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County talks road for school
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Plans for the county’s role in an extension of Veterans Memorial Parkway in South Bryan to provide additional access to a proposed elementary school were evaluated during a called workshop on Monday held at the Bryan County Emergency Services building in Ellabell.
Commissioners took no action regarding the matter, but discussed with Board of Education Chairman Eddie Warren their potential role in the extension of the road just past DeVaul Henderson Park to provide an additional entrance to the proposed elementary school, which is set to open in 2015.
County Administrator Ray Pittman said the county currently has “no firm options” for their role in the project but does want to be a “good partner” with the school board in the project.
Warren said the BoE’s preference is for the road to be extended to Georgia Spur 144, or Fort McAllister Road, to provide a bus entrance for the school, alleviate traffic congestion in the area and create a new option to come to Henderson Park and school from Spur 144.
However, the developer of East Buckhead, a new subdivision in the same area, owns the property the road would have to be built on, Warren said. The developer would eventually have to extend the road to Spur 144 after the subdivision is fully developed, but that wouldn’t be for several years, he said.
“If the Board of Education decides to participate in construction of the road, the developer would have to give it to us because we’re not allowed to work on property that is not ours,” Warren said Tuesday.
He said another option that could work for the BoE is extending Veterans Memorial Parkway, a county road, between 500-700 feet from where the road currently ends just past the entrance to Henderson Park.

Read more in the April 24 edition of the News.

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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