Lee Thompson run for Gwinnett Commission Chair [Podcast]

With the election coming closer, Rico Figliolni sits down with County Commissioner Chair Candidate Lee Thompson Jr. in this episode of Peachtree Corners Life podcast. Here, they discuss issues on transportation, affordable housing, immigration, and ethics in politics. Hear about Lee’s history in Gwinnett County and his views on where the county is going.

Resources:

Website: https://www.leeforgwinnett.com

“I believe this is an extremely important election when we come in as a County commission in January of next year, you’re going to have five county commissioners and the longest-serving county commissioners are going to have two years tenure. I believe it’s very important that the person who’s in the chairman’s position as the leader of that commission has a good and solid understanding of local government in the issues that have to be addressed by the local government.”

Lee Thompson Jr.

Topics can be listened by timestamp:

[00:00:30] – Intro
[00:03:10] – Lee’s Background
[00:05:21] – Political Changes in the County
[00:09:13] – New Challenges for a County Commissioner Chair
[00:12:42] – Working with Education
[00:14:48] – Property Taxes
[00:16:07] – Re-Opening the State
[00:19:56] – Transportation
[00:22:45] – Affordable Housing
[00:25:51] – Immigration
[00:28:12] – Ethics and Transparency
[00:31:43] – Campaigning During COVID-19
[00:35:13] – Election Issues
[00:37:56] – Closing

Podcast Transcription

Rico: [00:00:30] Hi everyone, this is Rico Figliolini host of Peachtree Corners Life. I appreciate you guys joining us in the city of Peachtree Corners. We’re doing our podcast as usual, socially safe. Not in the studio that we normally would be like Atlanta Tech Park, where we’ve been doing a lot of podcasts before. COVID-19 hit. We have a special guest today. We’re going to be discussing a bit about politics in Gwinnett County, but before we get there, I do want to just say thank you to our sponsor Hargray Fiber. They’ve been a sponsor of the family of podcasts that we do not only Peachtree Corners Life and Capitalist Sage, but the other shows that we do as well. So I want to say thank you to them. You can find out more information about Hargray Fiber, which is a leading fiber optic company in the Southeast. They provide fiber cable. They’re not the cable guy, they’re not Comcast, they’re not AT&T, they’re right in your community. When they come into Peachtree Corners, or Conyers, or Valdosta, they are right in their offices there. You don’t call up an 800 number that’s going to be like somewhere in LA LA land. Your tech support’s right in your community. They’re a great place that provide not only the consumer side, but the business side, which is what HargrayFiber.com does. So check them out. They have a 90 day free internet connection available, and also some tools that can get you online. Free tools that can help you do your work online in teleworking. If you’re getting challenges somewhere else, they’re the guys to go to. HargrayFiber.com so check them out. Now to our guest, Lee Thompson. Lee, welcome.

Lee: [00:02:08] Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me.

Rico: [00:02:10] I appreciate you coming out. I know, coming out, see? Everyone’s, everyone’s out here doing campaigning in the virtual world, right?

Lee: [00:02:20] I walked down the hall to another room, so.

Rico: [00:02:23] That’s funny. They set you up and you could just keep going. Was it Biden that was doing the virtual tour. I was wondering how he was going to do that from the basement, but it’s amazing. Everyone’s Zooming. Is that, that’s a new thing for you or not?

Lee: [00:02:42] Well, it certainly was before this pandemic started. But, now that we’ve been doing that, I’ve been, I think in three or four city council meetings that way. I’ve been in three or four forums that way. So I’ve done it quite a bit now.

Rico: [00:02:56] Cool. So for those that don’t know Lee Thompson. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about you? Obviously I think there’s six or seven democratic candidates running in the primary.

Lee: [00:03:08] Five Democrats and three Republicans,

Rico: [00:03:10] Okay five Democrats, okay, cool. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and stuff.

