You might not know that the city of Atlanta had two forests tucked away for a potential second airport, but now the cat’s out of the bag! And just in time for the city to sell them off!
Wait, wait, wait. The City was planning to build a second airport?
Well, sorta. If you’ve been keeping up with the news from the 1970s, you might know this, but there’ve been no recent plans to build a new airport in Atlanta.
According to a report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
In the 1970s the city of Atlanta worried it might someday need a second airport, so it bought a pair of 10,000-acre tracts of land in exurban Paulding and Dawson counties… The two sites have been managed as public recreation land by the state since 1975 — all while the city’s interest in building that second airport evaporated.
So what’s happening now?
Now, with no plans to build a second airport in Atlanta, the city is looking at selling the land. The AJC reports,
Atlanta officials have spent more than a year weighing a secret offer from the state Department of Natural Resources to purchase the properties for nearly $100 million and put them into permanent conservation.
Selling the land is definitely a decision with a lot of weight. On one hand, selling the land for conservation could help protect the city’s green spaces significantly. In fact, there are no tracts of forest this large left in the metro ATL area, so preserving them would be great for the environment. Dawson Forest also includes the tallest waterfall in the state, Georgia’s beloved Amicalola Falls.
On the other hand, this sale would, according to the AJC, “dramatically decrease the city’s landholdings and its chances of ever building something at the scale of another commercial airport.”
Mayor Andre Dickens is taking his time to weigh both sides of this decision to sell. Either way, for now at least, Atlanta is not getting a second airport any time soon!