FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — Some homeowners are fuming after learning a youth detention center is about to open in their community.
The neighbors who live near the High Point residential corridor near Stonewall Tell Road call it environmental injustice. They don't want the Youth Development Center to sit so close to neighborhoods and a day care that's a block away.
"I'm afraid that if someone breaks out of this facility will they go into that day care center," Community Activist Anjeanne James told Channel 2s Tom Jones. "Or will they go into one into one of our communities homes and kick the door open."
A parent picking up her child from the Sheltering Arms Learning Center voiced similar concerns.
"I think it's a horrible idea to put a youth detention center right here with a primary early learning center. What happens if one of those young people gets out one day and they decide to snap? And then all of the kids in the building, God forbid, something happens to them," LaTanya Randolph said.
Fulton County Commissioner Bill Edwards also opposes the facility's location.
"I don't want to look at razor wire. I don't want to look at fences," Edwards said.
People we talked to say the Department of Juvenile Justice is all set to open the 80-bed youth development center without getting any input from the community.
"They did not have community meetings," Edwards shot back after Jones told him state officials insisted the community had been informed about the center.
"No. I did not know the youth detention center was coming," Randolph said.
Department of Juvenile Justice Spokesman Jim Shuler said the Youth Development Center project has been a very public process. He said the community has been kept informed about it every step of the way.
Shuler also said the facility is very safe. He pointed out it has a 24-hour staff, it has a barbed wire fence and he says there are cameras everywhere. Shuler says the center will bring 131 jobs to the area.
But residents who oppose the facility said all that makes no difference if one of the children gets out.
"If they really were listening they wouldn't put it in a residential area," James said.
Some people in the area say it feels like this was just dumped on them.
"They wouldn't do this up north," Randolph said.
"We're just tired of the environmental injustice in African-American neighborhoods," Edwards said.
The Department of Juvenile Justice said it built this facility here so that Metro Atlanta parents wouldn't have to travel so far to visit their children.
This community wonders why the department didn't build it in North Fulton.
It is set to open sometime next month.
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WSBTV
