Balancing Creativity and Parenting: Jill Tew’s Journey

In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, Rico Figliolini sits down with debut author Jill Tew to discuss her gripping sci-fi novel The Dividing Sky. Jill shares her fascinating journey from a corporate career to becoming a published author, revealing how her love for science fiction and storytelling shaped her path.

Dive into the themes of worldbuilding, dystopian futures, and emotional experiences that form the core of her book. Jill also opens up about the evolving publishing landscape, offering insight into how authors today must stay agile and seize new opportunities. Plus, hear her thoughts on balancing writing with parenting and her excitement for her upcoming middle-grade novel with Disney.

This episode is perfect for fans of sci-fi, aspiring writers, and anyone curious about the creative process behind a debut novel. Tune in to discover more about The Dividing Sky and Jill Tew’s captivating writing journey!

Resources:
The Dividing Sky on Penguin Random House: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736783/the-dividing-sky-by-jill-tew/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/764010/freedom-fire-kaya-morgans-crowning-achievement-by-jill-tew
Jill Tew’s Website: https://www.jilltew.com/books

Timestamp:
00:00:00 – From Corporate to Creative and Spreadsheets to Sci-Fi
00:08:12 – Exploring the Dividing Sky, A Dystopian Tale
00:13:17 – Worldbuilding Responsibility for Sci-Fi Authors
00:17:49 – Exploring Mixed Media Formats for Storytelling
00:20:43 – The Evolving Publishing Landscape
00:26:22 – Balancing Writing and Parenting
00:28:00 – Writing Tricks and Techniques
00:30:02 – A Young Black Girl’s Renaissance Faire Journey
00:32:11 – Writing for Young Readers
00:33:06 – Capturing Friendship, Uncertainty, and the Power of Perspective
00:35:40 – Closing Thoughts

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life, a podcast here in the city of Peachtree Corners in the county of Gwinnett, just north of Atlanta. So I want to welcome you all for visiting with us today. We have a first-time author, Jill Tew, who’s visiting with us, who lives here in Peachtree Corners, actually, as well. Hey, Jill.

00:00:20 – Jill Tew

Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you.

00:00:23 – Rico Figliolini

This is great. I mean, I just love the idea of being an author myself. I’m sure I have a book in me somewhere, but I can appreciate the endeavors of a first-time writer and author doing this. Yours is actually called The Dividing Sky and is available on Penguin Publishing, their website, and anywhere else that you can find a book.

00:00:50 – Jill Tew

Anywhere books are sold. Yeah, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. I’ll always shout out local indie bookstores. If it’s not on the shelf, you can always make a request.

00:00:58 – Rico Figliolini

Excellent. So you were born in Georgia. You went away for college. You ended up in Denver for a few years, and then you came back to Georgia. Tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are and where you’ve been in life.

00:01:14 – Jill Tew

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up not far from here in the Dunwoody, Sandy Springs area. When I was growing up, it was Dunwoody, and then they incorporated, and so that changed.

00:01:22 – Rico Figliolini

Right.

00:01:23 – Jill Tew

And yeah, I grew up, I always loved writing and storytelling and went away for college to do something more practical. I thought that that was kind of what I was supposed to do. So I went away to school in Philadelphia at an undergraduate business degree and did that and was convinced that that was what I was going to do. I was going to go be an international businesswoman. And I was on the right track. You know, I graduated, I did pretty well in school, I got a very sort of like prestigious corporate job out of school, I was a management consultant. So I was working in New York advising major corporations. And yeah, after that, you know, I decided that maybe the corporate environment wasn’t quite for me, but I still loved business and I loved solving problems that way. And so I ended up moving out to Denver and worked at a startup for another couple of years. That startup ended up getting acquired by Comcast and it was kind of a really cool process to be a part of from start to finish. And that was when the time that I realized that I still had this like creative bug in me from when I was younger and I began to pursue writing as a hobby. And then a few years later, as things kind of shifted, the pandemic happened and I was growing in my craft. Then it shifted from being, you know, less of a hobby to more of, you know, a full kind of wholehearted pursuit. And now it’s a career.

00:02:47 – Rico Figliolini

Cool. What did, when you were younger let’s say, I don’t know growing up being a tween and stuff, what was your, did you have any, did you see yourself being creative at that point? What transpired even at that age? Because usually it seems to start young.

00:02:58 – Jill Tew

Yeah, totally. So it’s funny, you know, I never had any like visual art ability so I never thought of myself as like a creative person because I was like, oh I can’t paint or draw for beans. But I loved wordplay and so I loved like making things rhyme and making up funny like poems and like parodies of songs. My favorite book when I was growing up was actually my rhyming dictionary because I would use it to just like make up funny stories and poems and stuff. I loved books you know, I loved, I think, storytelling in all of its forms. So my favorite at that point ended up being musicals. So I, again, kind of love musicals for the storytelling ability. And I would find myself, you know, watching, you know, science fiction movies or books, or shows, excuse me, or when I was a little bit older, the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out. And I would just like, think about these worlds and thinking about these adventures and, you know, kind of come up with some of my own. I never wrote any fan fiction, but I read it heavily. And I just loved, you know, kind of imagining the different places that these stories could take me. And looking back now, it all kind of clicks. And I see, you know, where that spark kind of started. I loved writing stories and creative writing in school, but when I pivoted to that point of more pragmatic and practical approach, I should have known that eventually I was going to end up circling back.

00:04:17 – Rico Figliolini

That’s funny. So was science fiction, fantasy, was that area mainly your interest?

00:04:23 – Jill Tew

Yeah, mainly. I grew up you know reading animorphs. That was probably my first like science fiction love as a kid. I watched this show that not everyone remembers but if you know you know. There was a show that ran like the late 90s early 2000s called Farscape and it was like yeah. So it’s like Jim Henson Studios, like Muppets in space, but for like adults, like, you know, just like the best, like found family space opera of these like kooky alien characters coming together. I imprinted really hard on that show actually. And I feel like that was kind of where I got the bug.

00:05:00 – Rico Figliolini

Okay, cool. I agree. You listen, people get it from different places and depending on your age, it’s just, you know, it goes. I mean, my kids are voracious readers, and they’re into fantasy, sci-fi as well. Lord of the Rings was like a 13-year-old kid reading it. It’s a dense piece of work also.

00:05:21 – Jill Tew

Yeah, absolutely.

00:05:25 – Rico Figliolini

I can see that. So with the work you’ve done, you know, getting into it as a hobby, how’d you get into it as a hobby? What were you doing as far as writing profiles, short stories, trying to pull together a novel idea? How’d that work?

00:05:38 – Jill Tew

Yeah, it’s really funny. I have some friends who kind of started writing with short stories. I have a lot of friends actually that feel like they’re either good at short stories or novels. And like very few can really do both because they’re very different kind of media, like very different formats.

00:05:52 – Rico Figliolini

Sure.

00:05:53 – Jill Tew

So for me, you know, when I thought about a story, when my first story came to me, it really was this kind of bigger story that needed kind of a full length novel. I was at the startup job on the verge of burnout. And some coworkers thought that we should go see a movie after work. And so we went to the theater and it was Divergent. It was that movie that came out probably a decade ago. And walking home from the theater, I remember like that spark, like reigniting in me and me saying like, oh my gosh, like I’ve been missing this. Like this is what I want to do. I don’t want to make spreadsheets for the rest of my life, I just want to tell a story and I went home and instead of like working on work that night I started like plotting out this novel that I had in my head. It was the idea for like a parallel universe like sci-fi story and seven years later that story got me my agent. And then we went on submission and which means like you take the story to publishers and see if they want it. That book did not sell. But while it was out to editors, I ended up writing the book that became my debut, The Dividing Sky. So yeah, that was kind of the beginning of the journey was seeing Divergent and remembering that part of who I was.

00:07:01 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, Divergent. That was a YA novel that that movie was based on. A trilogy, I think, even because they came out with some more stories.

00:07:09 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:07:10 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. I love the process of writing the whole idea of doing it. You know, reading up on and listen to, you know, podcasts about writing the craft, like you said, because it is a craft, right? It’s an artisan craft almost in some ways. But putting things together, usually most authors that I’ve heard about or read about say that first book is usually that exercise of writing. But it’s not the book that ever gets published. It’s always the second or third book that might get you there. So is this book a duology, a trilogy, or is it a one-off book?

00:07:47 – Jill Tew

Yeah, right now it’s a standalone, I think. So actually I should say that next fall, actually I’m publishing The Penguin Random House again, a book that you could think of as like a companion novel. So it’s another kind of dystopian romance. It’s about a hundred years before the events of this book. So it kind of sets up how we get here, but you can read them in either order, honestly. Readers have been clamoring for a sequel already for The Dividing Sky. And so I am putting some thoughts together about what I want to pitch to my editors. It definitely has, it’s not a cliffhanger, but it leaves some questions open-ended at the end. There’s room for more. And so I’ve been thinking about where else the story might go.

00:08:28 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. No, I could tell. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but just the synopsis of what the story is about. It takes place in 2364. It’s an 18-year-old Liv Newman. Interesting storyline about what she does.

00:08:43 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:08:43 – Rico Figliolini

And that the rookie police force person, I guess, Adrienne Rowe, that follows her and finds her, and she’s lost all her memory, even though memory is part of her job. So, I mean, it’s just I think it’s such a great premise, and I can see how it could go further. You’ve done a lot of good reviews, it seems. Kirkus Reviews called your debut a gutsy novel. You’ve had other reviews in there and your comparisons even to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. What does it feel to be talked about like that? You know, to get those reviews?

00:09:21 – Jill Tew

Yeah, it’s a lot. I mean, when I finished it, and we were kind of wrapping up the editing process, I knew it was something special. But you never know, you know? I think, a lot of the power of those reviews comes in, like, who they assign to read it. And all you can do as a reader, as an author, honestly, is like, hope your book finds its people, like at every level, even, you know, bookstores. And so when I saw those star reviews, my first thought was like, oh my gosh, like this book might have a shot at like finding its people. And, you know, I mean like any author I think would like dream of being compared to Octavia Butler. I feel like I don’t want the book to be like overhyped, but you know, it’s funny. Like, I mean, I love Parable of the Sower. I love that book and Octavia Butler, her writing was brilliant. I think when I reread Octavia Butler or the Parable of the Sower this past year, I was reminded of how much of that story kind of seeped into my authorial DNA. In that book, the main character has this sort of like, you could call it a gift or a curse or just ability to feel like the physical things that others feel you know like if somebody gets punched in the face like she feels that pain and this idea of like a character like having empathy for like extreme like speculative like couldn’t possibly be real like empathy for others in that way has leaked into my DNA for sure. I think you know Liv in the Dividing Sky she’s what we call an emo proxy meaning that her job is actually to read books, watch movies, look at blades of grass blowing in the wind or sunsets, and have emotional experiences about those things. And then sell those emotional experiences, those emotional memories to wealthy clients who are too busy working to live life for themselves. And so this idea of transferring emotions, of channeling an emotion so that someone else can experience it, I feel like is tangential to that ability and Parable of the Sower in a lot of ways.

00:11:13 – Rico Figliolini

I love that idea. I mean, the fact that we look at COVID, we look at the sense of loss of personal connections with people, eventually losing you know I could see that it’s sad world almost a dystopian world where you literally have to work through other people’s emotions. Which is really what we do with social media right? When we scroll through TikTok for about 30 minutes we’re living through other people’s lives. It’s not that much different.

00:11:39 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:11:39 – Rico Figliolini

So is there, and as you know, every book always says, none of this is based on real events or real characters or people, but you know, an author writes from what they know a bit, right? Is there a particular part that was difficult to write or a particular part that you felt more deeply about in this book?

00:12:01 – Jill Tew

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So I think, there’s the world of the book starts off and it’s called the Metro. And it’s sort of this like hyper capitalist world where everything is hinged around productivity. And so you’re only valuable insofar as you can earn money for this mega corporation that we call Life Corp in the book. And that’s why everyone is so, you know, focused on working is because like, that’s how you get not only money, you know your productivity score dictates you know where you can live what you can do kind of just like the confines of your life. And so like of course you’re going to outsource reading books or child care or you know repair work or like dates with your wife to like proxies who will go and handle that for you. Now Liv and Adrian end up discovering this other community outside of the borders of the Metro called the Outerlands. And there are people out there who have been kind of vilified. But the closer they get to this community, the more they realize that they have a very different way of living that feels more connected and feels more like in harmony and is slower paced and appreciates the value of human life, not for being productive, but just for being intrinsically valuable. And that was hard. I mean, I did some thinking about what I wanted that world to look like, because, you know, I think as an author, like you’re going to be depicting a society that is like, you know, in some ways, kind of what you’re saying, what we should like swing closer towards or keep in mind, something that’s supposed to show, you know, what could be be possible. And you have to like take that responsibility really seriously. So I thought a lot about the elements I wanted to highlight and you know what I wanted to kind of telegraph as yeah, like a way of life that is you know maybe more in balance.

00:13:37 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. I mean you’re not too far off with the, with what you were saying before about how work or credits may affect your life because, I mean China does that right?

00:13:42 – Jill Tew

Oh yeah, the social credit, exactly, right.

00:13:48 – Rico Figliolini

And we’re not that far from that. I mean, we’re stepping towards it a little bit because even credit ratings, it used to be that apartment rent wasn’t counted in that. Now it is. Utilities and the use of utilities is being counted in that. It wasn’t before.

00:14:10 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:14:11 – Rico Figliolini

So I don’t think we’re too far from that social credit kind of deal.

00:14:13 – Jill Tew

I agree. Yeah.

00:14:15 – Rico Figliolini

So, and you do take responsibility as an author to be able to, I mean, as a reader, I take responsibility of what I want, what I like. So it’s a two-way thing, two-way street, right? To a degree like that?

00:14:31 – Jill Tew

Yeah, absolutely.

00:14:32 – Rico Figliolini

But I like where you’re going with that. World building is a very difficult thing.

