After the Highway 61 Bypass project Villa Rica officials had worked toward for more than a decade had seemingly flat-lined only weeks ago, it has been revived with new funding.

Two months ago the city cut loose the engineering and environmental contractors that had been working on the project because they felt like they were sinking good money after bad after the Georgia Department of Transportation had informed them there was no funding to complete the project. Without funding, they couldn’t receive a permit to proceed. However, it was revealed at a recent transportation public hearing in Carrollton that the project is on the July 13, 2009, revised draft of the GDOT State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) listing for some funding.

More than $1.7 million in state and federal funding has been allocated for right-of-way acquisition in 2012. Though the right-of-way acquisition is three years after it was originally planned and the available funds won’t be enough to purchase all the right-of-way needed to complete the project, city officials are pleased it’s back in the pipeline.

“It won’t even buy all the right-of-way, but at least it’s on the Improvement Program,” City Manager Larry Wood said. “It wasn’t even on there last year, so to get it on there is a big accomplishment in my mind.”

Mayor J. Collins agreed that any funding is an improvement and that once work begins on the project he believes GDOT will have no choice but to follow through on the plan.

“We never gave up on this,” Collins said. “Even when we heard the bypass was kind of a dead issue, it was a hit in the knees, but we’re not giving up on it because we know we desperately need it. If we can just get the thing started and one piece of equipment to knock down one tree, we’d be happy.”

City officials give a lot of credit for reviving GDOT’s commitment to GDOT board member David Doss and state Rep. Tim Bearden, R-Villa Rica, who continued to lobby for the project due to its regional impact on traffic in the entire West Georgia region.

“I thank Rep. Bearden for his efforts,” Collins said. “He’s kind of made that his mission. I know in our conversations he’s worked very hard to get us any kind of funding for that bypass because he realizes the bypass is more than just for Villa Rica. It’s going to impact transportation in our region with the amount of traffic we have coming out of Douglas County, Haralson County and Paulding County on those state roads that intersect here in our city. My hat is off to him continuing that fight for us.”

Since the available funding for the project won’t be enough to complete the entire length of the bypass — which will eventually run from just north of the Highway 61/Punkintown Road Intersection to the Industrial Boulevard/Highway 101 intersection — city officials are optimistic work will begin on the Highway 101 end to alleviate congestion there and because Ingle’s and other developers have already committed to building there with the introduction of the bypass.

“That is the worst intersection we have in town, so that’s where we want to start,” Wood said. “That would at least get us started on that end.”

Originally, the city had an agreement with the state to complete the engineering and environmental work for the project and the state would fund right-of-way acquisition and construction. Though the city has completed its end of the bargain several times, there has always been revisions that needed to be made. That is again the case with a few minor changes that must be made before the project can move forward, which will require more money be paid to the engineering firm of Keck & Wood and the environmental consulting firm of Edwards Pittman.

“There’s always something, but these will be small changes to existing engineering and shouldn’t delay the project,” Wood said. “This will be at least the third time (in the seven years) since I’ve been with the city, but there was always one more thing we had to do. I didn’t want to do that again and still be stalemated and have to do it over and over again. Now at least there’s partial funding by the state to start buying the right-of-way.”

Construction for the Highway 61 Bypass project won’t take place until some time after 2013.

Also on the revised 2009 STIP list for funding in Villa Rica is $578,813 for a walking path from downtown to the Health Department site on Cleghorn Street that will begin right-of-way acquisition soon and $4.3 million for a safety project that would involve intersection improvements at Highway 61 and South Carroll Road. There has not yet been a date assigned for the South Carroll Road project to begin.