Subdivision entrance to close one weekend Oakbrook subdivision to get second entrance
Transportation officials say they're planning to temporarily close the front entrance of a Columbia County subdivision so they can work more quickly on a Furys Ferry Road construction project.
The Oak Brook subdivision entrance will be closed during a weekend in the future while work on Furys Ferry Road continues. A back route will be opened during the closure.
Photo by Jim Blaylock
Gary Pulliam, a project engineer for the Georgia Department of Transportation's area engineer office, says sometime in the next couple of weeks the front entrance of Oak Brook subdivision will be closed for a few days.
"What we're going to try to do is do all the work over a weekend,'' he said, adding that one more similar closing of Oak Brook's front entrance for a weekend will be required several months later.
Before that occurs, though, a back road in the subdivision will be connected to King Taylor Road, which ties in with Evans-to-Locks Road. The connection, he said, will take a couple of days to construct and will be about 100 feet long.
The connection was given approval by county commissioners at their Oct. 5 meeting. Such a connector road had received some scrutiny in the past.
County commissioner Diane Ford said the need for another connection to the subdivision came before the commission several years ago and didn't pass because of dissent from some residents living on the road that would have been connected to King Taylor.
She said one resident who lived at the corner of the proposed connection was unwilling to give up the right- of-way.
"We had voted to keep it closed because we didn't have the right-of-way,'' she said. "At that time, I didn't personally want to have to condemn anybody's place.''
Since then, Ford said, there has been more support from residents and a new owner of the corner lot has donated his property for right-of-way.
"You're still going to have some resistance to it, but we just need to make some improvements to the road,'' she said.
Pulliam agreed that a connector road would improve the subdivision.
"It's a very large neighborhood,'' he said. "I'm surprised it only has one entrance as it is.''