00:14:36 – Jill Tew

It’s hard. It’s real hard. Yeah.

00:14:38 – Rico Figliolini

I mean, you do it well. I think people realize that without even putting too much thought into it they all of a sudden realize they’re in it and they like it. A bit like Blade Runner.

00:14:52 – Jill Tew

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think you know all of those stories. I think it’s funny as a sci-fi author and like dystopian author especially like you just realize you’ve been like swimming in this like ether and like all these ideas and you know there’s like androids in my book you know like all these things have just kind of like seeped into like your, the compost pile that you’re using to you know to grow your story.

00:15:13 – Rico Figliolini

Definitely, for sure. So where do you find, so you mentioned like movies, a couple of movies and stuff and obviously some books. Are there other books of sci-fi or movies or shows besides Farscape and some of the ones you’ve mentioned already that you’ve taken inspiration from?

00:15:28 – Jill Tew

Yeah, definitely those. You know, I mean, I haven’t really, I haven’t sold a book in space yet, but like I love Battlestar Galactica. That’s kind of like a classic space, you know, space story. What was I talking to somebody in an interview the other day about when I was younger, there were these two movies that came out back to back that were both about like androids that like you know kind of bordered on being human. So one was like AI, the Haley Joel Osment movie but he was like a little boy almost like a pinocchio metaphor. And then the other one was Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams.

00:16:00 – Rico Figliolini

Yes.

00:16:06 – Jill Tew

Where he lives over like 200 years. And I think those books, I mean the movies came out like back to back and I just feel like there was a moment there where everyone was kind of thinking about like technology and humanity and like where do you draw the line. And I think like I always wrestle with those ideas. The android character in Dividing Sky, Naz is Adrian’s like partner on the force. They’re like buddied up and he like he’s got a heart of gold right? Heart of like chrome and gold, I guess. But he you know, for being you know a robot essentially like he cares a lot about his partner. And I wanted to kind of subvert the idea of an android being clinical and like hard and cold and have one who’s like prime directive really was like the care of his partner. And there’s a book that is a little bit more recent it’s another like YA sci-fi book a trilogy actually, called the Illuminae Files. So if anyone’s listening and like has a young reader in your life that likes science fiction, this book is fantastic. It’s like a mixed media format so instead of just like prose on the page it’s told through like chat transcripts and like security camera footage and like all this really cool like artifacts. It’s a really fun read and also great on audiobook so I would highly recommend that one as well.

00:17:18 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. I haven’t heard about that one yet. But I guess trending today, I mean, you see, my kids are into YA novels too, or at least they were in YA novels. They’re into young adult novels, maybe, right? And so there’s trends out there, right? Different ways of writing. Like you said, I mean, it could be multimedia. It could be transcripts. It could be just different ways of doing it. Do you find, are there any, is there anything out there that’s trending that you think would work for you even for you to do?

00:17:53 – Jill Tew

I like, it’s my dream to someday do like a full mixed media like mixed format book like that’d be awesome. There are a few of those in Dividing Sky like we have some like police reports there’s some doodles in there that are really cute. We have like a scientific study abstract and a job description actually opens up the book so there’s like some fun little things we did in there from a design perspective to kind of make the world feel more fleshed out. But I would love to be able to play around with different mixed media formats because it’s almost like a puzzle coming together even more than like a novel already is. It’s like thinking about what elements you pull from like the real world that you’ve created to give a full picture of the story. So I think that’s really cool.

00:18:34 – Rico Figliolini

I’m curious. Your book is probably available as an audible.

00:18:38 – Jill Tew

Yeah. Oh, the audio book is fantastic. So we have two amazing voices. The story is dual POV. So it’s Liv’s perspective and Adrian’s perspective. And so we have two narrators, which is great. So Kaya Freight does Liv’s voice, and she is like a well-known anime voice actress. She does a bunch of audiobooks. She just did the voice of Violet from Fourth Wing on the like full cast edition of the audiobook so she’s amazing. And then Junior Nyong’o did Adrian’s voice and he’s a fantastic actor in his own right. He’s done a few audiobooks as well I think some things for the stage. He’s also Lupita Nyong’o’s little brother which is really cool too. So they both did a fantastic job. I’m like so, I’m a big like audiobook, I have like a high standard for audio books. And so I was like, okay, like can’t get just anybody. But I’m so pleased with how it turned out.

00:19:30 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no, I can appreciate that. When I go on my two, three mile walks, I always listen to a novel or something. And if I hear a really good performance or voice, I always look for what other stories they’ve read.

00:19:42 – Jill Tew

Yeah, exactly.

00:19:42 – Rico Figliolini

Because I mean, just, you can have a really bad reader or performer just.

00:19:51 – Jill Tew

They can ruin a great book, yes. That’s happened to me, unfortunately, a few times when I’ve listened. It’s like, ugh, yeah.

00:19:55 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, same on that, but it goes that way sometimes. So you’ve gone through the process of writing your book, publishing it. I’m sure it took a little time to, like you said, it took seven years to get an agent. You wrote the book for seven years, but your first book.

00:20:09 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:20:12 – Rico Figliolini

And you got an agent. Were you surprised about the process of actually, behind the scenes process of what it took to get the book published?

00:20:19 – Jill Tew

Yeah. So the process of going on submission, I think, was more straightforward. It’s basically like getting an agent, but like all over again. So, you know, you send the manuscript out to editors, you know, your agent ideally has relationships with different editors and publishing houses. And, you know, in science fiction and speculative work, especially, it just takes a long time because editors are also editing books they’ve already acquired. So they’re editing those things. They’re reading a bunch of submissions every day, every week. So the time it took, like that was kind of expected for me. The Dividing Sky actually sold in like five or six weeks, which was pretty fast. And that was amazing. But yeah, so after that, I think, you know, I knew that it would take about 18 months to two years for the book to come out after that, which is about right. So we sold it in October 2022. It just came out. So that’s about right. And over that time period, yeah, you’re editing more at the high level story structure level. And then you go into line edits. So that’s like at the prose level. And then you get to copy edits, which is like typos. So all of that takes, you know, months and months and months. You know, I think what might have been surprising to me is that, you know, a year before the book even comes out, that’s when like marketing and sales and like cover conversations really kick off. And so, you know, you might be working with your editor for a year before that, but it’s like that one year timeline like starts like now all of a sudden it’s a real thing for like everybody else at the publisher. So that part’s always really exciting. So now we’ve got, we’re going through that process now for my next YA book.

00:21:55 – Rico Figliolini

Gotcha, okay. And publishing has changed right? So I mean you have Amazon selling books you have Audible selling books on credit. So authors aren’t making the millions that they used to make before, let’s say. And it was definitely an exclusive club to some degree, right? Where you can make at least a full-time living between a book and then talking tours and stuff like that. Did you find anything about that that was surprising?

00:22:27 – Jill Tew

Yeah, you know, I don’t have much to compare it to because I’m an author now. But you know, from what I gather, you know, I think the biggest thing that’s changed is that people’s attention is just split in so many different ways. And that has upstream effects, right? So if people don’t read the way that they used to, you know, we have so many different things vying for our attention between, you know, the different streaming services and social media, and, you know, all the other forms of media out there, video games. And so I think authors are not, you know, one of only a handful of different forms of entertainment anymore. There’s so much more out there. And so, yeah, I think it’s harder. You know, I think publishing houses definitely feel this, you know, both because, you know the big five publishing houses that they have their own like traditional way of doing things that now may not be as effective and because new players are entering the fray. Like TikTok has their own publishing house now called Bindery. And Bindery partners with local TikTok influencers to like who become editors and like kind of curate their own stable of authors and then promote them through you know going viral on TikTok. And so you know there’s all, and it’s working really well. I mean, I have good friends that have Bindery deals and they’re being treated very well. And I think for authors it’s a totally viable path. So yeah it’s just fascinating to see and then also even downstream you have like book boxes so they’re these companies that will create these beautiful exclusive editions of books and kind of spray the edges and maybe redo the cover and put the illustrations inside and now they have their own publishing houses as well. So they’ve spent years getting to know what readers want really, really well. And now they’re like great, like we can just go buy that we don’t have to pay the publisher to acquire the licenses for these books, we’ll just edit and like have our own authors. And so I think from all these different angles, publishers are feeling this push of like, okay, how do we get closer to readers, but also explore these new channels of marketing, right? I think it’s kind of a free-for-all right now. And I think, yeah, authors can just stay agile and nimble and kind of react to what the market’s doing and just try to seize opportunity where it comes honestly.

00:24:29 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah and hopefully that you know maybe one of these becomes a Netflix series or movie or something, right?

00:24:35 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:24:40 – Rico Figliolini

With all the streaming services looking for content and stuff it’s unbelievable. And with ChatGPT. I’ve had a few friends that think they’re authors now because they can just get ChatGPT to write a piece for them. It’s amazing. It’s not that easy.

00:24:57 – Jill Tew

No, it’s not. And like you, if you don’t enjoy the like puzzle and like mental exercise that is writing, maybe being an author is not for you. Like you should enjoy, it’s hard, but you should enjoy the process.

00:25:10 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, that’s for sure. It is hard. And it’s, if you’re not willing to spend weeks, months and several years on it, then just drop it. You’re a parent of two kids, two young kids. I think one of them is starting school, maybe shortly? How do you balance? Writing is different than a 9-to-5 job, and it’s even different than some of these remote or hybrid jobs. Because someone could say, well, you can write almost any time. Although your creativity might be good at 6 to 7 in the morning maybe, or maybe at night after the kids go to sleep. So how do you balance that? How does that work for you creatively?

00:25:49 – Jill Tew

Absolutely. So yeah, so when I, before I got an agent, when I was like, when they were very young, I would write mostly at night. Now I write in the morning. So, you know, you can write anywhere. But for me, like once my kids are awake, like a good half of my brain is just like tuned in to wherever they are, like whatever they might need. Even if like I’m in the basement of my office and they’re upstairs, like you hear the pitter patter of little feet and I’m like, oh, like there goes like a chunk of my focus. So I need to write when they’re asleep. So, yeah, I get up early. I write, my like dedicated writing time is usually in the morning from like 6:30 to 8:00 or so. And now because my oldest is in like full time school now and my youngest is in a half day preschool program, I have more of the time during like waking hours to write. But you know, I’m still a full-time mom so my you know, I’m doing grocery shopping, I’m doing laundry. Like that time gets filled with other things too. So I really protect that 6:00 to 6:30 to 8:00 time and I can get a lot done in that time. If I’m like plotting out my story and I know what the next scene is and I know, you know, what I need to happen and what conversations need to happen in that part of the book, I can bang it out. You know, as long as I’m just like keeping that time and like holding it sacred and getting up every morning to do it a little bit at a time, I can chip away at a manuscript.

00:27:11 – Rico Figliolini

Do you set up an outline? Do you start with an outline?

00:27:15 – Jill Tew

I do. Yeah. Some authors can be more kind of like flexible and kind of discover, you know, where their story takes them. I always outline. I’m a plotter, as they say. So I plot out my story. I made spreadsheets for a living, you know, before I was an author. Now I make them for my like outlines and my revisions. Love a good spreadsheet still. And yeah, I need that. Yeah.

00:27:37 – Rico Figliolini

Do you create profiles for some of your characters or do you let them tell you where they go as you’re writing?

00:27:44 – Jill Tew

Yeah. Some authors do that and have like a big story bible. I’m not, I don’t do that only because I know that it will make me procrastinate. Like I could spend forever building that out and then never actually get to the story. So I kind of let, I have like a few character details that I use in service of like figuring out how the plot works. And then the rest of it, I kind of build in over the course of revisions as things kind of flesh themselves out. Yeah.

00:28:06 – Rico Figliolini

Are you a bit of a procrastinator?

00:28:09 – Jill Tew

I’m not, but I can get in my head about like a story not being good enough to get started and I think that’s the biggest thing when you’re writing. Even, you know, for an established author writing the next thing and like that blank page is always scary. So yeah, if I don’t just like start then like I can get in my head and say like, oh let’s wait you know, a few more days. Like just, nope, just got to do it. You cannot revise what doesn’t exist. So you have to start first.

00:28:29 – Rico Figliolini

That’s good. I love that. Do you set goals for yourself, like word counts or time or anything like that?

00:28:37 – Jill Tew

Yeah, I try, you know, I’m generous with myself because I know that I, if I’m not careful, I’ll burn out. And then like that goal won’t be hit anyway. So especially when I’m on my own deadlines, not my editor’s deadlines, I try to take it easy, you know. I can do 1000 words a day pretty reliably. And so you know, that gets like three months later, that’s a full book, right? So that’s kind of usually my pace. And I do like to kind of backwards plan and think about, okay, by the end of the week, I want to be at this chapter. By the end of the month, I want to be here. That way I just know that I’m on track. Or that I need to adjust my plan if I’m falling behind or, you know, sometimes as you’re writing, you’re like, oh, like that scene actually belongs somewhere else. Or I can like accomplish that in a paragraph instead. So you’re always revising, like you’re not holding it too tightly, but I like a good plan. It just helps me know where I’m going.

00:29:26 – Rico Figliolini

I know the kids are kind of young, but the oldest, what does she feel about mom being a writer and author?

00:29:34 – Jill Tew

Oh my gosh. Yeah. So the moment they began to kind of finally get it actually was last February. I sold my middle grade book, which is like a nine to twelve year old reader, kind of like that’s like younger than young adult right? I sold two books to Disney. So my first one, my first Disney book’s coming out in April. But when I told them that it was with Disney, they were like, oh, Disney, like we get it. That was amazing. And then actually like three days ago, I was going to, we were picking up Mellow Mushroom for dinner. And we went to Johns Creek Books and Gifts, which is like right down the street. And my book is there. And so I was like, our oh, pizza’s not ready yet. Let’s just go in this bookstore. So my oldest was with me. And I was like, hey, do you see anything that looks familiar? And like her eyes popped out of her head. I think for her, she was like, oh, like mommy writes real books. And they’re like in the stores. And that was, I think she was like proud, but like also just like over, like it was very cute. But yeah she like, she couldn’t believe it so that was really cool.