Lee: [00:03:16] Sure. I’m a lifelong resident of Gwinnett County. Grew up in Lawrenceville, attended Central Gwinnett High School, after that I obtained a degree, undergraduate degree from Mercer University. I have a law degree from the University of Georgia Law School. I have lived in Lawrenceville throughout my life and have practiced law in Lawrenceville since 1981. I started practicing law in 1981. For the vast majority of that time, our firm has been specialists in local government law. I’ve been the city attorney for the city of Sugar Hill, the City of Duluth, City of Grace, City of Lawrenceville. We have in the past also served for Snellville and the city of Auburn. And we also represent the Gwinnett County Board of Education and we’ve represented that entity since 1983. And so we’ve seen a lot of changes over the years. And so, that’s what I’ve done for a living my entire career. I’m also active in the community. I was actually in the first class of Leadership Gwinnett, that was in 1985 and 1986. I was in my late twenties and was selected to that class of Leadership Gwinnett. I have been active in the Democratic party. I’ve been on the executive committee of the Gwinnett Democratic party for over 30 years. I’ve been on the state Democratic party committee for over 20 years. And I’ve been in a number of civic organizations, I actually was one of the founding members of the Gwinnett Tech Foundation and was also a founding member of the Central Gwinnett Cluster Foundation and serve on the board of directors of the Justice Center of Atlanta. Which is a nonprofit organization that provides mediation service and provides mediation training for people all over the United States.

Rico: [00:05:21] And that’s interesting. I mean, the democratic, I mean, me coming from New York it’s all Democrats up in the city of New York. Unless you were on Staten Island, Long Island, and then there were Republicans. So there was never a Republican to be found in the boroughs, right? And when I moved down here in ’95, being a Democrat in Gwinnett County, you are lonesome, we never crossed paths that way. I ended up becoming a Reagan Republican or Reagan Democrat, however they call it. But the Republican party for the most part was what the county ran on right? During the early, I mean, most of the years, but when I moved here in ’95, it seemed that way.

Lee: [00:06:04] Well, certainly since ’95 that has been true. Prior to that, actually when I was in college and then a young lawyer in politics, there were actually a lot of Democrats in office here in Gwinnett County. I actually was the campaign manager for Bartow Jenkins, who was the last Democrat to serve on the Gwinnett County Commission before Ben Ku and Marlene Foskey were elected last year. I was his campaign manager. I also worked on the campaign staff of Ed Jenkins, who was a Democratic Congressman who represented the County up until, I believe it was 1992. The Republicans swept most of the County offices in 1984. And so, since that time, most of the County wide offices have been held by Republicans.

Rico: [00:06:53] I think there was a Gingrich along that time maybe, right? Yeah, but politics has changed in, in the County. I mean, I’ve seen it since ’95 since I moved here. Urbanized, Gwinnett has become more urbanized, right? A lot more minorities. Very different from the way it was in the late, mid, late nineties, I think, more Democratic. Well at least what democratic leaning, maybe not democratic voters, but we’re getting there, it seems right. It’s taken a couple of decades. Are you, are you finding it easier to meet more Democrats along the way? Different
types of Democrats? You know, there’s Asians, there’s African-Americans. I mean, it’s a big potpourri of ethnicity in Gwinnett County, right?

Lee: [00:07:49] It is, and definitely, I mean I’ve seen the entire change. I actually grew up in Gwinnett County, so I was going to school in the seventies in Gwinnett County when it was basically a rural community. My grandparents lived down on Pleasant Hill road, which at that time had a lot of farms and even some dairies on it. And so, I’ve seen it change from a rural community to a suburban community now to an urban community. It’s become much more diverse. It’s one of the most diverse counties in the United States at this point. And that’s, that’s been a very good thing. And it has been good for the Democratic party. The Democratic party has grown in the last few years. I was actually elected as state representative in 2008 when President Obama got elected. I ran against the three-term incumbent here in Marksville, was able to win that seat in 2008. I then lost it in 2010 when the Republicans swept in statewide races. But then have remained active in the party. And I’ve seen actually they split my old seat up into six different districts in the Lawrenceville area. And I was happy that by this last 2018 election, four of those six seats that have parts of my old district are now held by Democrats.

