A long-standing flooding problem in one of Eatonton’s neighborhoods will soon get another major fix, thanks to a $1 million Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) the city received Oct. 6. It represents the largest grant of its type the city has ever received.
Eatonton Mayor John Reid said the CDBG will fund infrastructure improvements in the neighborhood across Rock Lane from the old prison site and Uncle Remus Golf Course. It will continue work the city started several years ago.
“We did the lower section of that neighborhood two, three years back,” Reid recalled. “What you do whenever you work one of those projects, you do the lower section first because you’ve got to take care of the flood, make sure you’ve got the water running off.”
The new round of CDBG funding will allow the city to move uphill and address the higher-ground portion of the same area where residents have also faced flooding.
“We mitigated most of it in the first section, so now we’re going to go in and do curbing and gutters and hopefully some sidewalks might be included,” the mayor added. “But we may have to go back later to do sidewalks; if we can do them at all. It depends on how smooth the drainage [work] goes, which is the real focus here.”
The city has received several CDBGs over the years, Reid noted.
“It is a program where you can do one every year, but we are actually on a two-year cycle because we don’t have the staff and the funds available to do this every year, because it has to be some matched [funds],” he explained.
The city has already been working on preliminary work, though, Reid added.
“Now we’re into the stage where we’ve got to complete the design, and once that’s done, we will bid it out,” he said. “We’ll find a contractor that’s going to give us a price within our range.”
Reid added that the process, though heavy on procedure, is moving forward smoothly.
“It’ll be a fair bid process, but right now, we’re still stuck in the middle of all the red tape — which is the design, fully expected.”
Regardless, though a defined start date for construction remains to be set, the mayor said he expected construction to begin in January 2026.