00:30:33 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, that must have been a great feeling.

00:30:35 – Jill Tew

Yeah, I mean she, you know, like the whole house, my husband’s been amazing about this too. Just like the whole house has been like, mommy’s books coming out. So we have like just keep track of like whose birthdays come in like the calendar year and so it’s like, oh like daddy’s birthday, mommy’s birthday, you know my youngest, my oldest, whatever. And they slotted my book’s birthday in there so they’re like, mommy’s book’s birthday. And then yeah, and then Christmas. And so yeah. So it’s been like a big thing we’ve been building up to so yeah.

00:31:00 – Rico Figliolini

That’s fun. Now you did mention a middle grade book you wrote. So tell us a few you know tell us about that.

00:31:10 – Jill Tew

Yeah. So that’s coming out April 1st. Oh I have that, I’ll show you the cover because it’s very cute. So that book is, it’s called Kaya Morgan’s Crowning Achievement and it’s about a, let’s see put the camera, a black girl growing up in suburban Atlanta who is competing to be crowned the first black queen of her local Renaissance Festival summer camp. And it’s really good. I loved the Renaissance Festival growing up. It was a big part of my nerd awakening, probably. And there’s just so much in here about this girl kind of discovering where she belongs and what she’s interested in, even as society tells her that maybe those things don’t make sense for who she is. And also a bunch of Renaissance Faire puns in here.

00:31:54 – Rico Figliolini

So that’s great. And that’s a great festival. First of all, anyone that lives in Atlanta should be able to visit.

00:31:59 – Jill Tew

It’s amazing. Yeah, I go every year. So, yeah, that one’s coming out in April. And Disney has, it’s been great to work with too. It’s kind of fun to think about younger kids and readers that are maybe still looking for, they don’t know that they’re readers yet. They’re looking for the right book to hook them. And so I think a lot about the reader looking at this on the shelf and saying, okay, maybe I can get into books.

00:32:13 – Rico Figliolini

So that’s a lot different to write than a YA novel.

00:32:21 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:32:22 – Rico Figliolini

I mean, did that process take longer? Is it the same agent or you had to find a different agent?

00:32:30 – Jill Tew

Yeah. Same agent, different publisher, obviously. So yeah, for this one, you know, it’s interesting. You know, I love a good love story. There’s no romance in my middle grade, right? So where’s my romance arc? But that’s okay. There’s a friendship arc, which is really good. And yeah, the voice is different. I think younger kids, I think even for a young adult, like in YA, everything is so immediate and urgent, but for middle grade, even more so, right? So your best friend doesn’t invite you to the birthday party, your world is crashing. It’s crumbling down, right? And so it was fun to kind of get back into my like 12-year-old headspace. Remember what it was like, like not knowing who I was going to be, like who I was going to end up becoming. There’s a lot of that uncertainty and like, who am I, where do I fit in? It was fun to revisit that and kind of provide, you know, one perspective.

00:33:20 – Rico Figliolini

That’d be interesting for your kids to pick that up as they get older.

00:33:24 – Jill Tew

Yeah exactly. It’s different yeah.

00:33:37 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, critiquing mom on, I don’t know about this mom.

00:33:38 – Jill Tew

Yeah I can’t wait. Yeah my oldest is still, she loves her like Dog Man and Captain Underpants right now. But I think as she gets older she’s like, she’s close to getting ready for this. yeah we’re going

00:33:42 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I remember Captain Underpants, my kids bought those too. Actually, because of the school book fair, it’s scholastic books and stuff.

00:33:50 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:33:56 – Rico Figliolini

How far out do you think? I know you’re working on the other book. So how far out do you plan? I mean, or are you taking it as you go?

00:34:08 – Jill Tew

Yeah, I think I take it as I go. I mean, I have a few books, book ideas in me. So right now I’m actually, I need to start drafting. My second Disney book comes out April, 2026. So I need to start drafting that. I have the outline ready to go, but that’s kind of where I’m at in terms of my like workload. After that, I have no other contracted books yet. We’re on submission with an adult space opera, which I’m holding my, crossing my fingers for. But I’m excited to have some time in the early part of next year for a book that like, is not under contract, like nobody else knows about like, I just want to like play around again. Because I think, like, you know, it’s amazing to have book deals. But you know, there’s, you know pluses and minuses to everything and I miss that feeling of like this is just for me. So I’m excited to get back into that.

00:34:51 – Rico Figliolini

That’s cool. So have we missed anything that you’d like to cover that’s maybe, that I didn’t quite get to?

00:34:59 – Jill Tew

I don’t think so. I think that’s me.

00:35:02 – Rico Figliolini

Do you want to show us the cover of your new book? Do you have that?

00:35:04 – Jill Tew

Yeah, I do. Let’s see. This is The Dividing Sky, which this cover is absolutely gorgeous. It gives me all of the science fiction, romance vibes. Yeah, they did it, so pretty.

00:35:17 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. Excellent. Well, we’ve been speaking to Jill Tew, author, first-time author, lots of books out at this point with Disney and this first novel. Appreciate you spending time with us. And it’s great to see, you know, Peachtree Corners has a lot going on and it’s good to see, again, I’d love the opportunity to talk to different people from different areas of different professions, different skill sets. So this was great. Love talking about the, talking shop to some degree, although I don’t do writing, I publish magazines, but that’s about it.

00:35:53 – Jill Tew

It’s all connected. Absolutely. Thank you so much for this and for having the spotlight. I love the city. When we were moving back, it was top of our list. So we’re so happy to be here.

00:36:02 – Rico Figliolini

Great to have you. Hang in with me for a minute. I just want to sign off a little bit, but I also want to tell everyone EV Remodeling Inc. is our sponsor for these podcasts and for our publications. So check them out. Eli lives here in Peachtree Corners with his family. They do great work from start to finish. So no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s one room or all the rooms in your house, you should visit them. So EVRemodelingInc.com is where you can get that info. And if you’re listening to this through our website or wherever you’re listening, I’ll have links in the show notes. So this way you can find more about Jill’s books and about the Disney book as well. We’ll have that link as well. So thank you all for being with us. Appreciate it.

Early voting is open; Election Day, November 5

In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, Georgia State Representative Ruwa Romman returns to discuss her re-election campaign for House District 97, covering Peachtree Corners, Norcross, Berkeley Lake and Duluth. Join host Rico Figliolini as they dive into pressing issues, including Gwinnett County’s rapidly growing population, the urgent need for infrastructure improvements, and the impact of the upcoming transit referendum. Ruwa also shares her insights on housing affordability, the role of public transportation and how small changes in tax law could affect both local businesses and homeowners. She emphasizes the importance of civic engagement, recounting how a local election was decided by just four votes. Don’t miss this insightful conversation about the future of Gwinnett and the power of your vote.

Resources:

Ruwa’s website: https://www.ruwa4georgia.com/
Ruwa’s House email: Ruwa.Romman@House.GA.Gov
The Georgia My Voter Page has all of your voting information, including your polling location and which districts you fall in. You can also request and fill out your absentee ballot on your My Voter Page, or by visiting this Gwinnett County specific page.

“Gwinnett is growing very rapidly. And if we don’t start this now, we’re going to run into a lot of problems in the future where we’re going to see a situation where our infrastructure can’t actually handle how many people are coming in. It’s not going to be able to handle the businesses that want to come here. It’s not going to be able to handle the kind of growth that would bring better jobs and that would improve our communities. And the sooner we can start prepping our infrastructure for that kind of a demand, the less disruptive it’s going to be.”

Timestamp:

00:00:00 – Candidate Ruwa Romman Discusses Georgia State House District 97 Re-election
00:01:31 – Concerns over Statewide Homestead Tax Exemption
00:07:16 – Keeping Tax Cases Local and Efficient
00:09:49 – Vague Tax Exemption Amendment
00:12:18 – Tax Loopholes and Small Business Impact
00:14:50 – Gwinnett County Transit Referendum
00:23:46 – Convenient Airport Transportation Options
00:25:54 – The Need for Public Transportation and Infrastructure Improvements
00:28:00 – Addressing the Housing Crisis
00:31:40 – Challenges of Profit-Driven Development
00:34:03 – Home Buying and Energy Costs
00:36:41 – Negotiating Monopoly Power on the Grid
00:39:47 – Importance of Civic Engagement and Voting
00:41:25 – Voting Tips: Early, In-Person, and Ballot Drop-Off Options
00:43:38 – Importance of Voting In-Person and Ballot Drop-Off
00:46:09 – Navigating Voter Registration and Provisional Ballots
00:49:05 – Advocating for Public Service and Effective Governance

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life here in Gwinnett County. Beautiful day, although it started out freezing this morning, but we’re up to about 62 right now. We’re here with a candidate that’s running for re-election, Ruwa Romman. Hey, Ruwa, how are you?

00:00:19 – Ruwa Romman

I’m good, thanks. How are you doing?

00:00:21 – Rico Figliolini

Good. Good, thank you. Ruwa is running for Georgia State Rep House District 97. Actually, she’s running for re-election. She’s been in the term for one term, I believe. And so it’s time for a re-election, right? She represents, the area that she represents is Peachtree Corners, Berkeley Lake, Duluth. That’s about those three cities mainly, right?

00:00:44 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, it’s four. So it’s Berkeley Lake, Duluth, Norcross, and Peachtree Corners.

00:00:50 – Rico Figliolini

And as far as Peachtree Corners goes, it’s about a little bit more than half the city.

00:00:55 – Ruwa Romman

Yep.

00:00:56          Rico Figliolini

I believe, if it looks right.

00:00:58 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah.

00:00:59 – Rico Figliolini

So we’re going to hop right into this. We’ve interviewed her, the person running against her, Michael Corbin, a week or two ago. So he’s out there. So you can listen to that interview if you like. Find it out on our website. So this one, we’re going to be discussing a few issues we may not have touched upon with Michael Corbin. One of them is the constitutional amendments that are coming in this, actually, that’s going to be on the ballot this November. So, and you all should be aware of it. So one of them, the biggest one we’ll start off with, to me is the biggest one, because I’m a homeowner, so I can be a little soft on this, is a statewide exemption to local homestead tax. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about, you know, in brief, what that means to a homeowner who, they’re in Peachtree Corners?

00:01:47 – Ruwa Romman

Absolutely. So what it does is it puts a cap on how much home assessments can go up by about 3% per year. So what it’s doing is it’s essentially limiting the increases to property taxes. The cons, however, is that it’s kind of multifold, right? When we were working during session, we knew that housing costs were a big problem and we really wanted to reduce those costs. But what ended up happening is that we passed a bunch of referendums, including the Gwinnett one that we recently got passed. This is one of the other ones that got passed. So I’d originally voted yes for it. I’ll be voting no for it at the ballot box specifically because when you are adding on so many exemptions, one on top of the other very quickly, it can become very disruptive, particularly for local municipalities. So what do I mean by that? If a city or county’s funding is disrupted too quickly, suddenly you’ll start to see even slower responses to things like potholes, streetlights being off, school funding, you name it. So what we’re trying to do, at least for me personally with my vote, is that I’m trying to strike a balance between not shocking our municipalities too much and then shifting the burden onto our cities and our counties. I just don’t think that’s fair with the way that the bill is going to end up working out because we already passed the Gwinnett Homestead exemption.

00:03:10 – Rico Figliolini

So what is the? Okay. So if I look at my property tax, right? The way it works is that an assessment is made. Most people will know this, right? So usually it’s 40% of your market value of the home, which means that the county or the municipality doesn’t have to increase your millage rate. But in effect, because of the appraisal, your property tax can’t go up. So nothing is owed on it, just the appraisal’s done, and your property tax can be 20% higher. My property tax essentially I mean, won’t say 20% higher, but it was probably 12-13% higher. Due to COVID, right? Because it was then it went up, assessed, and they don’t assess every year I mean, they do, it doesn’t always change every year. So I think we’ve gone through that struggle where I don’t foresee a 12% increase again.

00:04:12 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. No, no, no. And we’ve already increased your homestead exemption. So all of this, the reason I’m worried about this bill in particular is it sets a statewide standard, but the problem is municipalities and counties are very different. And my worry is that, you know, as an example of Peachtree Corners, say they’ve decreased your tax bill, which people should have seen at least either their taxes not go up this year or go up by only a much smaller margin. Some people actually saw a decrease in their tax assessments this year. But the hope is that with the Gwinnett one specifically, it is tailored to Gwinnett residents. The problem with this bill is it creates sort of a weird opt-out mechanism that can create some problems for municipalities and counties that I’m worried about. So it’s more of a logistics thing. And what I tell people is that when it comes to constitutional amendments, if you have a concern, it’s actually okay to vote no, because it’s easier to get it back on the ballot next time around than it is to take it off or revoke it.

00:05:11 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. So, but the next time around would be two years from now, if it goes through the process.

00:05:15 – Ruwa Romman

We can decide. We can actually do anytime. So the Gwinnett homestead exemption was immediately put on the ballot during, like immediately during the primaries.

00:05:26 – Rico Figliolini

Okay, alright. So in your opinion this shouldn’t, this cap of three percent would wreck havoc possibly with our county or you’re talking about statewide with a variety of counties?

