City Government
City Manager Looks Back on Five Years of Accomplishments: Looking Ahead to Booming Future
Photos by George Hunter
From the Curiosity Lab to a new City Hall, City Manager Brian Johnson has steered Peachtree Corners through many big changes in his first five years on the job. Not that he’s taking credit for it.
“We have had some wins,” says Johnson, who started the job in September 2016. “But again, I want to stress the whole ‘we.’ I might be the CEO of the city, … and the mayor and the council are our board of directors, … but the ‘we’ is critical here. I can’t do it without mayor and council support. I can’t do it without my staff’s support.”
Johnson said he surrounds himself with department heads who “I would like to think are smarter than me” and keeps them focused on city service. “We get in early, we leave late, [and] try to make this the best community we can be to live, work and play,” he said.
Mayor Mike Mason says he’s glad the city brought Johnson onto that team.
“Although Brian was not from the area and moved here shortly after he was hired, in many ways, he saw the city the same way I did from the start — and I’m a 30-plus-year resident who led the ‘Yes!’ campaign and became the first mayor,” said Mason. “That’s been a gift to have someone who shares the vision and then, most importantly, takes action to get things done.
I’m told by other mayors that this ‘sense of ownership’ is unique. He has a relentlessly positive, can-do attitude, and that is so appreciated by the council, citizens and staff.”
Managing a city
A city manager oversees the day-to-day operations of a municipality. Johnson got the taste for the unusual job in an even more unusual way. A Navy intelligence analyst in the 1990s, Johnson switched to the Army and became an infantry officer in the Iraq War. There he found himself as the officer in charge of restoring services to the Sadr City district of Baghdad after the successful U.S. invasion.
“It was pretty cool to see it come back to life,” said Johnson. “A city is only as good as the services it can provide. Years later, when I decided to retire… I realized I really enjoyed that kind of thing.”
Back home, he got a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Georgia and embarked on a city manager career. He started in the Savannah suburb of Garden City, then managed the city of Anniston, Alabama before coming to Peachtree Corners.
Among the professional attractions were the city’s roots in Technology Park and its history as the place where such tech as the modem and the color printer were invented. After all, every city aims to be known for something, Johnson says, and Peachtree Corners already was.
“It’s nice to have that thing that has already been created, to feed and care for it, to ensure it doesn’t die,” he said.
As city manager, Johnson has no typical day, aside from his commitment to being an extreme early riser who aims to be in the office around 5:30 a.m. And no wonder. He said a workday could include talking with Gwinnett County police about street racing, handling a neighborhood complaint about trash collection, working with a company looking to move or expand here, and dealing with a homeowner upset about a neighbor’s tree about to fall on their property. That’s not counting scheduled meetings.
“It could go anywhere on a particular day,” said Johnson. “You could encapsulate a lot of what I do as firefighting.” He says he comes in when the “fire’s a little too hot or too big for a staff member to handle it.”
Another important part of the job, he said, is shielding department heads and staff from the pressures of policy debates. “I keep them from being distracted from too much political interference, from too much resident interference,” he said.
Accomplishments, big and small
The mayor and council have tasked Johnson with carrying out several city-changing tasks. The establishment of Curiosity Lab, the “smart city” and autonomous vehicle test track, in 2019 was a big one that has been “an economic development magnet,” Johnson says.
There was the lack of a traditional downtown, tackled with the creation of Town Center alongside the Forum, which also celebrated a 2019 opening. A small and hard-to-access City Hall in rented space was replaced in 2017 with a move to a bigger building the city owns.
On the economic development front, Johnson and the administration played a role in Intuitive Surgical’s recently announced $600 million expansion of its campus in the city, one of the largest such projects in county history. On the smaller scale, he said the city helped to reduce Technology Park vacancies and bring in around 10,000 jobs.
“There are some things that don’t necessarily tie to a bricks-and-mortar accomplishment,” he added. “We have been successful in keeping the city’s millage rate to zero. We don’t have a property tax.”
“In some cases, the accomplishments are merely me keeping the trains running on time. Some are not particularly sexy, not particularly evident to the untrained eye,” Johnson said. Some of the achievements are more bureaucratic and diplomatic, like the 2018 reworking of the city charter to make it mesh with state law about so-called city-lite governments like Peachtree Corners, with limited services and no property tax. That move spooked some residents about possible government expansion, which has not happened.
Challenges now and in the future
As far as challenges in leading Peachtree Corners, Johnson says it faces many that bedevil all cities. There’s the “age-old one” of never having enough money to do all of the paving, parks and public safety on a wish list, and the occasional frictions with other cities or the “state trying to take away local control.”
In Peachtree Corners, there are the added challenges of paying for everything solely with business and sales taxes, and the political tensions that come with being a very young city whose opponents to the founding are still watching carefully, not in some centuries-distant past.
