Cover Story: Raiders of the Northern Arc

A skyline bigger than downtown Atlanta's will sprout in north Gwinnett County somewhere around Lawrenceville. Eventually a new city the size of Boston or Baltimore will mushroom between I-85 and I-985. The bustling economic center of the region will drift north of I-285 with gravity so strong that businesses and jobs from downtown and the southside of the city will follow.

Put another way, the region will be turned upside down. "Intown" will be a suburb at best — or perhaps an economic ghost town. The "city" will be in what once was the "country." The once-vibrant urban core of the metropolitan area will be the has-been. The boomtown to the north will reign.

This is no doomsday scenario. It's a vision shared by several elected officials from across the metro area — a vision of how the Northern Arc will forever change the Atlanta region.

But an unlikely alliance is coalescing to stop this paved juggernaut from being built. Northside suburbanites who want to stifle the increasing sprawl the Northern Arc would perpetuate are teaming up with southside blacks who don't want to see local businesses shut down or move north.

Those two groups are combining to form an old-fashioned, power-to-the-people, grassroots movement that might have the political clout to derail the Arc. With the help of the dozens of lawsuits expected to be filed against the road, Arc foes are optimistic.

After all, all the opposition has is a mountain of money.

Fifty-nine miles long and with a price tag of $2.2 billion, the Northern Arc would run east-west through just four of the 20 counties in the metro area — Cherokee, Forsyth, Bartow and Gwinnett. Yet the road would completely alter Atlanta. If it opens as scheduled in 2011, Atlanta's already-out-of-control sprawl will pitch into hyper-drive. For most, the possible end result is difficult to comprehend, let alone imagine.

Gwinnett County Commission Chairman Wayne Hill sees it. He believes the Arc would be the foundation for a new city the size of Baltimore or Boston. And that's not hyperbole.

Most of that growth, according to Hill, would occur on the 10-mile-or-so stretch between Gwinnett Place Mall and the Mall of Georgia, which is right next to the proposed path of the Northern Arc. It may take 50 years, he says, but it would happen.

Under Hill's pro-road regime, Gwinnett County has become the poster child for rampant, uncontrolled growth. The county's population has jumped from 650,000 to 1 million between 1990 and 2000.

Northern Gwinnett County is a land of stoplights and traffic congestion — you experience the surge of humanity the minute you exit off of I-85. Traveling two miles on Pleasant Hill Road near Gwinnett Place Mall can take as long as an hour and 15 minutes.

Hill's second-floor office in the Gwinnett County administration buildings is a commute of about 45 miles of jam-packed traffic lights from downtown Atlanta. The complex is about a mile away from any business, restaurant, gas station or home in Lawrenceville. Hill's situation jibes perfectly with his philosophy on growth and congestion.

"I don't think you're ever going to get people to rely less on cars," Hill says. "I had a gentleman in here this morning. He says, 'My car is my freedom.' So as long as it's like that, I don't think we ever will get people not to drive."

As county commission chairman, Hill has a seat on the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) board. He'll vote in favor of the next phase of land acquisitions, and every other Northern Arc-related issue, as long as he sits on the panel.

As for the mounting concern that the Arc will skew Atlanta's growth to the north, Hill's not buying it. He believes the southside and inner city will grow right along with the rest of the region.

"I thing we're going to grow simply because of our school system. Intown is going to continue to grow with young people and older people. But when you have your family, you begin to think what kind of education you want for those children, and I think a lot of people would choose suburban life until their children are grown, and then they'll move back in [town]," he says. "But I think both of them will continue to grow. I don't think it'll be an either/or."

Hill's theory is the polar opposite of state Sen. Vincent Fort's. Fort represents the people who stand to lose the most from the road's construction: the inner-city working class. His district includes areas as far south as East Point and as far north as Buckhead. He fears his constituents — specifically the ones living south of I-20 — would lose any chance of seeing their communities revitalized if the Arc is built, and he's not about to mince words about it.

"The sucking sound you hear will be development going over to the northside," he says.

Fort contends that the mild growth that's occurred in the Historic West Side Village, along Pryor Road and at the intersection of Cascade and I-285 will stop and then reverse. History says he's right. In 1980, 40 percent of the region's jobs were in the city of Atlanta. Ten years later, Atlanta's share dropped to 29.5 percent. At the same time, job numbers in the northern suburbs grew from 40 percent to 52 percent, according to the Clark Atlanta University report "Sprawl Atlanta: Social Equity Dimensions of Uneven Growth and Development."