00:05:38 – Ruwa Romman

And we’ve seen this in California as well where it has increased things like homelessness and been very, very disruptive. A lot of times when people talk about, you know, I don’t like to dunk on California, but this, when I was doing research on this, and that’s why we actually did our guide a little later, is I was doing research on how this has worked in other states. And what we found is when you do this kind of a statewide mechanism or whatever the case may be, you end up seeing all of these unintended consequences down the road that you didn’t really expect, right? You had good intentions, you want to lower costs, which is great. But my recommendation to people is do it by county or municipality instead, because then you’re able to tailor it for your specific district or location. The other thing I will say is that this referendum in particular did not have a fiscal note. So we don’t actually know how this would impact even statewide revenue related matters. So say, for example, there is a small business program that has been vital in bringing small businesses to Gwinnett County or Peachtree Corners, whatever the case may be, we could inadvertently defund that program and then lose out on that tax revenue for the city. And then you start to see services go down in quality over time. So for me, the fact that I don’t know how much this is going to cost us, I don’t know how much this will be disruptive on top of the Gwinnett one that we’ve already passed. It gave me pause and that’s why I switched from yes to a no.

00:07:10 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. And people can appeal their assessment. So, I mean, it’s not like they can’t go out and appeal it. And what you’re saying is really to keep it local. It’s almost like a Republican thing, right? Keep, yeah. Keep the power local versus.

00:07:25 – Ruwa Romman

Big local. Yeah, I’m a big local person and fan, so…

00:07:28 – Rico Figliolini

Right, so keep it local. You know, if we don’t like what’s happening at the county level, I know in Peachtree Corners, there is no millage rate, but at the county level, obviously, there is. So if you have a problem there, you can either appeal your assessment or, listen, just vote the county commissioner out, that’s like voting these things in like this. So let’s move on to tax court in the judicial system and what that means in brief.

00:07:53 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, so I am going to be voting yes on this one because I think that we need to remove tax cases from your general queue. I would much rather that a case where somebody is waiting for their case to be adjudicated to not have their life hang in limbo because of a tax case that’s taking up a lot of time. The other thing is that tax cases require a lot of expertise that not every judge might have. And the hope is it would relieve the burden on the criminal justice system as well. Now, some of the cons on that one is obviously that means that the governor gets to appoint those judges, not us as people, we don’t get to vote for them. So less oversight. The other one that people had mentioned to me recently is that if you have a tax case, it might be a little more burdensome or costly if you’re low income. But for me, I really think that we should just kind of take those because there’s such a niche type of law that, you know, take it out of the generic queue and put it in its own queue because then, you know, businesses can kind of deal with their own stuff and not take up the court’s time. But again, per usual, if you have concerns with it, vote no and let’s fix it.

00:09:04 – Rico Figliolini

So just, is there, I mean, I’m sure there’s statistics about who is in the tax courts, not tax courts, but you know, how many people, what the demographics are, like, is it majority business people that are going to these? Okay.

00:09:24 – Ruwa Romman

So it’s majority businesses, but you know, with everything that happens with systems, you’re always going to have a small group of people that could be negatively impacted. We don’t, unfortunately you don’t actually have that much research on it. I wish we did, but we do know that when it comes to businesses, they do want to be able to finish their cases sooner rather than later. And this would be an opportunity to do that. But again, as I always say, when it comes to constitutional amendments, if you have concerns, err on the side of no. I just think in this case, the positives outweigh the negatives, but I totally understand if people think the opposite.

00:09:58 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Referendum A, not one, two, but A, is tax exemption for tangible personal property.

00:10:02 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So I voted no on this one during session, and will be voting no on this one at the ballot box. There’s a few reasons for this. One, we don’t actually fully describe what we mean by, tangible property is the term that is being used for this specific amendment. It’s basically tax exemption for certain types of tangible personal property. We kind of define it, we kind of don’t. There’s a lot of room for people to take advantage. So somebody could take this tax exemption. And what it does, it actually raises the exemption from 7,000 to 20,000 and just a lot of room for misuse. And the intention was to help businesses. But the reality of the situation is that it would mostly help larger companies and corporations and could actually inadvertently hurt small businesses. Because the way that small businesses do their taxes, I’m not really sure that they’re going to be able to benefit from this as much and could actually be hurt. Because again, we have a lot of programs that support small businesses and this might be taking away from that support.

00:11:09 – Rico Figliolini

So I read something online about this particular piece just recently, and I agree with you. It was vague. I mean, it didn’t say exactly what it was, but it did say along the lines, it gave an example, for example. So maybe it’s a bad example, but what they gave is, let’s say you buy a computer system. It’s a $5,000 system. You’re paying sales tax on it. The tangible personal or the tangible property tax, you have to pay an additional tax on that equipment, if I understand correctly.

00:11:44 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, and it depends on how you’re using it too. So it depends on the usage. It depends on what it’s generating. It depends on the equipment and how it’s used in your business. And that’s why I’m saying it’s so vague that what you’re bringing up makes total sense. You’re like, okay, you’ve already paid taxes on it once. Why are you paying taxes on it again if you’re using it for your business? The problem is that the way that taxes get itemized, the concern is that there is going to be a lot of ability to misuse this and it would cause a decrease in revenue. And we would take away programs that actually help small businesses to succeed. And the next thing you know, these larger corporations are benefiting in a way that was supposed to help you as a small business owner, but actually ends up hurting you in the long run.

00:12:31 – Rico Figliolini

So, but the larger businesses, I mean, this is a maximum of 20,000. The larger business, 20,000 is like a drop in a bucket or is it per?

00:12:40 – Ruwa Romman

Again, it totally depends on how it’s set up. And that’s what I’m saying. It’s, these are like, this specific referendum was written in such a way that I voted for it, no, on the house floor. And will be voting for it, no, again, because it was kind of ran through. There was no, and I don’t, and I need to like quadruple check this, but I looked for a fiscal note, I couldn’t really find one that would tell me how much this would cost or the impact it would have on our state. For me, I can’t even tell you to make a decision on this appropriately because I can’t even give you adequate numbers to say, yeah, it’s only 20,000, not a big deal, drop in the bucket for a large business, but a big deal for a smaller business. But I don’t even know if that smaller business could even qualify or what hoops they have to run through or what items count kind of thing. And on top of that, I don’t even know how much it would cost us in the long run to be able to give you like a ‘yes’ recommendation.

00:13:37 – Rico Figliolini

So if anyone wants to find out about this particular referendum, I mean, any of these three, they can go, I’ll have links on in the show notes, but it should be easy enough to find where they are.

00:13:49 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So we have put up a voter guide on all of our social media channels. I’ve got to just finish it on Facebook, but right now it’s on Instagram. Actually, no, it’s everywhere. It’s on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blue sky, wherever you get your information. We posted the entire guide for everybody to be able to access. And it goes through the pros and cons of each one. I also go through how I voted for it during session and how I’ll be voting for it at the ballot box and why. Because I do believe in that transparency, right? Like you can disagree with me on, hey, we need to lower these taxes at all costs possible. Like, cool, totally no problem. I just never want people to question what their elected official is doing and why.

00:14:28 – Rico Figliolini

I appreciate that transparency. So even if you change your vote and you decided to vote yes or no, it’s good to know why you changed that. Alright. So let’s move away from that a little bit. There’s another referendum coming up just for Gwinnett County, and that’s the transit referendum. I think on infrastructure concerns here in Peachtree Corners, I mean, we’re mainly a car city, if you will, and the autonomous vehicle Technology Park thing just drives that. It almost feels like Michigan sometimes. So how do you think this referendum would address our issues or impact us locally here in Peachtree Corners?

00:15:08 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So one of the things that I’ve noticed, for example, is that in my district alone, we have four different cities and three of them are downtown centers. So they have festivals, they have events, they have a lot of incredible activities, and it comes with a lot of traffic. And so what I tell people is imagine if you could take a convenient bus to the fall festival in Duluth or, for example, to any of the Norcross festivities that happen in addition to the Peachtree Corners festivities. Because suddenly you don’t have to worry about parking. You don’t have to worry about getting stuck in traffic. You don’t have to worry about any of that kind of stuff. So this transit referendum specifically would pay for 115 miles of quick ride BRT light is what it’s called. And what’s really great about BRT light is that it’s almost as fast as a train without needing to build the infrastructure for trains. It would do almost 26 miles of bus routes. It would have nearly 346 miles of county ride services, 20 transit transfer centers, two airport connectors. And for Peachtree Corners specifically, there is going to be one of those airport connector routes in Peachtree Corners.

00:16:27 – Rico Figliolini

Now, this would connect to the Doraville station or?

00:16:33 – Ruwa Romman

These are like express buses. So to give you an example, right now, I can drive about 10 minutes to Sugarloaf Mills and I can take a bus and it will take me directly to downtown and only has four stops downtown before I get to the Capitol. So on days when I don’t have late evening events at the Capitol during session, I will literally take the bus and spend that hour that I would have spent in traffic responding to emails or getting work done or doing calls or whatever the case may be. And I’ll be in the HOV lane. And it’s incredibly, I mean, I’m kind of skeptical about buses, to be honest with you, but I decided to try it. And I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s a clean bus, has Wi-Fi, is full every single time I’ve taken it to the point that they’ve now had to run buses every five minutes during rush hour, because the buses will overfill and people will have to go onto the next one. So it would be similar to that kind of an experience. Think of like a charter bus with the nice seats and the cushions and things like that. And the hope is to build that out for the entire county. Now, it’s going to be a 30-year project because infrastructure takes time to build, but it starts with the most dense areas such as Lawrenceville and works its way out. So over time, what you’ll see is you’ll see a decrease in traffic because there’s less cars on the road. Instead of having 40 cars, it’s going to be just one bus. And I don’t know if any, you know, for the listeners who have to commute, it just gets so, so awful.

00:18:00 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, it’s interesting because with remote work now and hybrid work still being in place, I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere. If anything, it just brought me more hybrid rather than just dedicated remotely working. But coming from New York, I mean, and having lived here since ‘95, I can see some, there’s good reasons in my mind. Like there’s the Long Island Railroad. There’s other rail systems or even express bus systems that are coach seats and stuff that work really well. You paid a premium for that above the normal bus payment. And they were clean and they were safe and stuff. Different than the bus, than the train system, at least in New York at the time. And even here sometimes you hear things happening on MARTA. MARTA’s not always the safest or the best that it can be, just because of the nature of the beast, I guess. But I can see why there would be some resistance to this a little bit with regard to spending the amount of money. That’s going to be, what’s the total cost like over the period of time for this referendum?

00:19:15 – Ruwa Romman

It’s a one percent levied. I gotta double check the number but.

00:19:23 – Rico Figliolini

It’s a one penny tax actually. It’s a one penny tax on your sales tax. So it would be adding one more penny to any Equinet sales tax, right? And so over time, we’re talking billions of dollars being raised to be used. And it’s, like you said, it’s not really a train system. It’s not bringing, it’s not spending, you know, billion dollars to do two miles a track or something.

00:19:45 – Ruwa Romman

No, no, no. This is like, the way I’ve explained it to people is that it’s like the biggest bang for your buck right? We don’t have the density to justify train. And this is Gwinnett. This is like, by Gwinnett for Gwinnett kind of a program that focuses on only Gwinnett. I mean obviously it’s trying to also, you know, connect people to other transit systems in the area. But if there’s a, in our guide, there’s actually a map that will show you where it’s going to be a county ride, what’s called a quick ride, and actually Peachtree Corners, Norcross are both on the quick ride route. The county ride will include all of Peachtree Corners, Duluth, Norcross, and Berkeley Lake. You have the airport ride also connects into Peachtree Corners.

00:20:36 – Rico Figliolini

When you say airport ride? That goes straight to the airport?

00:20:39 – Ruwa Romman

Correct. So there’s going to be what’s called 20 new transit stations. One of them is going to be in Peachtree Corners. The other one’s going to be in Norcross. And the third one’s going to be in Duluth. So all of these downtown centers where we have a lot of people, you’ll actually be able to access at least one and up to four. So county ride, quick ride, rapid ride, and airport ride along these transfer stations and facilities. So one of them is going to be here in Peachtree Corners.

00:21:08 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. So if I wanted to go to the airport, what I’m getting at, is I could go to that hub, I could be dropped off here in Peachtree Corners, pick up the bus, and it takes you with some stops along the way, maybe. It’ll take you all the way to the airport. There’s no additional, there’s no jumping off, getting onto a different system to get to the airport.

00:21:30 – Ruwa Romman

It’s still the same system. Based on this map, there might be a transfer to the airport line, but you can also just park and ride. So you can just park your car, which is what I do with the Gwinnett one. And the, based on, I’m trying to see like, there’s a, it’s called Hartsfield Jackson ride and I’m actually trying to open it up.

00:21:49 – Rico Figliolini

So the one from Gwinnett county or from Peachtree Corners or these micro hubs, they won’t take you directly to the airport. You would still have to make a transfer somewhere?

00:22:01 – Ruwa Romman

Yes. Or drive your car directly to the airport. You would still have to make a transfer somewhere. I’m reading the map as we’re talking right now because I don’t have it memorized, but there, because like the, it’s a quick ride or a county ride. Well, you can either take that to connect you to the airport express bus because they don’t want to do any stops. They want somebody to be able to get on the bus and go directly to the airport. Or you can, I’m trying to find where the hub is.

00:22:22 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. So you can go there. So that’s my point because originally some of these things were, you get on it, you get to, let’s say, the Doraville MARTA Station, you hop on and then you get to the airport. But what I’m hearing is that if you’re hopping on the Peachtree Corners hub or Duluth or Norcross, that you go directly from here to the airport without making any jumps anywhere.

00:22:46 – Ruwa Romman

Exactly. Exactly.

00:22:49 – Rico Figliolini

So, I mean, I find that more convenient than having to stop somewhere, get off, walk, get another transfer, wait for that. Okay. So it’s straight.

00:23:02 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So if you have a car, I’m trying to see where the nearest hub is. There’s obviously the Indian Trail, like Greyhound one but I can’t, like the bus route, I’m like looking at the bus route. It starts at the Mall of Georgia, goes down to Sugarloaf Mills, goes down to the Gwinnett transit center at Gwinnett Place, Indian Trail. I can’t fully read what that says. It’s like OFS or something like that. It’s like right behind Norcross. But that one, any of these are on the route to Hartsfield-Jackson, and you don’t have to transfer. You just park, get on the bus, and it’ll take you directly to the airport.