Rico: [00:09:13] Wow. It has changed a lot it seems. So politics. Politics has changed a bit too, right? Since even a decade ago. I mean, we’re more concerned about transportation coming in. I’ve seen more challenges on that Marta wants to be able to come in, although it was recently defeated. COVID-19 has also opened up a lot of different other challenges as well. So what do you find with, you know, what challenges do you think a County chairman will have coming into office considering reduced revenue that’s happening because of COVID-19 and in health issues. So what challenges will an elected official County Commissioner, County Chair face when they take office?

Lee: [00:10:03] Well, they’re going to face a lot of, of issues. They’re going to face the issues that they already had, which are transportation, how to deal with transportation, how to deal with land use planning and infrastructure, and all of the issues that were already there. But they’re now going to be facing that, having to deal with probably substantially reduced revenues. One of the things that we’ve already seen is the effect on businesses. Obviously with restaurants being closed with a number of retail businesses being closed, that we’ve had a reduction in sales tax revenue. And that sales tax revenue is probably going to continue to be reduced. Sales tax revenue in Gwinnett County is mainly used for those special purpose local option sales tax to fund capital projects. So what is probably going to happen is we’re probably going to have to see how long that reduced sales tax revenue goes on. And see if there’s going to be enough money to fund the projects that were planned out for this loss in the last referendum and see if we’re not able to fund those projects, which projects are we going to put priority on and which projects are going to have to be delayed or which projects where we might have to come up with a different funding source. We also really don’t know yet how this is going to affect other revenue sources. When I was in the state legislature I went in in January of 2009, a few months after the economic collapse of 2008. And I found at that time the state was often trying to balance the budget by cutting funds that it was providing the local governments. And so we
don’t, the state hasn’t even adopted its budget for the coming fiscal year, which starts July one. So we don’t have any idea if the state is going to be cutting back the County funds. And so we’ll just have to kind of wait and see the ultimate effect this has. But obviously it’s going to change planning and we’re going to have to be very strategic in our financial planning next year. Once we see how much we are actually affected by this.

Rico: [00:12:09] I think I just heard something about the governor’s office saying to all the departments about cutting back 15% across the board. Something along those lines.

Lee: [00:12:18] That’s correct. I think they sent out a memo to ask them to cut their budgets about 14%.

Rico: [00:12:23] Across the board, no matter.

Lee: [00:12:27] When they had originally asked them to cut a 6% or 4% I believe it was earlier, there were certain places that were exempted like education and other areas. As I understand it from this last memo, there are no exemptions.

Rico: [00:12:42] So how does the County work hand in hand with education, for example, and other areas within the County? Obviously school kids are home. They’re home through the summer. They should be coming back in the Fall if things go well. School buses have to run school lunches. There’s other services that the County provides separate. I mean, obviously you’re not, County Commission doesn’t deal with the school board per se. But there’s auxiliary services that have to be provided that the County coordinates right? With school system, with the health department.

Lee: [00:13:16] They do. And of course, as I said, our firm represents the Gwinnett County Board of Education. So we see it from the education side and obviously the decisions about policy and how to operate schools are all done by a separate elected body separate than the County Commision. They’re done by the school board and the superintendent of schools. But yes, there’s coordination that has to go on between transportation. Transportation projects that provide intersection improvements and sidewalk improvements and those types of things around schools. And obviously, going on now, the school system has continued to deliver lunches despite the fact that it has children who are not in school. For your title one schools they have continued to provide lunches to those individuals. When we get to the summer and they may not have those lunches or if we face something in the fall where people may not be able to go back to school, that’s obviously an issue that we all have to deal with and all that. If you, I, I’m very close, my office is very close to the Lawrenceville co-op. They give out food on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. During the week of spring break, the line from the Lawrenceville co-op extended back over two blocks of people waiting to get in to pick up food that week. So that’s a real issue where we have to deal with our social services and our health and human resources. Divisions of the County have to step in and try and help on some of those issues.

