It’s been three years and four days since the Atlanta Braves announced their move to Cobb County – a move I have chronicled frequently on this site. And why wouldn’t I? My hometown team was moving into a brand-new stadium exactly three miles from my front door.

Tuesday night, Cobb County informed me I’d have to find a new front door, and a new house, because they’re bulldozing both to build a new road.

Unoriginally named the Windy Hill-Terrell Mill Connector project, the new four-lane road will connect – you guessed it – Windy Hill and Terrell Mill roads when construction begins in Fall 2019. There’s no timeline for completion, but the project begins in June when homes in the path of the new road are acquired.

(More: SunTrust Park construction, October update)

Why this new road? So the folks who take the new managed lanes along Interstate 75 can easily hop off the freeway at Terrell Mill Road and get to the new stadium quickly. The stadium I was so happy about.

If it wasn’t all so ironic, I would cry.

So my wife and I will leave our home soon – the only home we’ve ever known, the place where we’ve lived since the summer of 2013, a year before we got married. We’ll never be able to bring our future children past the home where their parents first lived, and we definitely won’t be able to show them the place to which they were first brought home from the hospital.

We’ll find another home, probably in Cobb County, but likely a lot farther up I-75. We’ll pay the same taxes we do now, but we won’t quite feel the changes in the area we’ve anticipated since the Braves made their big announcement.

Perhaps that’s what bothered me the most. The county claims this new road plan has been in place “a decade or more,” so one might assume they were keeping my neighborhood around as long as they could to squeeze as much tax money as they could out of us. We’ve been the ones who’ve had to deal with the congestion as the county tore up every road around us to revitalize the area, and they’re not keeping us around long enough to enjoy the finished product.

Since this project is 10 years in the making, it’s hard to blame the Braves for this. The area around Cumberland Mall was getting a face lift whether the Braves came to Cobb County or not. The new I-75 managed lanes are to blame, plain and simple.

But when you advertise 14 main access points to the new stadium, and one of them is the road that runs outside my house, it’s hard to fathom why you need to build yet another one through my home.

That just seems like overkill.

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