Project Derenne Stumbles

Last month, contractors working for the Georgia Department of Transportation cut down a stand of pine trees at the intersection of Abercorn Street and Derenne Avenue. They plan to expand the intersection for “safety” reasons.

The work has neighbors boiling mad.

“There is this little thing called Project Derenne.,” explains Magnolia Park’s Beth Kinstler. “Nothing was to be done along this corridor until all the people involved along the corridor had a chance to sit down and discuss it and come up with some alternatives to just widening Derenne.”

Project Derenne is the latest incarnation of the ongoing debate about what to do with increasing traffic on the east/west corridor. Prior plans included tunneling under the street, building more lanes above the street and demolishing homes to widen the street. All met with intense opposition and ultimately died before reaching the engineering phase.

Project Derenne is supposed to be different. “Number one,” says Kinstler, “it is supposed to be about what to do about the entire corridor, enhance the livability of the corridor not to just widen it gratuitously for traffic.” The idea is to view the road, the homes, the businesses and the people as one organism realizing that changes to one part will affect all the others.

The City of Savannah has put together a team of all the various interests along the street. They seek a plan to allow traffic to flow, neighbors to live peacefully and business to flourish. The project is in the embryonic stage but those involved believed that nothing would be done to the street until they finished the new plan.

Someone at the Department of Transportation did not get the memo.

“The breakdown in communication is really the fact that it is an Abercorn project.” Savannah Citizen Office Director Susan Broker explains, “That is the way that GDOT and the County and the City have traditionally looked at things. This is an Abercorn project not a Derenne project. I think Project Derenne is saying is that we can't look at things like that anymore.”

Broker worries the move by GDOT may have damaged the relationships and trust she is trying to build with very skeptical Derenne neighbors.  “The timing couldn’t be worse,” she admits. “It was placed in the long range plans 7-8 years ago. GDOT is responding to what the city and county folks, eight years ago, said was an important safety project for Abercorn. Fast forward eight years we start this effort (Project Derenne) and at the same time GDOT has moved forward on the safety projects that they now had some funding for.”

Neighbors say they are not abandoning the new effort but they want GDOT fully on board. Broker says she wants that too. “It's where we all live work and play. So, our effort relative to Derenne is to do our level best to make it that way. It is a gateway into our community it is the terminus to 516 it connects with Truman Parkway but it is a corridor that affects so many other interest than just moving traffic.”

Kinstler sums sums up her feelings on the subject this way, "People are more important than cars. Always!"