Rico: [00:14:48] And property taxes is another issue too I’d imagine. Property tax has to be paid towards the end of the year and stuff. Do you think that there may be challenges there? Are we looking at not a second wave of, well, second wave of economic impact even, but we’re looking at the County have challenges there then? Because that would affect budget as well.

Lee: [00:15:12] It would. And we could be looking at that. I think it may be a little bit too early to tell that for sure. It’s going to, we’re going to have to see how drastic this economic downturn is from the virus. If it lasts long enough and we begin to have people having evictions, we begin to have people moving out of buildings and leaving the buildings vacant. All of those things obviously can have a downturn on property values and can affect property taxes. I don’t know if we’ll see it so much this year in the property taxes, and because those property values were really set at the beginning of the year in January. Unless we see people who are not able to pay their bills, we may see Gwinnett County actually has a very high collection rate on their property tax bill. So it’ll be interesting to see if that goes down this fall when, when those property taxes actually come to you.

Rico: [00:16:07] Come, when, Governor Kemp back in, I think it was April 21st, somewhere around there, mid April, decided to start opening up the state slowly. I don’t know if it was slowly, but it was announced that it’s going to open up. The rules, the executive order, he placed, said sure, salons. He has salons, nail places that can open up, but there were no obviously anyone that looked at that and looked at the CDC guidance would be like, you can’t open these things up. I know that you were sort of opposed to the opening up of the state at that point. How do you, how do you see it coming along now? I mean, are you still, how do you feel about the opening and the continued opening right now? Summer camps, for example, not overnight camps, but summer camps are going to be allowed. The movement to 10 persons in a group and stuff like that. How do you see that affecting Gwinnett County? Are you for that? Are you, you know, what’s your take on that?

Lee: [00:17:09] I’m still concerned about it. I had two problems when Governors Kemp did that and put out a short statement about that when he did it. The first was that I thought it was a little bit too early for some of the reasons you just cited. There were some obvious businesses in there that you really couldn’t keep social distancing that it was difficult for them to abide by the guidelines. Secondly, the issue of that, every time the governor has put out an order, he’s preempted any kind of local action. So, in other words, if the city of Atlanta wants to do something differently, or Gwinnett County, a County of almost a million people, thinks it needs to have different rules than a County in South Georgia that has 20,000 people, he preempted any ability to do that. And I found that disturbing. You know, I hope we’re not going to see an uptick and the second wave of the virus. I think it’s a little bit too early to see to know that. I have been impressed by people, I think showing common sense. And a lot of people just saying, you know, I’m not comfortable going in and sitting in a restaurant right now. I’m still going to pick up, or I’m not comfortable going to a particular area. And the people who have opened up at least, you know, hair salons, one person salons where they say, okay, I’ll take one person at a time. I’ll use disposable capes, I’ll disinfect everything after this person leaves. Everybody wears masks and
gloves while they’re in here, you know, so I have been pleasantly surprised by some of the common sense I’ve seen of people trying to make sure that they apply common sense to the openings that they have done.

Rico: [00:19:04] That’s interesting. I’ve been out there a little bit. I’ve been doing a lot of Instacart ordering, so costco deliveries, Publix delivery. Well, not Ingles. But when I do go out there though, it’s interesting the mix of different things, right? I see a lot of people with masks, and then at some places you see no one wear masks. So I just, you know, and I think my fear is that the longer we do this, the more lax people become. Because, you know, that’s just the nature of, I think people, right?

