways being planned by the city and Gwinnett County for the area. The goal is to give Snellville and the South Gwinnett area a connection to the existing trail network around Stone Mountain. This is a key connection for the future, as it links the growing Gwinnett County greenway network to the web of trails and greenways in the rest of Atlanta Metro and beyond.