I recently wrote about all the wheelchair ramps being created in our Landmark District. The pace seems to have slowed recently; in fact it seems to have halted all together. Perhaps there is a reason.

This past weekend while I was visiting friends in Charlottesville, Virginia I noticed that they have repaved the streetscape in the most historic part of town with a lot of very attractive and functional brick work. While the UVA football team lost against North Carolina, unfortunately - unlike our Bulldogs who beat Florida this past Saturday (Yeah!), Charlottesville has definitely won in terms of the quality of their recent streetscape renovations. It all has to do with the elevations and the angles involved - some of our ramps just will not work! They are way too steep and/or bumpy. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Jay Graham Landscape Architecture won the contract to do the specs in Charlottesville instead of the seemingly unsupervised way our project was handled (with some sort of state mandated deadline in mind if I am not mistaken) ….. If governments could only learn to get along ….. I have mixed feelings as I'd like to see it done right but I hate the idea of all that cost for correcting those ramps that clearly will need to be reworked in order for anyone wheelchair bound to easily maneuver them.

Planning Savannah, planning - it is how we got to where we are today both the good and the bad!!

Until Next Week,

Ron Melander