Lee: [00:19:38] So I would agree with your comments. I’ve seen the same thing. We’ve, when we have people come into our office, we still have our doors locked. We let people come in as they need to for a specific, to sign some papers or something. We wear a mask. We’ve asked people to wear a mask. Some people do, some people don’t. So yeah.

Rico: [00:19:56] You know, and moving forward, obviously I think business has to start moving at some point. Intelligently yes. Um, because we, people need to make money. They have to pay their bills. I think everyone starts feeling the hurt at some point. Individuals as well as business owners. And also opportunities have been found because some people figure they don’t need that 10,000 square foot office. They could use 2,000 square feet and everyone could be, you know, out there doing zooming you know and stuff. That could have a bad effect on commercial real estate in the country. You know, there’s that. There’s also, you know, transportation. I’m sure Marta is going to come back up again. I don’t know when the cycle is, maybe even in November if there’s something on the ballot, I guess. How do you feel about Marta coming back and, or transportation along those lines? Is that something you would be welcoming and how would that be affected? You know, how can we do that? Maybe with even limited budgets?

Lee: [00:21:07] Yes, it’s something I would actually welcome. I’ve actually lived here long enough that I’ve voted for the Marta referendum in 1990 when it came along. It was defeated in 1990. I voted for Marta referendum last year when the referendum came out, I think it needs to be put back on the ballot. I think it was unfortunate that it was put on the March ballot rather than the November ballot, that the last vote, I think that was done for purely partisan politics. And that was a sad thing. It is something that we need. We need public transportation, and we need to do it because what that referendum actually provides is a 1 cent sales tax that’s going to last for about 30 years. That will provide a guaranteed funding mechanism for transportation and we might differ a little bit on the plans and which plan is a better plan and what we should have. I hope that we don’t try and wait for the perfect plan before we get that funding source in place because we need to put the funding source in place and get some type of public transportation going in this County. I’ve, when I was a state representative, I also supported the T Splice bill. It wasn’t a perfect bill, I didn’t like it, but I voted for it and I’d hoped the County would vote for it in 2010 unfortunately we didn’t. And now we saw it was another 10 years
before we got anything else on the referendum. So the longer we put these things off, the less money we have going towards transportation over the years.

Rico: [00:22:45] I agree with you to a degree. I mean the T Splice is a little different probably because you can always adjust that budget where that money goes to some degree, whereas the larger transportation plan might be different, right? Heavy rail versus light rail? You know, where are you going to put the transportation hubs? I mean, some of those things can be decided later, obviously, but there’s always a plan that people look at initially. I think that was why that plan failed. As well as being politically put into the wrong month to be voted on. So I agree with you there. That just killed it. They just, that was just dumb. But it was made on purpose to be defeated I think at that point. But anyway, you know, COVID-19 is actually qualifying everything we talked about now. Transportation, are we going to be doing that type of thing? How do we continue development, you know, and providing affordable housing? I’m assuming that, you know, as any Democrat, I don’t know if you’re progressive or more conservative, but how do you feel about affordable housing when it comes to further development in the County? Do you feel that it has to be regulated in there, incentivized? How do you feel about that as far as people being able to afford to live in a place near where they’re working?

Lee: [00:24:09] Well, I think it is a demand that we have to respond to in the County, and it should be a high priority of providing affordable housing and work force housing. I’ve actually been involved in a project in downtown Lawrenceville as the city attorney, that I think provided a good example of how we might do some things. The city of Lawrenceville took about 30 acres near its center and is actually redeveloping that for a number of mixed uses. It’s apartments, condominiums, single family, retail, restaurants. As part of that the development actually wiped out some old public housing that was built in the fifties and sixties. And what Lawrenceville did was part of that plan is take part of the money that came from the development of that. And we actually built a, I think they lost 30 some odd units in public housing. They actually built 40 some odd units of new housing, and relocated those people as part of the project. They also have several projects that their housing authority has done where they’ve been mixing projects where there’s affordable, supplemented housing being mixed in with regular market rate housing. And so there are a lot of creative ways to do this. And I think we’ve got to continue to look at those creative ways, engage the private sector in doing that, and work along with our public sector and our housing authorities and our other authorities that we have that can provide the type of housing we need.