00:23:38 – Rico Figliolini

Gotcha. Okay. Alright, cool. So this way everyone knows some of that. We’ll have a link also to that map. And so this way people can check that out also. There’s pros and cons, obviously, and we’ll try to find those links for people that want to look at that. Because it is a penny that’s being added to our sales tax, and it’s a commitment that will stay there for quite a few years, I think.

00:24:09 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, when building it, it’ll be about no more than 30 years. And the reason for it is that when you’re building this kind of infrastructure, whether it’s ordering buses or one of the things they’re going to do is these buses are going to have the traffic, like they’re going to coordinate with the traffic system. So if you’re on a bus, it’ll always be a green light. You don’t have to stop at traffic lights. You don’t have to get caught in that traffic. Some of them will actually have their own lane. So they have to designate some of the lanes for rapid transit bus as well. So a lot of that, again, going back to the biggest bang for your buck, you’re not laying down tracks. You’re not trying to rebuild stuff. It’s actually more technology-based. And the other cool thing is that for some of these quick transit ones, they’re going to be electric. So you don’t have to deal with the fumes of buses, increased exhaust, that kind of thing. But it does take time. So that was one of my cons is that it’ll take time for all this to be rolled out to the county.

00:24:59 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. I mean, there’s all sorts of things, legality and public hearings and stuff for these types of things to even set up the hubs, the micro hubs, like in Peachtree Corners. Like, where would that be? I know it’s on a map somewhere, suggested, but the ultimate place that it would be would take time and public hearings and stuff like that, I guess. But this is different than the last time the transit referendum was on the ballot, because that last time included, I think, a MARTA or several MARTA stops. I think it was at least one. And I think that was to Mall of Georgia.

00:25:31 – Ruwa Romman

Yep. Hello. I love cats.

00:25:35 – Rico Figliolini

I’ve got three of them. Do you want to take one?

00:25:37 – Ruwa Romman

Awesome. I’ve got two. But it’s great. Look, I’m a huge, I will say this. There is very little that I miss about my time in school in DC. But the one thing I do miss is having access to public transportation because it was just so nice not to have to sit in traffic. I could get so much work done. You know, you can be on your phone, you can relax, you can read. It’s just, I don’t like traffic and anything that will make that better would go a long way. And I will say too, Gwinnett is growing very rapidly. And if we don’t start this now, we’re going to run into a lot of problems in the future where we’re going to see a situation where our infrastructure can’t actually handle how many people are coming in. It’s not gonna be able to handle the businesses that want to come here. It’s not gonna be able to handle like the kind of growth that would bring better jobs and that would improve our communities and that kind of thing. We end up facing a ceiling, but the problem is people are still coming and we’re going to have, you know, hopefully more families and more kids and that kind of thing. And the sooner we can start prepping the, our infrastructure for that kind of a demand, the less disruptive it’s going to be.

00:26:44 – Rico Figliolini

And I agree with you on that. We’re seeing more apartments being built, multifamily. People aren’t buying as many houses because of the nature of mortgage rates and there’s less land to build on.

00:27:03 – Ruwa Romman

And we don’t buy these corporations. I mean it’s so infuriating.

00:27:05 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. I mean the trend is build to rent. I mean it’s just like crazy the amount of private industry purchasing these homes that you’re gonna, even in subdivisions where you’re gonna just, you know, rent them out to other people. And there’s a trend among younger people anyway to rent at this point because they can’t do the buying. And we were talking about it during one episode with the city manager about having affordable housing. How do you create that? How can you incentivize that or force that? Sometimes incentives don’t work. We literally have to force certain things. So when there’s not enough affordable housing and you have a need for labor, maybe the transit system is certainly one way to do that.

00:27:53 – Ruwa Romman

Yep. Yeah.

00:27:56 – Rico Figliolini

Let’s move on to, so let’s see, we’ve done the transit. Though there’s feedback. Alright. A little guy likes to chew on wires sometimes. Get electrocuted. So there’s feedback from the community, I think, that would be, that you’re hearing probably, especially if you’re campaigning, going door to door and stuff. So what type of feedback are you getting, whether it’s national thoughts or just local? What are the pressing issues that you’re seeing from this district?

00:28:30 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, so my favorite part about campaigning, and for those who don’t know, as state representatives, we don’t actually get staff, right? So the nice thing about campaign season is it gives us an opportunity to fundraise and get staff and be able to door knock. And I’ll go and door knock myself. Well, everyone on the team canvases, it doesn’t matter if you’re the candidate or if you’re brand new, everyone’s doing the work. And what’s been really amazing to me is the fact that there are some things that haven’t changed, right? People have concerns about fully funding education, the size of classrooms for their kids. You know, how do we retain teachers because teachers are leaving, they’re burning out. You know, making sure kids have access to the best educators, taking care of those educators, that kind of thing. But the thing that has gotten like more, like we’ve seen more at the doors over time is actually, we were just talking about, which is housing. Whether that includes HOA oversight. Some people are starting to realize that there are these companies taking over HOA duties and it’s causing a lot of problems. One of the things I learned, and again, this is why housing is always harder for state people, because there’s so much that happens on a city and county level that is a little more complicated. But one thing I learned recently talking to one of our city council members is that companies are coming in and buying single family homes. They’re pricing out young families and it’s terrible, right? Cities are actually not allowed to have a database to track how many of these homes are up for rent versus being sold to actual families. And there are these laws that we have on the books in Georgia that preempt local ability to actually handle some of this part of the housing crisis.

00:30:12 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, that’s true. I heard the same thing, actually.

00:30:15 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. And so people at the doors will say things like, I wanted to, for example, move or get a larger home, but I can’t because we’re being priced out everywhere. I’ll tell you that there’s a house on the corner here that is $200,000 more than when we first bought our house in 2020. And it’s only been four years. And I don’t think, it’s not, I mean, it’s a great home. It’s a beautiful home, but I don’t think it’s worth half a million dollars. And so you’re seeing this insane housing market. And people keep talking about, well, we just need to build. They want us to lower standards in order to be able to build more, but that’s just not true. All you’re doing is making homes less safe and you’re just letting them pocket the extra part of their profit. So how do we, like you said, is there a way to force it? Is there a way to incentivize it? Is there a way to, you know, I think we use a lot of carrots here in Georgia because we really do care about being the number one place to do business. But the reality is that companies are profit driven. And if there are no consequences to not following the law, the law is just a suggestion at that point.

00:31:21 – Rico Figliolini

I mean, I totally agree. I mean, I was just speaking to someone else here in the city about a particular development that went up. The schematics for it or the renderings for it doesn’t look, the building itself does not look like the renderings that are given because they ended up using slightly different materials and stuff. And so when rezonings are done for, let’s say, multifamily and stuff, cities, counties, they want to allow, like you said, some room for innovative, creative work, right? But the problem is it is profit-driven. And when you have profit-driven, profit drives over everything else on that list. And if they can get away with using slightly cheaper materials, or if you say landscape, these got to be, you know, you got to replace all the trees, they’ll put in one-inch radius trees versus three-inch radius trees. Unless you specifically condition these things, they will not do it. Yeah, so that is a problem. The database for knowing whether a building’s bought, at least privately, like through an LLC or corporation, is out there. It can be found. In fact, there’s an app that interacts with it.

00:32:40 – Ruwa Romman

Like officially, you as a city, you cannot set it up yourself, and I think that’s just insane.

00:32:47 – Rico Figliolini

Yes it is. And in fact I’m looking at actually collecting that data at some point and publishing it because I believe there’s at least 12 to 16 percent that may be owned privately in the city.

00:33:00 – Ruwa Romman

Even worse. In Atlanta, 40% of single family homes are now owned by private corporations. They are no longer on the market. They are up for rent. These aren’t like people who have two homes and renting one out for college kids. These are actual hedge funds who are buying up these portfolio of homes. And sometimes they’ll just sit on them and then sell them for a profit. And the next one will sell for a profit. And suddenly the cost of a home doubles, even though no updates were made to it or very little, like, you know, shallow updates were made to it.

00:33:52 – Rico Figliolini

Right. Just cosmetic.

00:33:54 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. And if, I’m a new family or a young family or a young couple, like me and my husband are. I’m telling you, the reason I’m in the house I’m in right now is that the agent for the people who are trying to buy it to rent was so aggressive that she scared away the family. They had already outbid us. I’m serious. They had outbid us. We thought we weren’t going to get this house. And the agent for the family came back and said, look, they were very turned off by how aggressive that agent was. And even though your offer is lower, they’re willing to accept it. And we got really lucky. But it can, I mean, it’s tough. It’s really, really hard. And you add that on, you add the increase of everything else, utilities. So we don’t have an option of who you pick as your energy provider. And Georgia Power has increased our utilities four times. Four times.

00:34:27 – Rico Figliolini

Isn’t that amazing? Because they’re supposed to be capped at the amount of profit they’re allowed to take in a year. And yet you keep getting. And I’m sure the Georgia Power raised your tax because of the nuclear plant that went online that took them years and billions and billions of dollars over. It’s just ridiculous.

00:34:44 – Ruwa Romman

Yep. That’s what I say when I say about consequences. So I sit on the Energy Utility and Telecoms Committee. And to tell you how this worked and I’m a Georgia Power customer and it’s driving me crazy. And we are trying to figure out a way to allow for more community solar and solar options for homes so that way we can drive down energy costs. We’ve seen this work in other states. It’s really, really important for us to be able to create some form of competition because Georgia Power is a legal monopoly and it’s supposed to be held responsible by the Public Service Commission, but they’re not really fully doing that right now. And to your point about like Plant Fogel, everyone’s like, oh, we’re going to make it 25% clean energy. And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at these graphs and 2% of it is solar. 2%. We have farmers who would love to lease out their lands to solar companies and become solar facilities because what it does, it creates revenue for the farmer to then maintain the rest of their land and not have to sell this land that’s been in the family for a long time. But because Georgia Power is not, like keeps, I mean the only bills they come after are solar bills. It is wild.

00:35:50 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. Well they’re protecting an entity that’s why. And even in some states where they’re allowed to put solar and you’re allowed to feed it back to the grid and get paid for it you still have to pay an infrastructure fee because obviously there’s an infrastructure that has to be maintained.

00:36:08 – Ruwa Romman

I told Georgia Power, I said, I completely understand. You guys do, and they do. I like to be fair. They do a very great job of maintaining the infrastructure grid. But if you have a monopoly mostly on that grid and you’re part of the grid, can we come to a negotiation? And I’ve asked, I actually got yelled up at the CEO for asking this because she was like, we came up with the rebate rates already. You don’t need to reopen that can of worms. I was like, but what does that range look like? Can you explain it to me? Can you tell me how many cents on the dollar is required for you to be able to handle more solar and maintain the integrity of the grid? And they don’t want to answer that question.

00:36:45 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. They may not have the answer to it even, but they don’t care to get it. Because if they, like you said, the information data is important, right? If you have that information, then you have to make it. If you don’t research that information, but you sort of know the answer, then you don’t have to worry about it.

00:37:01 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So if your bill went up, please email us, especially to my house email. It’s Ruwa.Romman@house.ga.gov. Because I do want to see how much people’s bills have gone up and I can actually bring that up during committee hearings and talk about it.

00:37:16 – Rico Figliolini

Good. That’s excellent. And just to tap one more thing on the private businesses buying property. I mean, the reason that that works out for them too, I think, is because there’s a tax advantage, right? They get to write off the mortgage, the interest rates and stuff, but they get to amortize the property because it’s an investment on their side.

00:37:36 – Ruwa Romman

Okay. So nobody knows this. I’m so glad you know this. I actually co-authored a bill on this with Representative Spencer Fry and nobody would move it. And it was really weird to me. So I’m going to try it again if I’m reelected. But the way that it works is that if, like you said, commercial property degrades over time. So businesses actually get a tax break on that commercial property. Well, they now count homes that actually appreciate in value over time to get that same tax break, right? So they’re like double dipping, it’s awful. So we wrote a bill. And part of the concern was some people who own small businesses will also own their home under that small business. So we didn’t want to go after single family homes. So I actually helped write this part where it said that if you are the business owner and your address is in Georgia, you can be exempt from this. But everybody else you can no longer get that like absolutely not.

00:38:28 – Rico Figliolini

So that would help to a degree, I can see. Although I can see the other side of that setting up a Georgia corporation that’s a subsidiary of a larger company, I mean those things can’t.

00:38:40 – Ruwa Romman

So they can’t have multiple homes. You can’t like, yeah, it was also to take away like any multiple home type, whatever the case may be.

00:38:47 – Rico Figliolini

Or maximum number or something that you can’t have more than two homes or something.

00:38:52 – Ruwa Romman

Exactly. Yep.

00:38:53 – Rico Figliolini

That’s great, Ruwa.

00:38:59 – Ruwa Romman

Very few people knew about this. And I was like, why don’t we just write a bill? And so we did.

00:39:05 – Rico Figliolini

Why not? You know, you could write a bill about it. Yeah, no, I appreciate you even thinking about that because most people don’t know that. Let’s talk a little bit, because we got just a little bit more time, about voting, right? What that looks like. You know, you’re an incumbent, you’re running for reelection, you have opposition from the Republican party, obviously. What did you want to say about that?

00:39:31 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So I have, I’ve been an organizer way longer than I’ve been an elected official, in addition to like my professional life.

00:39:38 – Rico Figliolini

Which by the way, what do you do for your professional life?

