Tuesday, Macon.com posted this story about future planning for Macon roads, mentioning Knight Program Director for Macon, Beverly Blake, and an e-mail she wrote to community leaders.

From the Macon.com article:

With funding from the Knight Foundation, a disinterested third party, Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture IMAGINE Lab (www.coa.gatech.edu/imagine) is being employed to look at the proposed project and present a 3-D rendering that should show the community what the project will actually look like. There are all sorts of rumors of the project’s height and width and how it will interact with the Ocmulgee River. In the letter informing community leaders about the Tech project, Beverly Blake, the Knight Foundation program director, said, “Will it (the I-16/I-75 interchange) provide an orderly set of feeder streets to bring more folks into downtown/intown Macon? Will the time for construction effectively choke off all life to downtown? Are the alternatives worse than the proposed plan?”

The computer generated visuals, she said, will let us “see just exactly what the proposed interchange will look like when completed from different perspectives…”

Blake’s original letter concluded:

They [Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture IMAGINE Lab] are pleased to provide us with a proposal for their work to bring to us the three dimensional view of the proposed interchange; they will need info from Bibb/Macon and also DOT. If the scope is within the financial parameters of the grantmaking of the Knight Fund for Macon at the Community Foundation of Central Georgia, we will ask the Board of CFCG to consider funding of this visual presentation.

I wish to be clear that Knight Foundation does not have a position on this plan-our only position is to support projects and ideas that move forward Macon as a vibrant, progressive community. Our goal is to assist in providing accurate information to our citizens and policy makers.

I welcome your comments and ideas. Kindly respond to all so that we can each be a part of this conversation.

Do you have comments or ideas? Please leave them in the comments below.