Mullikin Road won't get lights, commission says

Columbia County commissioners nixed plans to add street lights to Mullikin Road during a Tuesday meeting.

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County officials cited a lack of public support as the reason to not create a street light district on the road.

Scott Herring, the county's director of Construction and Maintenance Services, said an online poll conducted by the county listed the majority of respondents against the street lights. Of the 69 total responses, 36, or 52 percent, were opposed, according to Herring.

Only 43 people attended a public hearing held April 14 to discuss street lights, Herring wrote in an e-mail.

Following the July 2008 death of Mullikin Road resident Christian Giles, many of her neighbors clamored for a sidewalk along the road. Brandon Wise, 24, fatally struck Giles, 24, with his Ford Expedition as she was walking on Mullikin Road.

County officials used about $109,000 in 1-cent sales tax discretionary funds to construct the sidewalk.

However, it is up to homeowners to pay for street lights. Depending on the type of light installed, Herring said it would have cost residents $55.20 to $66.40 per lot annually.

Though the commission no longer is spearheading the effort for a street light district, Mullikin Road residents can initiate installing street lights at any time, officials said.

Also at the meeting, commissioners approved allowing staff to file a grant application for $161,000 in federal stimulus money to improve a radio system.

If sanctioned by the Georgia Department of Transportation, the grant would pay for upgrades to the county's mobile radio system, GPS units and tracking software for county vehicles, dispatch software and more.

The primary impetus behind the grant is to replace county-owned two-way radios with those capable of using narrowband frequencies, as required by the Federal Communications Commission.

"(The) radio frequency highway is in a severe traffic jam and the FCC is running out of radio frequencies," wrote county Emergency and Operations Director Pam Tucker in an e-mail. "Narrowbanding will open up twice as many frequencies for the FCC to assign to radio users due to the reduction of bandwidth required for each radio channel."

All radio operators must comply with the new narrowband requirement by 2013, according to county documents.

Though administered by the state DOT, the money would come from a $25.6 million pool of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds allocated for the Federal Transit Administration's Rural Transportation Program.