00:39:41 – Ruwa Romman

I used to be at Deloitte. Now I’m just like a freelance consultant now that I work, you know, now that I’m an elected official. But, you know, the thing that I really care about is I really want people to be civically engaged. And that starts with us filling out our entire ballot. Everyone always talks about the presidential. There’s so much, you know, energy and focus on that. But like we talked about at the very beginning, on our ballot is obviously the presidential. We’ve got our members of Congress. You’ve got your state senators, state house. You’ve got your referendums. You’ve got your county commissioners. So our county commissioner is Kirkland Carden, who’s amazing. And he’s up for reelection this year. And so please, I cannot stress enough, not only voting, but also filling out your entire ballot. We have people who will go vote and they’ll leave the rest of their ballot blank. And it’s a big problem. So if you have any questions or you’re not sure about something on your ballot, we’re doing a BYOB. So bring your own ballot to our GOTV rally, which is going to be at Shorty Howell Park this Saturday on the 19th. And you can actually vote early in any voting location in Gwinnett because it’s early voting. So as long as you’re in the county, you can vote anywhere. Between now and November 1st. And voting locations are open seven to seven. It’s really easy. There’s no lines. So highly recommend people go because, and the reason I mentioned this part is it took me three tries to vote in the primary this year. The first time we got there just a little too late. The second time I opened my wallet and my ID wasn’t with me. I happened to have taken it out like at an appointment or something. I forgot to put it back in. So it definitely took three times, three times is just the charm. So I always tell people don’t leave it until the last minute. You never know what’s going to come up. You never know what’s going to happen. If you request an absentee ballot, if you don’t get it back and mail it back by the 25th, it’s kind of my arbitrary personal deadline because of just mail delays. Please go vote in person. Just let them know to like, hey, I requested one, either got it or didn’t get it. And I would prefer to vote in person and they’ll be able to help you vote in person. But please, please go vote early. It’s really easy, really quick. If you have questions or want to go vote with someone, come vote with me on Saturday the 19th at Shorty Howell. We’ll have really great food, snacks. It’ll be from one to three and we want to make it fun.

00:42:03 – Rico Figliolini

And I think some of the early voting locations are at least.

00:42:10 – Ruwa Romman

Pinckneyville and Shorty Howell are the two in our district.

00:42:12 – Rico Figliolini

So Pinckneyville Recreation Center?

00:42:14 – Ruwa Romman

Yes. It’s the one that’s on the Main Peachtree Industrial, not in the back where the park is.

00:42:20 – Rico Figliolini

Correct. Okay, cool. So you have absentee ballot also, like you said. And those are counted based on when they arrive at the polling place or based on the postmark?

00:42:38 – Ruwa Romman

Most people say postmark. But again I don’t want to risk it. And I just tell people, please put it in. Because here’s the other thing, you can drop it off. So anywhere that there’s a voting location, sorry, not anywhere. During early voting, some of the locations have ballot drop boxes. You can check that out on the Gwinnett County website.

00:42:54 – Rico Figliolini

Pickneyville Park has one, the recreation center. There’s a drop box. Shorty Howell does not.

00:42:59 – Ruwa Romman

Yep. So please, that’s actually, if you have a ballot and you’re able to physically go, please put it in a ballot box by election day. I’m just really worried because there have been a lot of mail delays. There have been a lot of like just weirdness happening. Even if something is posted, it’s not getting where it’s supposed to be. So I just don’t want to run into an issue where somebody relies on USPS to mail their ballot. And it’s awful because this is what happens when you defund stuff, right? Suddenly services are worse. And people don’t know this. USPS is actually a constitutionally mandated thing. So unlike UPS and FedEx, they’re actually required to reach everybody no matter how far they are. Versus these corporations that can just say, well, we’re not going to deliver to you. And so it just makes it all worse. So that’s my long story spiel of if you do absentee, one, if you run into issues, reach out to us, two, drop it off. And three, if you’re not able to complete that process by the 25th, please go vote in person.

00:44:06 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Do you see, have you seen any, you know, with 300,000 people voted on the first day of early voting, which is a record in the state of Georgia. And so apparently, you know, I think, I forget what the, I don’t know what the breakout was, whether it was like 40 odd percent Republican, because you could tell from the data, I think, where the breakouts are. And I don’t know, 20 odd percent was like independents or something. Are you seeing or hearing, I know this is early still, but any issues with voter suppression or anything like that?

00:44:40 – Ruwa Romman

So, you know, what I tell people is that we have, over the past decade, have had to build the kind of organizing infrastructure to be able to get around a lot of that. So thankfully, we’re at a point now where a lot of people in Georgia know what to expect if they run into any issues. The one that I keep hearing most recently is that people will go on mvp.sos.ga.gov. That is your My Voter page. So mvp.sos.ga.gov. And they will log on and they will see that it’ll say their voter status is inactive. And so people have been feeling like, oh, I can’t go vote. So if you log on and you see that it says inactive, you can still go vote. That is totally okay. We did have a few people that tried to log in and their entire voter page is gone. It’ll give them an error. If that’s the case, reach out to us. We can connect you to a hotline that can help you figure that out. Some cases like that, but nothing too crazy.

00:45:37 – Rico Figliolini

So does that mean, so if they don’t see it online, but I go to a voting place, right? And they find my name in the database because they’re connected they’re going to find it. Let’s say I’m fine to vote, if for some reason they don’t see it there but I know I voted two years ago in a primary or something and so I should still be in there, can I take, can I request a ballot? I forget what you call that ballot.

00:46:05 – Ruwa Romman

Provisional.

00:46:07 – Rico Figliolini

Provisional. Thank you. I can ask for a provisional ballot and call that?

00:46:13 – Ruwa Romman

So the rule of thumb is before you get to that stage, very kindly and politely ask them to either pull up your address. There are different ways to do this, right? They can pull it up by your address. They can pull it up by your driver’s license number. And the reason I say that the provisional ballot should be your last resort is that once you submit a provisional ballot, you actually have to physically go to the voter registration location. It’s like the headquarters for Gwinnett. And you have to go and show up in person to fix your ballot. So I always tell people very politely, because this happened to me when I moved back after grad school, the person couldn’t find me in the system and she kept insisting I wasn’t in there. And so she was able to find me through my address rather than my name and it worked out. So, you know, first and foremost, try and be very polite about it. They’re doing their jobs. And then obviously as a last resort, yes, go ahead and request a provisional ballot, but be prepared to go down to the registration office to finish out what you need to get finished out for your ballot.

00:47:11 – Rico Figliolini

Can people register to vote still? Or is it too late at this point?

00:47:16 – Ruwa Romman

No, the deadline was October 7th.

00:47:21 – Rico Figliolini

October 7th. So, final words, is there anything else you would like to talk about before we sign off?

00:47:27 – Ruwa Romman

No, like I said if you run into any issues voting, finding out where to vote, your absentee ballot, whatever the case may be, feel free to reach out to us. You can, you know we’re on social media but the best place to do it is to email us at Info@Ruwa4Georgia.com. We are tracking cases and helping constituents vote. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us too about your ballot. You’re not sure who to vote for. I’m happy to give you my opinion. I’m very, you know, I try to be very transparent about that. And, you know, just please remember, I remind people that my city council member won his race by four votes in a runoff. So even if you think your vote doesn’t matter, particularly in a swing state like Georgia, it matters so much. So, you know, take a few minutes, go vote early, make it an event, take your friends and your family and yeah, happy voting.

00:48:21 – Rico Figliolini

Great. So on that note, I appreciate you being with me, Ruwa. Thank you. And in fact, you know what? Why don’t I get off for a second and then you give us your one-minute pitch. Even though you just did it a little bit like that, but definitely use this moment to give that pitch and ask for the vote.

00:48:44 – Ruwa Romman

Thank you. So my name is Ruwa Romman. I am the Georgia State Representative for House District 97, and I’m running for re-election. I ran because I wanted to put public service back into politics, and I want to keep doing that work. In my first term, I’ve been able to pass a bill out of the House. It ran out of time, so we’re going to keep working on it to designate EMS as an essential service. So I’ve worked on healthcare issues. I’ve worked on education issues by fully funding education this year, including the Hope Scholarship. I want to keep working on that. You know, when it comes to just making government work better for all of us, that continues to be my number one priority. And so if I’m reelected, I want to keep doing the work that I have been doing and advocating for you at the Capitol in every way that I can. But thank you for your support originally and I hope to have it again come November 5th.

00:49:33 – Rico Figliolini

Thank you for doing that. Hang in there with me for a minute, but everyone else, thank you for being with us. I appreciate you listening to the podcast. If you’re listening to this on like Apple or Spotify, leave a review. Love that because that’s an easy way for people to find us then. If you’re watching this on YouTube or Facebook, do leave comments if you like and we’ll see if there’s any questions you have that we can answer those for you. Otherwise, there’ll be links in the show notes on the website. But thank you again. Appreciate everyone joining us.

00:50:01 – Ruwa Romman

Thanks, y’all.

Exploring Land Use with Shaun Adams

Land use changes, business growth, and community engagement shape Peachtree Corners’ future. From revitalizing office spaces to innovative mixed-use developments, the city is working to attract investments and meet the needs of its residents.

Peachtree Corners Life’s host Rico Figliolini is joined by Shaun Adams, Community Development Director, to discuss how the city adapts to new trends, assesses vacancy rates, and gathers public input to guide its growth. Learn about the city’s plans, including focusing on office renovations and diverse housing options, and how the community can get involved in the upcoming public meeting on October 3rd.

Resources:
Peachtree Corners Website: https://www.peachtreecornersga.gov/
Community Development: https://www.peachtreecornersga.gov/190/Community-Development
October 3rd Community Engagement Meeting: https://www.peachtreecornersga.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=210

Timestamp:
00:00:00 – Peachtree Corners Land Use Moratorium
00:01:58 – Revitalizing the Central Business District
00:04:53 – Public Engagement Meeting 
00:07:06 – Insights from Asset Inventory and Changing Business Trends
00:11:11 – Improving Office Amenities and Competitiveness in Tech Park
00:14:03 – Reinvestment in Aging Office Buildings
00:16:15 – Evolving Uses in Office and Mixed-Use Developments
00:19:51 – Attracting Diverse Businesses
00:24:00 – Exploring Mixed-Use and Diverse Housing Options
00:27:39 – Mixed-Use Development
00:29:42 – Efficient Residential Density Options
00:33:17 – Trail Connection Around Technology Park Lake
00:40:41 – Evolving City Management through Conferences and Collaboration
00:43:00 – Accessing City Development Information

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life here in the city of Peachtree Corners, Gwinnett County, Georgia. I’m here with our Community Development Director, Shaun Adams. Hey, Shaun. Thanks for joining us. Before we get started, and we’re going to be discussing the land use moratorium that’s been in effect for almost six months. But before that, I just want to say thank you to EV Remodeling Inc. for being a sponsor, not only of our magazines and our journalism, but these podcasts as well. So you should visit them. They’re a design build firm here in Peachtree Corners. Eli will take care of you. He’s a great guy. The company is called EV Remodeling, and you should go to evremodelinginc.com and visit them. Some great pictures of what he’s done over the past few months. You can browse right through there and then reach out to him. So let’s get right into it. The moratorium is just more than halfway through. It’s going to end November 3rd. And this is a moratorium on residential new application rezonings in a specific area in the central business district. So at some point, there were so many things coming in and so many applications coming in, so many people taking somewhat advantage of wanting to do what they want to do, that the city decided to stop and put a moratorium on new applications to say, well, I think we need to look at this, change a few things maybe, have some public hearings, focus groups, and come back and add to that land use plan, which is, I think, a great thing you all have done. That’s going to end November 3rd, and there’s a public hearing that’s going to be coming up for public comment, I think, Thursday, October 3rd, between 6 and 8 p.m. at City Hall. So we’ll get into that. But I want Shaun, Shaun, if you wouldn’t mind explaining a little bit about why the moratorium briefly was put in place and where you all you know where the city’s at what the timeline has been actually moving forward on that.

00:02:13 – Shaun Adams

Sure thing. So as you indicated you know the central business district just to help people out if you really think from Holcomb Bridge Road up 141 to into the Forum, Town Center. That’s kind of our central business district area. This plan within that is really going to focus on our commercial office portion of it. So Tech Park, Spalding Triangle, Corners Parkway, those areas up and around 141. And so about four months in and what we’ve kind of done so far, one of the biggest things that we’ve done is an asset inventory. We really took a look at our underutilized spaces, vacancy rates, condition assessments, what approvals or redevelopments have occurred so far, but maybe haven’t come out of the ground yet. Looked at our existing proposed trails. You know, we have a trail study. We have some that are already in design and underway or built but we have others proposed but those proposals are largely based off of where we kind of have a path of least resistance through properties or easements but as redevelopments come into play there could be opportunities to maybe realign the trail so it makes more sense based off what’s coming down in the future. And so the first couple months took a lot of time taking a look at that and understanding where we are. We looked at about 100 commercial office buildings. So that was good feedback to use for now and in the future. August, September, we had a couple of focus groups. One of the first ones we did was with a combination of some of our existing board members from Planning Commission and our two authorities, our Downtown Development Authority and our Redevelopment Authority. And what’s great about their feedback is not only do they have a level of industry expertise that runs the gambit from real estate to finance to development to engineering, but they’re all residents who care about seeing how our city moves forward. And so that was a good group. We had about 18 in total there, which for a focus group is a good size. Our consultants kind of ran that meeting. We showed them our map of the asset inventory that we did, kind of used that as a jumping off point. And then we turned around a few weeks later and did the same with some of our brokers and office owners in the area that do a lot of business here to help kind of learn what are they hearing, whether they’re a broker who’s representing a building for sale or they’re representing tenants looking to lease up. And understanding when they’re showing buildings with their tenants, why are they choosing here versus why are they going to Alpharetta or somewhere else? What’s missing? And so we got a lot of good feedback as a part of that focus group. And as you’ve mentioned, public engagement meeting, October 3rd, we’re going to take kind of what we have to date, bring that to them. It will be in council chambers from 6 to 8 p.m. It’s an open house style. And so just kind of help everybody out with that. We will have representatives check them in, kind of give them a one page, if you will, of what we have, what they’re going to see. Using council chambers will be great because we have the TVs down the sides where we’ll have that map up. So no matter where they are in the room, they can see the map. We’ll probably have four to six stations, each one kind of representing a different subsection, if you will, of the central business district. And we’ll have both staff and consultant representation at each of those so that people can come in, they can ask questions about what they’re seeing. We’ll have boards there. And if you remember during the comp plan update process about two years ago, or a little less than two years ago, people were able to put dots in, provide feedback based off a certain question. So one of the benefits of Kimley Horn being our consultant on the small area plan is they were also the consultants on the comp plan. So they have all of that data that the public gave previously. So one of the things we wanted to do is as a refresher as well, is say, here’s what you said 18 to 24 months ago as it relates to the central business district. Here is what the business community has said through our broker owner, Finkers groups or other Finkers groups we did this time. What do you see? What has changed for you in the last 18 to 24 months based off of the feedback provided? Or for those of you who weren’t either in the community at that time or for whatever reason weren’t able to be a part of those sessions, your input can come in as well. So this is building upon the input that we had and helping understand what’s changed. And by having that data there, I think it’s good for the community to see, oh yeah, this is what we thought back then. I agree with that still, or you know what, based off of, you know, XYZ, I think it should be something different and here’s my input. And so we can bring all that together. And then with that, we have a good six week time period before it would be set to go before planning commission in November and council in December. Both of those times, of course, will be public hearings where the community will be able to provide additional input as you would in a typical process.

