Residents Get No Timeline On Turner Field Redevelopment
Mechanicsville residents attended the Atlanta Fulton County Recreation Authority Board meeting on Monday morning to ask when an RFP might be issued for parking lots in Mechanicsville.
TASNIM SHAMMA / WABE
Residents of the Mechanicsville neighborhood left a City of Atlanta and Fulton County Recreation Authority board meeting Monday unhappy.
After the Olympics in 1996, the Mechanicsville neighborhood was gutted to build parking lots for the Atlanta Braves stadium at Turner Field.
Residents say all they got were empty promises of redevelopment.
Now, with a new developer possibly coming in, residents were hopeful … but the recreation authority did not provide a timeline for when their neighborhood might see some changes.
Nearly 10 acres of parking lots in their neighborhood used for the Braves’ stadium were left out of the Request for Proposals (RFP) document released last month.
“Twenty years later almost, we’re still looking at those parking lots,” said Jane Ridley, economic development chair of the Mechanicsville Civic Association. “We had hopes that the RFP would include those parking lots so that once and for all we could get rid of them.”
Atlanta City Councilwoman Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is also executive director of the City of Atlanta and Fulton County Recreation Authority board, said in an email: “There were a number of reasons that the Board considered in deciding not to include the lots, including consideration of parking for Fulton County jurors, in the event they are no longer able to use the current lots in Summerhill.”
The deadline for the proposals for redeveloping Turner Field — minus the Mechanicsville parking lots — is Friday.
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