Rico: [00:25:51] Okay. What about immigration and the policies that are right now in place, like programs like 287G and you know, the impact that has on the immigrant population. How do you, where do you stand on that issue?

Lee: [00:26:07] I think that’s a bad program. I actually put out a, you can go to my website and my Facebook page. I think I actually put something up on Facebook in like August of last year when they were having some of the hearings and discussion about that. That is a program that’s
bad for a couple of reasons. Number one, it’s bad economically. We spend about $3 million a year on that program and we don’t get any substantial return from it, I think. And the second is, it’s bad from a psychological standpoint. It sends a bad message to our immigrant community in saying that I think it leads to profiling. I think it leads to a negative feeling of the immigrant community that they’re being discriminated against, and I think they are being very often as a result of that program. And, so I think we need to get rid of the program. I think we also need to make sure that the programs that were put into effect in Gwinnett County are welcoming and inclusive programs. And I can actually tell you a story. When I was a state representative back in 2009 and 2010, I actually got complaints about some of law enforcement running roadblocks near churches that were having Spanish mass or a Haitian community. And I think that was a direct result of 287G types of programs back at as long ago as 10, 12 years ago.

Rico: [00:27:37] Wow. I know a lot of the, I’ve interviewed, I think two sheriffs, candidates that are running for Gwinnett County. They both obviously want to take, you know, stop the 287 G program.

Lee: [00:27:49] And I would say the sheriff has the most control over that program. And so I think electing one of these good Democratic candidates we’ve got for sheriff would go a long way towards stopping that program.

Rico: [00:28:00] Do you have a particular candidate that you favor?

Lee: [00:28:03] I actually do. You can check their financial records and see which one I gave money to.

Rico: [00:28:12] Alright, sounds good. Talking about financial records, we’re heading towards the end of our time together. So I want to take it on ethics and transparency, which is on your website. And, you know, Gwinnett County government for a long time, I’m sure. I was on the planning commission for three years, I think, under Burton, when he was commissioner representing this area. And, although I never was personally involved or seen any ethics issues, you know, you always heard things. You know, that might’ve fell along the border a little bit of like, you know, someone rezoning a place, a hundred acres then flipping the property to a developer, all of a sudden that’s going to develop that. So a lot of farmers became millionaires over in the early nineties and late eighties, even going into the late nineties, a little bit because of things like that. And there were, I’m sure there was even one County commissioner, I won’t name them, that was connected directly to developers and ended up having to give up a seat and was prosecuted at some point. But, you know, things like that happen in politics. I don’t think anyone’s led to think things like that doesn’t, you know, doesn’t happen on a regular basis. What would you change? So then there would be more transparency and more honesty maybe brought to the process. What could we do there?

Lee: [00:29:42] Sure. Well, the first thing is you need to enforce the rules that exist. There are ethics rules that exist for both politicians to disclose their personal financial disclosure
statements and who’s giving them campaign contributions. All those things. People need to comply with those. They need to file them on a timely basis and they need to file them and be open about that. Second thing is we actually need to, I believe, revise our internal processes in the County about how zonings are handled. One of the things that the ethics statutes say is that if somebody is an applicant in a zoning, they’re supposed to disclose whether they’ve given campaign contributions to someone within a certain time period. Well, if you come up and you’re going to buy a piece of property and rezone it and you put it in an LLC, that’s never existed before. Never owns anything other than that piece of property, obviously you’ve never given any campaign contributions, but it can be owned by five people who have given lots of campaign contributions. That’s circumventing those rules and regulations. And we just need to, and that would be very simple to just make you disclose certain things when you file applications, make sure you know who the applicant is, make sure you know who the owner is. Make sure you have the types of disclosure that needs to be done, and so I would certainly push for those types of rules changes in our zoning process.