00:07:19 – Rico Figliolini

Alright. So I have a couple of questions that pop up just because of the discussion here. Was there any surprises you found when your group did the asset inventory of 100 buildings? Because we all have an impression of what we think is going on. But were there any surprises that you found while you were doing that?

00:08:04 – Shaun Adams

You know, there’s quite a few things. That and the vacancy aspect of course. The trick is we’re using CoStar, which may not always be accurate, but kind of seeing the number of buildings that kind of blended together in terms of where we have needs for activation of underutilized space instead of it being just pockets here and there. It’s kind of Corner’s Parkway area, actually. You think about some of the properties over there, there’s a lot of small parking, building. So it’s kind of nice to see kind of how these nodes may have formed throughout that process. And you know another thing is how few properties it would take to connect key pieces of our trail and where some of our hubs are naturally already starting to take shape to say, okay, if a couple of things go in the right direction or we can time these right, then we can connect key stretches of trail through Tech Park that could allow people to run from office to the Forum or wherever to their home.

00:09:06 – Rico Figliolini

Did you find, as you were doing those asset inventories, I don’t know how detailed it was, but types of businesses in there, did you all notice any shift or difference over the, I don’t know even how you would quantify that necessarily without going back a few years, but seeing the turnover maybe would be, is probably the better question over the last five, six years, changes in the type of business in that inventory.

00:09:34 – Shaun Adams

So, I mean, one of the things we are seeing and matter of fact, I mean, it would jump ahead, but we had a recent rezoning, resolving a split zoning, and probably seen a couple of tax amendments for uses like fitness studios come in. But what we are seeing is that flex office is stronger than a lot of traditional office right now. So you have a lot of smaller businesses who need, they don’t need a whole lot of admin office space, you know, a couple of thousands per feet, but they might need a space to house excess inventory or supplies because they’re a service-oriented business that provides their service offsite, mechanical contractors, commercial janitor services, things like that. And an office institutional zoning doesn’t do well with that, but we’re seeing flex office spaces like a lot of our one-story buildings are, where they have that kind of mix of office and warehousing. That’s coming in more, it’s coming in stronger. And so making sure that our code aligns with that is something. And we’ve also heard from the brokers and owners that these are some of the uses that are coming in.

00:10:46 – Rico Figliolini

To go into the brokers and owners, or maybe just the brokers for the time being, or a mix of both, what are you hearing from them that we lack? Let’s start there first, from let’s say Alpharetta or Roswell. Alpharetta is like one of the biggest tech hubs north of Atlanta. Probably 700 companies, if that’s still a good number, there are startups and tech companies. Obviously, that’s a competitive space, right? A competition or rival for us, if you will. So what are we lacking? Have you heard anything specific?

00:11:22 – Shaun Adams

Some of what I’ve heard, I mean, I think you might have seen too in papers of race to quality. You’ve heard that a little bit. And so with a lot of our office stock, it was built in the eighties and those that have kind of redeveloped over time or, you know, reinvested into the office over time, they’re positioned even better, But, you know, having more of that activation and amenitizing of the surrounding. So as we talked earlier about green space, trail connectivity, having some retail or supporting service base in the studio or something like that, where they can work out during lunch and not have to go up to Town Center or somewhere else, but having something kind of central to Tech Park that they can easily get to, or if they want to walk the trail to get to it on lunch, just to clear their head for an hour. Having that is something that, you know, we’re hearing we could use and put us in better competition. But the other part of it is to some of the buildings and seeing them. Part of what we did is reassess the property by looking at the parking, the signs, the landscaping, and the building. Because we can understand based off of how each owner is investing in that building, you know, are they in ramp up mode of trying to pull tenants in or are they in maintenance mode? And being able to understand where that building is in its real estate life cycle or that property is can kind of help us better plan for how can we preserve it and enhance it and stabilize it for the long term.

00:13:03 – Rico Figliolini

So are you seeing, I’m thinking Intuitive Robotics, right? They’re moving along, their construction is being done. I think the parking deck is, I don’t know if it’s complete, but everything’s moving along there, for example. Modern, new looking. Some of the buildings are moving to renovate, right? At the outside of it, new monument signs also I’ve noticed as I drive through Tech Park and some of the other areas but so is that something that you’re seeing too like an outward visible change to the buildings? Because driving to work you know a lot of people were working remote, some people, a lot of people are working remote. A bunch of people are working. It’s hybrid also, and you want to enjoy where you’re working. Some of these old buildings are really old buildings, like you said, 80s and 70s. You feel like you’re going back in time almost in some of these buildings. Are you seeing a reinvestment, a larger reinvestment than you all thought coming in? Because that’s difficult. They’re not rezoning or filing an SUP or something. So they have to file a permit to do certain things. But are you seeing things more than you thought?

00:14:20 – Shaun Adams

We’re seeing some in various places. Again, I think the flex office building stock is doing it more and more. And so those office buildings that are one story, roll up doors in the back, they’re going well, they’re leasing up. Some of the mid-rise office, it’s really honestly a mix. Couple of corporate locations have come in recently, which has been good and has taken up some space in those areas. And that’s helpful. I would say it’s largely stagnant, but part of that right now was what the cost is to bring a building up. They’re having to get, some of what we’ve heard from brokers is, hey, if we’ve got to get a building and spend 100 plus a foot on it to get it to 200 a foot then it’s hard to get the rents to justify that cost and that’s kind of what puts it in maintenance mode. And so part of what we asked was okay, how can we amenitize around you, bring something in to make it easier to invest into that property so that you can justify the rents. Because if you have the amenities, then you can probably get the rents as well. And so that’s part of what we’re hoping to identify out of this plan is where we can, you know, make some of those adjustments. I’m also hoping that rate cuts make it easier for them to want to invest. So I feel like every other week we hear companies are bringing people back to the office. You know, remote work is here to stay. And I think until that pendulum kind of settles down in the middle, it’s just going to be a state of flux.

00:15:57 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Yeah, the rates, I mean, half point drop. Who knows if next year will be another half point drop next quarter or the quarter after. But yeah. And I think the market, I mean, from what I see anyway, from what I’m hearing, right, the market has accepted it already. I think they’ve already worked it in, but who’s an economist? The economists don’t even know sometimes what’s going on. It’s like the stock market. People say, well, drop 500 points. Why did it? It’s like no particular reason. People are covering shorts maybe you know it’s just like or whatever the new use is. I know that there’s, you were talking about like fitness places and stuff. Are you, what type of new uses are you seeing that the city has to sort of work into the into the regulations that don’t exist like that’s not enumerated out there? Are they specific?

00:16:55 – Shaun Adams

So using fitness studio as an example we have health and fitness centers in our code currently and they’re in C2 and that typically is your LA Fitnesses, things of that nature. And so when you think about Stretch Lab and Cryotherapy and Alloy Personal Training and some of those ones that you see in the Forum, they can go in under that already because it’s a C2 or it’s a mixed use development. But C2 uses are allowed in there. What we are finding is some of our buildings that are office buildings, how they’re zoned O&I or zoned M1, those uses aren’t contemplated because they tend to be retail heavy. But on a smaller scale, 4,000 square foot fitness studio or CrossFit box or something like that may be a good amenity to put in the main floor of an office building to support the tenants out of there. But our code wasn’t allowing for it. So as we identify some of those uses, we’re trying to make sure that, okay, we’re not opening a pandora’s box of allowing them to go somewhere where they don’t make sense. But as long as they’re an accessory and supporting to the overall office environment, then we want to allow that. So that’s one great example. And that’s why that one was put in there. The kind of social hobbyist clubs that you’ve seen, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about the car storage, car club. We’ve seen other, I’ve seen golf simulator clubs come in that kind of blend a business club environment, but have that simulator component to it. I’ve seen those in different jurisdictions and just wanting to make sure that if it’s something that fits in an office building as it currently stands and can be, you know, a supporting amenity and draw an attraction to the tenants there, then want to make sure our code, you know, allows for it because that’s only going to help them lease it up.

00:18:44 – Rico Figliolini

Right. I think we, at some point, talked about, I think Brian Johnson and I, at some point, talked about, or at least I brought it up, about use is a larger use, if you will. I’m always thinking that there’s 500 acres there. And like you said before, just because of the nature of the beast, some things evolve, these nodes are created and such. Is there even thought or discussion, have you heard from brokers, on bringing in larger campus-type development into an area? GSU, for example, has several satellite campuses throughout the city. One in Dunwoody, for example. Georgia Tech has done that, I think, or UGA in several ways, places. And that’s just education hubs like that. Has that ever come up? Or even has, because we’re autonomous vehicle and autonomous smart city focused, there’s also pharmaceutical biofabrication companies, those types of companies. You know, just a different, have you heard anything, or has anyone talked about that, like diversifying the type of businesses here in the city?

00:20:04 – Shaun Adams

From a development standpoint, our team is certainly looking out there and trying to attract, whether it’s suppliers to some of our existing companies that are here in the area, the Intuitives of the world, people of that nature, also life sciences, those types of groups, certainly wanting to try to attract them in where we can using Curiosity Lab and what we do there to maintain that technology focus of Tech Park. We don’t want to lose that where we are. So we’re hoping that by doing more and maybe even looking at opportunities for the testing that goes on at Curiosity Lab, thinking about it on a larger scale than a test track or a facility, but where our opportunities to partner with businesses within the area to test certain technologies, maybe on their property or around it, that type of thing. I mean, I’m not in the middle of that every day. That’s more kind of the ag dev side, but I certainly touch it and support it where I can. I haven’t had people kicking tires on it recently from that standpoint, but I think certainly I know Georgia Tech teaches some classes up here already, you know, any opportunity to bring institutional in that supports the businesses around or kind of supplier or accessory users to some of our larger corporations that are here. That’s definitely a focus of our economic development team.

00:21:35 – Rico Figliolini

 Okay. Moving away from that a little bit, did the moratorium include changing some regulations with regard to actual development, like the actual building of buildings or the actual renovation of buildings where we have an opportunity if someone comes in for a special use permit or for redevelopment to say, okay, I think we’ve learned something over the last two years. Maybe we want more. If there’s going to be a residential component to something, we want to make sure that, I don’t know, it’s LED certified or it’s individually wired units. I know that’s part of some of the zoning, but is any of that being revisited?

00:22:19 – Shaun Adams

Certainly. I mean, one of the things that, I mean, the small area plan itself is going to be focused on kind of the nodes and maybe what goes there, generally speaking. But what I’ve talked with the consultants about is as we identify gaps in our code to be able to achieve what we’re trying to do. The plan, recommendations for tax amendments in that regard is important as well. And that goes to the regulation just from the building side. I mean, one of the things, you know, I kind of intentionally did with a couple of the development proposals that came through recently was get a little more specific on the elevations and especially elevations that touch or have visibility to public right-of-way to ensure that we can as closely as we can get it to come out of the ground as it looks on paper you know we want to be able to do that because if you’re selling a vision we want that vision to be reality and not you know an alternate you know universe of it kind of thing. So I’ve done that by virtue of conditions where I can, because when you put it in code, right, you might find yourself in an unintended consequence of not having the flexibility. But we are intentional about that. I will say we’ll probably see a couple of new zoning districts come out of this to kind of help bring us up to what the market is really looking for. For example, we have one mixed use development in our code right now, and it’s three uses. It’s 32 plus units an acre. The way the uses are identified is office, residential, and retail. We’ve kind of interpreted public uses such as a trail as a use in previous districts. And that may make sense for a kind of downtown core where you need a ton of residential to support the retail because it’s a retail heavy center like Town Center and the Forum but it may not make sense in Tech Park where you’re activating a utilized space so looking at more of maybe say a commercial mixed use where it stays commercial heavy you’re preserving the office the redevelopment of any retail and or residential that exists is more supporting its accessory or you know and supporting to the commercial property creating an opportunity for that where it might make sense. And then also we don’t have a code that allows for a mix of housing types under one subdivision, if you will, or development. So, for instance, Gwinnett County has a traditional neighborhood development zoning district where you can have a mix of townhomes to three different lot size single family detached home under one development. And, you know, part of what we’re seeing now, we’re clamoring for built-for-equity products. We’re a redevelopment city. We don’t have big swaths of green space to be able to develop estate-sized subdivisions on anymore. So how can we be creative about the space that we have, the infill opportunities we have, to put developments on there that attract the buyers that we need. We need housing for seniors. We’ve heard them say, look, I want empty nester style housing, but I still want to own it. Okay. So we want to find that product type for you. I’ve heard a phrase, first stroller generation recently. So you’ve got young professionals, but then as they get married and they have that first baby to push that first stroller, their thoughts on what their home life is going to be is different than the young professional, and maybe it’s still single or married without kids. And so how do we create those opportunities for them at an attainable price point? And you have certain fixed costs in construction that you can’t control. And so one way you can control it is being creative about setbacks, lot sizes, density, and things of that nature. And so looking for opportunities to allow for that. So we don’t have just a bunch of townhomes either coming in. How can we mix product types into smaller infill developments, getting the density that somebody may need to justify the product or the project while providing a product that the market’s actually looking for.

