Editorial: Historic preservationists should pay attention

This community has known since Nov. 2, 2004, that a mixed-use parking deck would be built downtown, when voters approved a list of 33 projects, including the deck, to be funded with a continuation of the 1 percent special-purpose local-option sales tax.

Sales tax proceeds will fund a third of the $17.5 million cost of the six-story, 520-space deck, which also will include retail and office space. Bonds will cover another third of the cost for the deck, which will be at Lumpkin, Clayton and Washington streets, and Atlanta developer Batson-Cook, which will own some retail and office space in the deck, will cover $6.2 million of its costs.

In the years since the SPLOST vote, this newspaper has carried any number of news stories about the planned new downtown parking deck, and also has editorialized about the proposed structure. Also during that time, the SPLOST program office, the Athens-Clarke County mayor's office, and each of the county's 10 commissioners have been nothing more than a telephone call or an e-mail away from any interested citizens.

Beyond that, in the past year alone, there have been somewhere around a dozen formal opportunities for the public to comment on the planned parking deck - at commission work sessions, agenda-setting meetings and a public hearing. The commission also provided an opportunity for the Athens-Clarke Historic Preservation Commission to get an early look at the plans, even though the deck is outside the locally designated downtown historic district.

And yet, despite the fact that a new downtown parking deck has been formally on the public agenda for almost five years, and despite the fact that any concerns could have been made known to SPLOST program managers or elected officials at any point during that time, the local historic preservation community is grousing that planning for the deck simply has moved too fast.

In a Monday story in this newspaper, a local retired landscape architecture profe

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