Toccoa Seeks Price Tag Before Deciding Whitman Street Memorial’s Fate

Toccoa’s City Commission unanimously directed its Public Works Director on Dec. 9, 2013, to bring back cost estimates for a proposed community memorial and parking site on city-owned Whitman Street property near the Boys and Girls Club. Commissioners set Jan. 13, 2014, as the date for that report, making the cost question the city’s next decision point rather than approving construction.

The request matters because it placed a proposed new use for the Whitman Street parcel under public financial review. A memorial and its parking component could shape how the city uses the property, but commissioners had not established a price, identified money to pay for it or authorized work. Until those decisions were made, the scale of the proposal—and whether it would proceed at all—remained open.

The action followed a presentation earlier the same day, when the commission heard Roy M. Mayfield’s proposal for a community memorial and parking site. Rather than immediately choosing a design or committing city funds, commissioners responded by asking staff to calculate projected costs. Their unanimous motion turned the idea from an initial presentation into a preliminary staff-review item scheduled for a subsequent commission meeting.

Mayfield presented the proposal for the community memorial and parking site, according to the Dec. 9 work-session minutes. The City Commission, acting unanimously at its meeting, asked the Public Works Director for the estimates that would allow officials to weigh the proposal’s cost. The record identifies no competing proposal, public opposition, funding commitment or final position by commissioners on whether the memorial should be built.

What the commission completed was narrowly defined: it requested a cost-estimate report. The memorial and parking area remained a proposal, not an approved capital project. No dollar estimate appears in the Dec. 9 action, and the record does not document a later vote to fund, revise, build, reject or abandon the plan. Its eventual outcome is therefore unknown.

The next identified public step was the Public Works report planned for the Jan. 13, 2014, commission meeting. That report was expected to give commissioners a basis for deciding whether to pursue the Whitman Street memorial and parking site, but it would not by itself settle funding, design or construction. Minutes from that meeting and later commission records would be needed to show whether estimates were delivered and what Toccoa ultimately decided.