The inside dirt on Cowart Road:
when is a barricade a tollbooth?

By Al Levine

For AccessMilton.com

We were always guaranteed two things in life, death and taxes. In Milton, you can add two more: the city government will continue to embarrass itself. And the traffic sucks, too.

Hey, you wanna be a city manager? Job’s open again in Milton, which can’t seem to keep the office occupied long enough to test the smoke detector.

Just another indication of a dysfunctional city government? Or the more popular explanation: oh, just growing pains. One thing is for sure. The revolving door is beginning to define Milton and that’s not necessarily admirable. Now that schools are back in session, one other frustrating thing seems to be defining the new city. Depending on the time of day, traffic in Milton moves too fast or too slow. There is a movement underway to tackle both problems.

Shortly, the city council will be hearing from concerned citizens who want Milton to lower the legal speed limit within its boundaries.

And there is growing unrest about those barricades that prevent gravel-topped Cowart Road from being driven end to end. Essentially, the residents on Cowart have somewhat private access to a publicly-maintained road. The big question there is: how fair is that?

Many long-time residents look out their front doors at both traffic dilemmas – the speeders who seldom are slowed down and the morning/afternoon gridlock that chokes the main two-lane arteries near schools – and long for the good old days.

“You used to literally put black walnuts out in the middle of Birmingham Road and wait for a car to come by to take the hulls off ’em,” Jim Bell said.  “Now I can’t even get out of my driveway at certain times of the day. Going to the mailbox is like asking for death. I live in a drag strip.”

Resident Patti Silva said she has been passed by cars doing 70 mph while carting her kids around in her van.

“Either we lower the speed limit or widen the roads or we put in lights,” Silva said.  Hey, if Milton doesn’t want commercial areas, perhaps an aggressive law enforcement campaign against speeders can create a nice revenue stream.

“I hear they won’t ticket anybody unless they’re at least 10 mph over the speed limit,” Bell said. “Speeding just has to be controlled by law enforcement. So I guess if you just lowered the speed limit it would slow down the traffic, or at least have them ticket people at lower numbers. I would be in favor of lowering the speed limit. If you lower the speed limit it makes it, for lack of a better word, unattractive to go through those areas.”

More than local residents are clogging up or speeding through town. “It’s the people going through Milton all the time,” Bell said.  “You’ve only got so many ways to get out of Cherokee County.”

But the folks on Cowart Road will never have to worry about Cherokee commuters doing a gravel-dustup to their homes, unless enough people try to change the situation.  It’s impossibly impassable.

Drive up Cowart from Providence Road and you quickly encounter three orange barricades. The Yodock Model 2001 Traffic Control Device looks like bloated equestrian jumping equipment left over from the ’96 Olympics. It’s essentially a tollbooth because citizens of Milton pay to have the road maintained though few can drive on it. Each Yodock unit weighs 130 pounds empty, 1,600 pounds when water filled. Go ahead and try to move them, but bring a forklift.

If you turn up Cowart on school days between 7 and 9 a.m., you will also see red, as in police lights. The cops are ticketing violators, the fine is $100.

Here is the history of  Cowart Road, according to Angela Parker, Fulton County’s Director of Public Works.

The dirt road was closed to through traffic by Fulton County in 1999, just after Summit Hill Elementary was built. There were two contributing factors, Parker wrote in an email reply, traffic volume and community input.

“The amount of traffic on Cowart Road that the school would generate was an inappropriate volume for a dirt road,” Park er wrote. “Maintenance costs for dirt roads are very high and with a high traffic generator such as a school, almost daily maintenance would be required. Funding was not available to pave Cowart Road. “

She said a number of public meetings were held for community input.

“There was a loud group of area residents who wanted the road barricaded to through traffic,” Parker wrote. “However, co mmunity opinion on the Cowart closure was not unanimous. Ultimately, when considering the potential maintenance costs, the County made the decision to close Cowart Road to through traffic.”

Now it’s a Milton issue. “As Cowart Road is now a city road, any decision regarding the removal of the barricades and opening Cowart Road to through traffic would be the responsibility of the city of Milton.”

The barr icades strike some citizens as blatantly unfair.

“Why are the police camped out there every morning to catch people cutting through?” resident Lauren Holmes said. “If that’s a public road, why can’t we drive through there. Why are we getting $100 tickets for cutting through their neighborhood? They’re cutting through my neighborhood.”

Perhaps it’s because there is a very influential resident living near Cowart, one Jan Jones, the Republican legislator representing Milton. She did not reply to an email request for comment.

“It’s Jan Joneses neighborhood. She gets whatever she wants,” Holmes said. “I believe that’s the way it is. I don’t know if it’s true or not but it sure looks like it.”