Another study reported by the Brookings Institute, a Washington public policy think tank, says, "Jobs, people and prosperity have moved northwards and outwards, leaving a large arc of little or no population growth, economic decline, and an unusually high concentration of poverty on the southside of the city of Atlanta and its close-in southern suburbs."

The report also says hyper-growth in the north and the declines in the south are fundamentally connected, with negative consequences for both areas. The northside suffers from severe traffic congestion, environmental degradation and over-stressed infrastructures, while low-income and minority residents of the southside become more isolated. And we all inhale some of the worse air pollution in the country.

Fort is one half of the budding coalition opposing the Arc. The other half is represented by John Sibley, president of the Georgia Conservancy.

Sibley isn't known as a radical environmentalist. Neither he nor his organization takes stands as bold or controversial as other activist groups such as the Sierra Club. But this time, it's different. Sibley has all but vowed to file a lawsuit against the Northern Arc if everything else fails.

Sibley mainly opposes the Arc for environmental reasons. But it'll take the environmental movement and Fort's inner city activists to convince the person who can tip the balance against the Arc. That person is Mayor Shirley Franklin, conflicted by competing loyalties to the governor and the people she represents.

It was during a Georgia Conservancy

panel discussion on the Northern Arc three weeks ago that Fort and Sibley laid the groundwork for a coalition attack against the road. Standing at a podium in front of 200 people in Georgia-Pacific's auditorium, Sibley presented his case — that the Northern Arc could spell economic doom for downtown Atlanta.

"As the center of gravity of the region has shifted to the north, we have developed a mismatch between the location of entry-level jobs and the people who need them," he said. "Most of the jobs are being created along the northern perimeter and further north. There are no feasible transportation options between. Continuing our current patterns will make the mismatch worse."

It is that reasoning — the northside sprawl caused by the Northern Arc would devastate downtown Atlanta — that resonates with Fort and the intown leaders Sibley hopes will fight the highway. Toward the end of the Georgia Conservancy meeting, someone asked the members of the audience to raise their hands if they lived in town. Almost everyone's hand went up.

"If you take it from the coalition point of view, the constituencies who naturally have reasons to oppose the Arc are larger than the constituencies who support the Arc," Sibley says. "And if the people whose interests are not served by the Arc can get together, you can beat it."

Right now, the best place for a grassroots movement to apply political pressure is the Atlanta Regional Commission. In October, the ARC board will vote on handing the Georgia Department of Transportation $158 million to complete acquisitions of land for the eastern route. This would include buying people's homes, and maybe even taking property by eminent domain.

The DOT has bought about half of the land needed for the eastern portion of the Northern Arc between Georgia 400 and 316. Most of this is undeveloped land. And if the ARC board approves the money for the next phase of land acquisition and the state begins buying up people's homes, there would be no turning back.

Sen. Fort is readying what he calls a "multi-front war" against the Northern Arc. After all, it'll likely be his people, his constituents, who will be hit the hardest by the mega-boom the road would spur on the northside.

"This Northern Arc affects two of the most important issues minority communities have to worry about," he says. The first is economic development and why our communities are underdeveloped; the second, health and the environment.

"The political leadership in those communities and the leadership of Atlanta need to be activated because it will affect our quality of life for the next 50 years."

Now Fort is working the phones, e-mailing old friends, rounding up the inner-city and southside activist groups and clergy, and scheduling meetings with the northsiders.

Not may people — elected officials, activists or otherwise — have as much experience as Fort in putting together coalitions of folks who normally wouldn't associate with each other. Still, he knows it's going be tough.

"Some folk don't want this coalition," he says. "You've got business interests and others who don't want balanced growth. They want a Baltimore in Gwinnett. The impact it has on the region — they could care less. It's a matter of profits and development."

Defeating the Arc would be a coup the size of which the state has never seen. And it's not a pipedream. Other coalitions have taken on Goliaths — and whipped the giants.

In the early 1990s, Fort brought together southside residents and northside conservatives to tackle problems each side had with city and county contracts involving the Olympics — a good training exercise for the fight against the Arc. The northside residents thought the city of Atlanta and Fulton County would be left vulnerable to economic ruin if the Olympics bombed. Southside residents wanted revitalization funds, traffic improvements to protect pedestrians and relieve Olympic congestion, and to stop the construction of a proposed second stadium.