Rico: [00:31:08] Is that something that has to be voted on or is that something the County Commission Chair can across the board like an executive order? Can you actually do that yourself without any?

Lee: [00:31:19] I could not do that by myself. I would have to have a majority of the County commission agreed to change the regulations about that.

Rico: [00:31:25] Okay. Well, there’s a couple of Progressive’s I think on the County commission now, right? It should be easier maybe.

Lee: [00:31:31] Well, we certainly have two Democrats on there already. So the, you know, the hope is we’ll have five Democrats next year when we come into session in September, I mean in January.

Rico: [00:31:43] Right, right. Alright. I don’t have a problem with that necessarily, but although some of my listeners will be a bit problematic with that. COVID-19 has changed the way politics works. So let’s talk a little bit just quickly about that, how you’ve been campaigning, because it’s like you’re not a, I mean, even still now, I don’t think you could go out in really more than 10 people, I guess. So how are you campaigning? How is that process working for you now?

Lee: [00:32:14] Well, it’s been a very interesting process. We came up with the campaign plan really before the first of the year last fall, and about eight weeks ago, we just said, well, this isn’t going to work out. So, because it involved a lot of door to door, knocking on doors, having meets and greets in neighborhoods, doing fundraising at gatherings. And in fact, I think the last event I had like that was over in Peachtree Corners. I had an event back in February, and I think that was about the time the virus hit a week or two after that.

Rico: [00:32:47] Right. That was when it was growing, I think.

Lee: [00:32:49] That’s right. We started shutting things down. So, it’s really shifted the campaign. We’ve had to do a lot of telephone work, had to do, we’re sending out texts, doing a lot of social media. Putting things on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and we’re sending mailer pieces out.

Rico: [00:33:11] And you’re doing a lot of virtual, I’ve noticed that, doing a lot of virtual candidate forums organized, which is pretty good. Organized, like one of them was organized by the Asian American advocacy fund, another one by the Gwinnett African-American caucus.

Lee: [00:33:25] Correct.

Rico: [00:33:26] Really niche. I mean, social media allows you to actually be able to niche down some of these things and reach certain segments of the population better, I think.

Lee: [00:33:34] And that has been fascinating and is actually, when you say that, I think the response to some of this has been actually better than you’ll get at a public meeting. I know we were at one virtual forum that one of the CID was doing, I think they had 160 some odd people watching at one point. We had one with the chamber of commerce this morning that lasted for about an hour and a half. The commission chair candidates, and they told us they had had between 100-200 people register for that and they expected even more to come on that. I actually participated in NAACP meeting earlier this week about virtual zoom call. I participated in the Asian American Advocacy fund forum that you were talking about last week. So I’ve participated in four or five of those types of forums and they’ve been very well received and it’s been enjoyable for the candidates to get a chance to actually talk with each other and share our views with the public.

Rico: [00:34:38] You know, I think the opportunity, maybe you can’t do the door to door handshake, which is always the best thing for a politician, to be able to do door to door because that’s really pulling out that vote and meeting people in person. But you’re right. I mean you don’t, you probably wouldn’t have gotten that as many in person visits to a forum then you can online because people would be like, I can do that. I’m here, I’m home. It’s just the zone right in there, you know? So maybe it could be good.

Lee: [00:35:06] That’s right. And then you have the same as you do with these, they get posted somewhere and people see them after the fact as well.

Rico: [00:35:13] So it’s been an interesting process with hope. And I mailed in my ballot also. So did that I think it was last week I mailed the ballot in. And hopefully what 7 million, 6, 7 million people got in the state of Georgia, got the application for the absentee ballot. I think a million of them responded, which was unusual because normally it would be a hundred thousand or something like that, be a really small number. So, it’ll be interesting to see how this is going to
all pan out and how they’re going to be able to count those ballots. So I don’t suspect we’ll know the winner for a few days.