00:26:32 – Rico Figliolini

Obviously, that makes sense to me. There’s different needs, right? Different age groups have different needs, like you said. And some of them may not want the large land, but they may want. I’ve seen developments like, for example, I think it was Trellith, Georgia. That’s where the big studio is. And some other places similar to that where you do have some mix of housing where it’s townhomes. It’s sort of single family also on a really small plot of land, but big enough for a family, but it’s still separate, right, separate pieces. Some people might say it’s on postage-size land, but they have a backyard, and they might have even four bedrooms in that house, or five even, with a nice deck, let’s say. I know it was in Canada. It was the same way. It was this development where it was mixed use, and I walked into this house. And it seemed small in the front. It was a one-car a two-car garage, with a side entrance. But it was a five-bedroom, three stories, beautiful house, the small deck on back. And then a really nice backyard also. But small, nicely done, craftsman style and stuff. I don’t know what that would cost here in the States, but over there, it wasn’t too bad. So, but space. Maybe within that development, you know, Pocket Park or whatever. I mean, are you thinking along those lines? I mean, Medlock Bridge Road, for example, is full of houses on one side that are these big lot houses. At some point, those may change. I mean, those are, I don’t know if they’re one acre or two acre lots. I mean, they may, you know, over the next 10, 20 years, change and become something else. High density. Are you looking at that? Is that some of the, because that’s within the Central Business District map, I think.

00:28:36 – Shaun Adams

So actually after the hexagon building going down Medlock, I think in the 2045 update, some of that has been dubbed village residential to create that transitional density coming off of Town Center and going towards Spalding, South Peachtree. Because you have a mix of towns and smaller lots, single family subdivisions there now. And so acknowledging the fact that those one and a half, two acre older homes may at some point in time be sought for redevelopment. How do we want that to look and how can it assimilate, you know, bring those two character areas and planning nodes together in a logical flow. And so that has been contemplated there, but I’ve also seen some of these developments occur on 12 to 18 acre sites. So you don’t need 40 acres, 30 acres to do it. And so being able to create that opportunity and in reality, you know, I hate to say high density in that regard because people assume, you know, multifamily or something, you know, like that. In most cases, those developments can do it at 10 units an acre or less, which is really more of a townhome density, you know, just like a bunch of townhomes. And so to me, there’s as much of an architectural benefit and design benefit to that because you’re seeing differing product types. Some people don’t want their wall to be shared with another family. So even if it’s a five-foot setback, side setback, that alone, it’s effectively a townhome, but that alone to them feels different.

00:30:07 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. Yeah, yeah. I agree. I’ve seen that. Anything else that’s with the moratorium that we should bring up or discuss? Otherwise, I’d like to move on maybe to some of the stuff that’s going on as well.

00:30:21 – Shaun Adams

Sure. The only other thing that I would say that was probably the biggest, a surprise for me was the request by, especially the broker owners on where we can coordinate with the County, especially with fire and things of that nature. So most people don’t realize that since we don’t have fire inspection, fire marshal and house of the city, that still goes to the county as well as anything water sewer related and so you know they can work in parallel with permitting and things of that nature but we are actively working with our building side to create better coordination with Gwinnett. But hearing that it’s at a point where sometimes it impacts a tenant coming in because they have a tight timeline and when they need to be up and operational was something that I thought was great feedback. That’s a process thing that we can work on and kind of push Gwinnett on for really is what it is. Pushing Gwinnett on more and seeing how we can help them turn around their inspections faster and keep things moving within the permitting side of the house.

00:31:27 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, that is great for you. I never thought about that. You’re right. I mean, it’s just like that’s outside the city’s responsibility at this point, but cutting the red tape would be good. Any other surprising stuff that you found?

00:31:44 – Shaun Adams

In the realm of surprising, not really. I think there’s a lot of stuff that we’ve heard more and just getting more of that kind of consensus within that kind of helps understand the direction of where we want to go. But I think it’s shaping out nicely. I think the community will – I look forward to more of their feedback and really, if anything, being able, since I wasn’t on staff when the update happened two years ago, but being a resident, I attended a couple of those myself. I really look forward to seeing to the extent that there are changes in the thought process just in the last two years, you know, from the update to now, I’m really looking forward to that feedback and seeing how we can implement it into this proposal and make this time well worth it.

00:32:28 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, interesting. I’m sure there will be more unique feedback. I mean, there’s a lot more people that have come in over the last two years. So it will be interesting. Moving away from this for a little bit, what are the developments or what other things are coming up that people should be aware of over the next two months besides this that you’re aware of?

00:32:54 – Shaun Adams

So on the new front, I mean, I guess one last thing I would say that kind of transitioned us is, you know, I know we’ve talked about 25 Tech Park South before the 13 condos, but as a part of that, they’re agreeing to create, provide the easement for a trail connection around that lake. So we already have existing trail around the Ashrae site. We already have agreement and principle from other office owners to extend it through them, which will now connect to this. So this gets us mostly around Technology Park Lake with that trail. So just an example of when a redevelopment opportunity comes in being able to partner with them to get those other public facing amenities and make it happen faster than what it would if we had to just pick you know go piece by piece on our own ground. So that has been approved and so we would expect to see that you know take. That is a conversion. But outside of that, we don’t have any residential developments or anything right now in the pipeline. What is upcoming on council next week is a second read on a text amendment for the townhome district, the RTH, residential townhome district. The townhome the residential townhome currently the density on it is eight district units an acre. RTH, district, we’re proposing to go to 10 units an acre, which is consistent with what Gwinnett County does and they’ve done for a few years. We’ve seen it in other jurisdictions. And, you know, it’s an up to. So it’s a situation where we’re in a position where we need housing stock where we can. We’re clamoring for bill for equity housing stock where we can. So in certain situations where if a couple extra units an acre make the difference from a developer saying this site only works if it’s multifamily versus this site could work as townhomes. Then, you know, or a bill for equity product, then we want to provide that opportunity to consider it. Just because it says 10 units an acre, though, doesn’t mean council has to thumbs up 10 units an acre. They can say, well, on this particular property, eight units an acre makes sense. So it’s a tool in the toolbox that can be used. So that’s coming before them. We have a pawn shop SUP, which will be located. It’s the same plaza as Tortuga’s on Holcomb Bridge, just north of Crooked Creek. And so that’s an SUP for that. They’ve been in, they have a business existing in Tucker. They’ve been in operation there for 10 years. No issues. Had no reports a predominantly a jewelry reseller really when you listen to kind of the product of what they’re looking to do. The applicant even indicated the planning commission when questions about you know crime and concerns that came up to say that they made a decision a long time ago not to accept tools or anything like that because it’s really hard to track and to ensure that it’s legitimately brought in. And so they limit themselves predominantly to nicer jewelry, stones, things of that nature. And so they’re coming before us for that SUP, where council planning commission had recommended approval. And then we had planning commission last month, we had an in-home daycare SUP. And so that’ll be first read next week in council, and it’ll go before on a second reading public hearing in October.

00:36:23 – Rico Figliolini

So in-home daycare?

00:36:25 – Shaun Adams

Yes.

00:36:26 – Rico Figliolini

Like a daycare or a children’s daycare?

00:36:30 – Shaun Adams

It’s a children’s daycare, but they’re capped at up to six kids. And so, and it’s kind of, you know, I have a quick PSA opportunity on this. Really the SUP is an SUP for customary home occupation. So section 607 of our code is for customary home occupations. And most people don’t realize this, but the way it’s set up is any home-based business that provides a service on or adjacent to the premises or conducts a sale transaction on the premises has to have an SGP. And all of them are technically limited to trip counts of up to six per day so that’s really what this is an SUP for. It’s for a customary home occupation it’s just that the occupation is an in home daycare so they’re only going to have this.

00:37:19 – Rico Figliolini

Okay so similar if it was a hair salon, if you will. Someone was doing hair salon type work, if you will, in a home. Because I’ve seen that sometimes on through Gwinnett County. Yeah. So, okay. So that makes sense.

00:37:36 – Shaun Adams

Hair salons, music teachers who give their lessons on property. If you’re an accountant and you have people meet in your home, that is a service. Your consulting service is being provided on site. Therefore, technically, you should have an SEP. So we know that this probably goes on a lot undetected, unfortunately. But that is kind of where we are with it. And so that’s why they’re there before us. There was an in-home daycare in the same neighborhood recently where that person stopped doing it and this one’s kind of picking it up they’re doing it on their right from the start and so that one prior to actually didn’t have an SUP came in before that was a requirement and so it was kind of grandfathered in if you will. So they’re following the process and going through that so we will see that in October. It will be first next week. And then the last thing is actually not as much zoning, but it’s zoning adjacent, which is the social recreation facility. So if you remember, we had that. I’m going to go through in April on the zoning side, where it’s kind of dealing with the racing simulators, any type of business like that. So adding that to the alcohol ordinance so that it aligns with the zoning code so people will see that ordinance first read next week and public hearing on it in October.

00:38:57 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. But that includes stuff like, well, I mean, VR stuff and that type of stuff, laser tag or escape rooms, I guess. Because there’s no particular zoning for that, I don’t think. Would that work with that?

00:39:15 – Shaun Adams

Correct. So right now, what you see most commonly is indoor recreation facility. But the way that is commonly defined is that the food and beverage is clearly incidental to the rec facility. So when Nitrozone was here, or when you go to a Top Golf or Mario Andretti Racing, that type of thing, the facility is taken up so much by the rec aspect that the food is smaller. But you’re seeing post-COVID response again. You’re seeing more businesses doing smaller footprints. By virtue of that, their alcohol sales might be more than the 20-30% you typically see in code for the bigger ones, but they don’t go over 50%, which is usually that kind of big line. Our code not only didn’t contemplate it in zoning, but also didn’t contemplate the license for it in alcohol. The alcohol portion of it’s now coming through, which aligns with the zoning that was adopted back in, I think, April.

00:40:10 – Rico Figliolini

All right, cool. So it’s never ending. The city has to constantly keep evolving and working and finding new things that they have to attend to, right?

00:40:21 – Shaun Adams

We actually are maintaining a list. As we come across things, we maintain a list of text amendments to take a look at. And then ultimately what we do is we research them, compare them to other jurisdictions to make sure that before we bring it forward, it truly aligns with where we’re trying to go as a city and doesn’t have an unintended consequence. But it’s definitely a revolving situation.

00:40:44 – Rico Figliolini

I’m curious. Every industry has a conference or trade show. Do cities’ management have trade shows where they can go to and find out what other cities are doing across the country? Is there such a thing that you do comparatively? You might find new things that you never thought about even.

00:41:08 – Shaun Adams

So I would say yes, by department. And so actually last week, I was at the City County Institute for Georgia, which is where we get our CLEs. And we get everything there from the do’s and don’ts of what other jurisdictions have experienced, recent case law decisions, the impact of that on our jurisdiction, ordinance amendments, the do’s and don’ts of that. So we get it from that’s the legal side of what I do as well. But we have Planners Association. We have city county managers, both at the state and federal level. So we certainly have opportunities. If anything, you almost have to be strategic about the ones you do attend because you can get to have too many. And so we really try to look at that to make sure that it’s giving a good return on investment when we do go.

00:41:56 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. I mean, there’s a lot of cities around here, Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Roswell, that are doing a lot of different things also. They’re all trying to figure out, like we are, right? Trying to figure out what’s best for the city, for who we are and stuff. So interesting process. So let’s not forget that October then Thursday, October 3rd, 6 to 8 at City Hall is the public meeting about the changes to the land use plan for the Central Business District. If you have any questions, I’m sure Shaun Adams would love to handle some of those. So you can put comments as you watch this into Facebook or YouTube, wherever you’re at, and I’ll make sure that Shaun gets those. We’ll have links in the show notes as well on the website to some of these meeting agendas that you all can look at. Anything else, Shaun, before we wrap up that you’d like to share?

00:42:56 – Shaun Adams

The only other thing that I would encourage everybody to do is go take a look at our website on the community development side. We’ve made some changes recently, and happy to get those over to you so that you can share them. But we have now all of our current land uses are on the page and pretty much anybody, you can get to that page from anywhere, whether it’s the agenda site on our main page or the button. So you can, when you go into current land use pages, you can see the application, you can see a site plan if one was needed, elevations, if it’s a redevelopment you can see the staff report once it’s posted. And then once it’s adopted it goes to an archived section on that same page where you can get, you have the ordinance as well. Anyway this process wheel if you will it’s pretty cool take a look at that so you can understand how development gets through. And at the bottom of that page, we have a couple of different flow charts. So depending on how you like to take in information, I think we pretty well run the gambit on that for you.

00:43:57          Rico Figliolini

I think we have an article on LivinginPeachtreeCorners.com. So if you all visit that, you’ll see that as well. And I’ll have links to that. So it’s a great site. I mean, way, way more, not that it wasn’t transparent before, but way more, much easier to find everything all in one place. So check that out. Shaun, hang in there with me for a second. I just want to say thank you to everyone for joining us. EV Remodeling Inc. is our sponsor of these podcasts and our publications. So go visit them, find out a little bit more about what they do in their remodeling services, renovation work here in the city of Peachtree Corners, or wherever you’re living within the metro area. Their website is evremodelinginc.com. And obviously the city is PeachtreeCornersGA.gov. So go visit them as well. And you can find way more information out there than you need probably. It is a portal of information. So you can get lost in there and find stuff, but check out definitely from that homepage. You’ll see the land use stuff. So check that out, but thank you all for being with us. Appreciate it. Thank you, Shaun.