"The day that it was to be voted on by Fulton County, you could see the coalition — poor black folk, working-class black folk from the southside, and people from north Atlanta and north Fulton — in the auditorium," Fort says. "All along the way, from Atlanta City Hall to Fulton County, we were able to improve the contracts — more neighborhood protection and more taxpayer protection, and we stopped [the second stadium]."

This past legislative session, Fort brought together a group of mainly minority urban legislators and rural white Democrats for his next big battle: predatory lending. Eventually Gov. Roy Barnes entered the fray and adopted predatory lending as his own issue. It took that kind of power to defeat the banking lobby and push through some of the nation's strongest predatory lending legislation. For a state senator who was first elected in 1996, it was a major victory, and it reinforced Fort's beliefs that coalitions are the best way to beat the Goliaths.

Other grassroots coalitions have accomplished as much. Intown activists proved that enormous super-highways and the state Department of Transportation could be beat. Their political pressure transformed the Presidential Parkway — a proposed super-highway that would've run through the heart of historic neighborhoods — into Freedom Park.

Beginning in 1987, a group of rural activists in Taylor County used civil disobedience to defeat the state Environmental Protection Division and Waste Management Inc. — at the time the world's largest handler of waste and one of the more powerful companies in the state — over a proposed 3,000-acre, $50 million hazardous waste incinerator site.

Halfway between Macon and Columbus, Taylor County is about as rural as Georgia gets. Regardless, hundreds of locals fought the plan as radically (if not more so) than any big-city Atlanta firebrand.

Debbie Buckner was one of them. She was the leader of a group that, for the first year and half, tried the traditional route of writing letters to public officials. "We never got anywhere with that," she says. "We kept asking questions or trying to get answers to questions that it was obvious they didn't have the answers to."

Then the group moved on to "a good bit of what I guess you might call civil disobedience protesting, but nothing violent, nothing illegal," Buckner says.

In September 1990, about 200 people marched 100 miles from Taylor County to the Capitol to protest the incinerator. Such tactics worked, attracting the media's attention — which lured more allies for the cause until there was enough political pressure that the state buckled.

The incinerators were never built.

Considering the amount of momentum behind the Northern Arc, you wonder whether anyone can overcome the mighty forces pushing the Arc.

Fort doesn't have an answer.

"To be very honest with you, I don't know if coalition-building will be successful," he says. "It takes a lot of hard work. It takes a lot of different folks to make concessions and work together."

And it will take political pressure focused on a few key people who could tip the scales.

"We in the city of Atlanta would have to work with the mayor and the Atlanta City Council to make sure that they are not only against the Northern Arc, but that they take the lead in opposing the Northern Arc."

Like Fort, Mayor Franklin represents the citizens who'd lose the most if the Arc were built. Franklin, though, has a seat on the ARC board and will get to vote in October on the right-of-way acquisitions for the Northern Arc.

Franklin's current popularity is close to stellar. She's wowed Atlantans and other local elected officials, and she's won over the usually cold-shouldered General Assembly. If Franklin came out publicly against the Northern Arc, she could ignite a revolt within the regional panel that might defeat the road. Other ARC board members harboring their own problems with the planned highway would likely follow suit — but not until someone else made the first move.

Franklin has a choice: the economic prosperity of her city or the political capital she holds with the most powerful man in the state, Gov. Barnes, who bolstered Franklin's campaign by donating his staff and helping her raise funds. Barnes controls the purse strings on the state's transportation budget, which can used as powerful leverage over local officials. That club, plus the election debt, prompted Franklin to host a Barnes re-election fundraiser June 11.

As a former member of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority board, Franklin knows how and where the metro area grows. And three years ago, she saw the Brookings Institute study that says decline in the inner city is partially a result of sprawl on the northside.

And while the City Council passed a resolution condemning the road, and City Council President Cathy Woolard regularly decries the road for its negative economic and environmental impact, Franklin is still on the fence. She's adopted a wait-and-see approach. Specifically, she's waiting until July 8, when the ARC board will hear a presentation on the Northern Arc's financing and planned route.

After that meeting, says Franklin, she'll base her decision on the facts, not political pressure.

"I don't operate based on whether something is good or bad politically," she says. "I mean, I assume good government is good politics. I think the governor expects me to vote based on what my convictions are, and my analysis and understanding of the road."

Franklin says she wouldn't oppose the road simply because it could lead to increased competition for jobs and development.

"I will not be one who says that another part of the region should not have a transportation solution because I'm trying to promote downtown Atlanta," she says. "That's just ... I don't take that approach."

Too bad for inner-city Atlantans.??