Lee: [00:35:49] Well that’ll be interesting. In fact, there’s a lawsuit pending I saw just now that was kind of playing off the Wisconsin lawsuit as to whether ballots are going to have to be counted. Do they have to be received by seven o’clock on election day or did they just have to be postmarked?

Rico: [00:36:05] Yes, and that was the question I had now, besides the fact that there was no pre stamped or pre-metered return, which really, I mean, that’s, I think the state should have done that.

Lee: [00:36:16] I agree with you. In fact, Stacey Abrams put out a statement about that, and I put out a statement agreeing with her.

Rico: [00:36:21] It’s ridiculous that they did not do that. They printed all those valid applications and not do that? That makes no sense to me. But yes, I had the same question of, is it post marked that day or it has to be there before that day? And what if the post office gets it wrong? I mean, I’ve published Peachtree Corners magazine and I can’t tell you how sometimes every once in a while we’ll get someone say, I didn’t get that, or I got it three weeks later and it’s like, you know, I pay the rate I pay. It gets, it’s supposed to be delivered legally and officially within three days and not like a week later. So that’s what I’m wondering right now.

Lee: [00:37:04] And I think the secretary of state contends that the rule is it has to be in the election office by seven o’clock on election day. The Supreme court, when they approved the Wisconsin decision that they approved earlier this year. Actually allowed, a federal judge has said, as long as it was postmarked by the day and it came, then you still had to count it. So that’s probably going to be an issue that’s going to be argued back and forth between now and election day. This is going to be an interesting election cause I do think you’re going to have a lot of people voting by mail, which extends it out for the candidates as well. Normally you have a three week process where people are early voting. We have about a six week process cause as you say, you’ve already voted and yet we’re still more than, you know, just a month or so out from the election.

Rico: [00:37:56] Which becomes a problem though because if I voted and let’s say you know, let’s say the candidate I’d like, I’d like someone else now it’s too late. You can’t do anything about it. So you really do have to be careful the candidate, as long as you campaign, as long as you can. We’ve come at the end of our time. So normally what I ask a politician to do is give our audience, ask for the vote, tell them, give me about a minute or so, and I’ll put you on screen by yourself. Why they should be voting for you Lee.

Lee: [00:38:32] Alright, well thank you very much. So first of all, thank you for letting me do this and for having me here today. It’s been very nice, I appreciate it. I would ask for your vote for
County commission chair because I believe this is extremely important election when we come in as a County commission in January of next year, you’re going to have five County commissioners and the longest serving County commissioners are going to have two years tenure. I believe it’s very important, that the person who’s in the chairman’s position as the leader of that commission has a good and solid understanding of local government in the issues that have to be addressed by local government. I believe I’m that candidate. I have almost 40 years of experience as a local government attorney representing some of the largest cities in Gwinnett County and representing the Gwinnett County school board, the largest employer in Gwinnett County. I have a great knowledge of County and city government. I have a knowledge of zoning, which is about 50% of what County commissioners do. And I’ve done zoning throughout my career for over 30 years. I believe I have the talents and the ability to do the job and to do it well. And I also have a passion for Gwinnett County. I grew up here. I want to see our County prosper. I want to see our County become inclusive. I want to see our County become leaders in regional transportation and doing the types of thing this County needs to do. And I would appreciate your vote and your support.

Rico: [00:40:10] Thank you, Lee. Hang in there with me while we sign off. I want to thank everyone for watching Peachtree Corners Life. More podcasts to come. Elections are not over. So I might have another candidate or two from a variety of places you never know. So I appreciate you guys hanging in there with us, listening to the issues. Make your choices. If you haven’t voted yet, you need to do this. 2020 is truly an important year on so many different levels. And if you’ve been affected by COVID-19, I pray and hope that your family and you and the people you are with, that you know that things turn out well and stay strong. We’ll be with you. We’re all in this together. Thank you.