The Sandy Springs City Council authorized the city’s Public Works Department to apply for a $9.12 million federal grant for construction and utility work for its Roswell North End Boulevard Project.
The city would need to provide 20 percent of the $11.4 million needed to complete the project as a requirement of the 2025 Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) Discretionary Grant Program. The city has the $2.28 million required through its transportation sales tax program, Sandy Springs Public Works Director Marty Martin told the city council during its Jan. 21 meeting.
Martin said the North End Boulevard Project is the city’s best candidate for this grant program. He cited its criteria, which includes safety, environmental sustainability, quality of life, mobility and community connectivity, economic competitiveness and opportunity, state of good repair, partnership and collaboration, and innovation.
“Additionally, the project’s location in the area primed for economic revitalization, where many of the residents are low income, make the application competitive because the criteria also give preference to investments in economically disadvantaged communities,” he said.
Sandy Springs received $960,000 in federal grant funding for preliminary engineering for the project. The Roswell Road North End Boulevard project is programmed in the Atlanta Regional Commission’s (ARC) Transportation Improvement Program. The city is waiting for approval from the ARC on its request for another $3.92 million for the right-of-way phase of the project.
The project’s genesis came from the Next10 Roswell Road Small Area Plan in 2017. It envisioned transforming Roswell Road from a suburban, auto-oriented corridor characterized by strip commercial development and large parking lots to a multimodal boulevard that connects vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods. The North End Boulevard project was recommended in the 2021 Transportation Master Plan in 2021 and refined in a scoping study in 2022.
“Our first application was for the Georgia 400 bridge enhancements, and since then, we’ve applied for the PATH 400 in a couple of other years, ’21,’ 23, and ’24 but no grant has been awarded to date,” Martin said.