The historic COVID-19 pandemic was a massive challenge that Johnson says will continue to have lasting local impacts due to the ways it accelerated changes in work and retail, shifting them to virtual, remote and online versions. With more online shopping, the city has to consider the health of local stores. With less business travel, the city wants to make sure its hotels remain robust. With more remote work, the area is already seeing people moving here rather than living closer to Atlanta jobs.
That remote-work factor is just part of what Johnson says is the major challenge — and opportunity — of the future: coping with and harnessing the success of “explosive” growth in metro Atlanta overall and this piece of Gwinnett in particular.
“So we are having a very significant amount of pressure being placed on us for additional housing of all types,” he said. “So managing that growth and also ensuring that our current residents are not affected [are big challenges].” And then there’s the redevelopment of some existing areas that the city would like to spur, he added.
Another challenge of growth that Johnson says the city is handling well is to “make sure that everybody feels welcome” as the city becomes more racially and ethnically diverse. “We are now technically, as they say, a minority-majority city,” he said, adding that is “indicative of the fact this community is seen as an inviting community for all.”
Johnson is enthusiastic about the city’s future because it’s his future, too. He, his wife Cheri and their two children live here. “I’m invested as anyone,” he said. “I very much have a personal stake in how well this community does or does not perform, which, again, is pretty cool — pretty cool when we exceed our own expectations, not so cool when we miss the mark and I beat myself up.”
“It’s a true honor to be sitting at the table where decisions about the direction a community is going [are being made] — That’s a pretty solemn, important duty that I don’t take lightly,” Johnson said. “And I feel honored every day, I feel lucky every day, that we have opportunity to do that.
In what has now become tradition, the Southwest Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce hosted mayors from Berkeley Lake, Norcross and Peachtree Corners at a panel discussion on July 12 at the Hilton Atlanta Northeast.
The conversation centered around strategies for revitalizing and expanding metro Atlanta cities, with a focus on redevelopment, zoning ordinance reform, pedestrian and bicycle safety and investing in local schools and affordable housing initiatives.
Zoning changes
“We are beginning a really big project in our city. We have had ordinances that we’ve been working on ever since the city was incorporated in the 1950s,” said Berkeley Lake Mayor Lois Salter.
“We feel that we need to overhaul the whole zoning ordinance system and hire a consultant to come and elicit understanding and opinions from our citizens. We want them to be a part of that. We have some folks that resist any kind of regulation. They just want us to regulate their neighbors,” she added.
Norcross Mayor Craig Newton agreed that evolving needs are an important reason to change the zoning, and planning for what lies ahead is paramount. He pointed out that all Georgia cities must implement a comprehensive plan to maintain their qualified local government certifications and remain eligible for selected state funding.
Land development
“We intend to focus on improving pedestrian bicycle safety downtown and establish a sidewalk activity improvement,” he said. “We’re also looking at approving parking in our town center and constructing the Norcross Greenway, which will bring a much-welcomed park, green space and a trail,” he added.
The county announced earlier this year that the project involves redeveloping the existing property into a park that will span almost two acres. It will offer various community spaces, including a multi-use trail, playground, covered picnic area, restroom building and a 41-space parking lot.
In addition to its amenities, a 12-foot-wide concrete trail segment will wind through the park and utility corridor, connecting Singleton Road to Dickens Road.
The trail is part of the 2018 Gwinnett Trails Countywide Trails Master Plan‘s Norcross to Lilburn Trail with an internal loop trail connecting to the neighborhood.
Commercial use
Peachtree Corners has had several “community-friendly” projects come online in the past year, but the effects of the pandemic continue to linger.
“When you think about the future, you’re thinking about the landmass and buildings and commerce. Probably the most significant issue facing a lot of us in the near term is modern office space,” said Peachtree Corners Mayor Mike Mason. “There’s a lot of space. The question is, are people going to come back?”
He said that the central retail area has shifted with the revitalization of The Forum and that’s making city leaders rethink city planning.
“We’re having a look at our code and things like that. But from another point of view that will drive the decision about what communities are going to look like,” he said. “For example, there are people coming into the city that say some buildings are technologically obsolete.”
Public safety
Even though Berkeley Lake is the smallest of the three cities and has the highest average home values, all the mayors agreed that public safety is a growing concern.
“Living in Norcross offers residents a dense suburban feel that’s somewhat rural compared to the city of Atlanta,” said Newton. “But some of our public safety initiatives are increasing police presence in high crime areas.”
As the only one of the three cities with a full police department, Norcross is seeking creative ways to implement effective community policing strategies to build trust and communication between law enforcement and the residents.
Newton mentioned programs such as Neighborhood Watch, youth outreach programs and educational initiatives along with enhancing emergency response capabilities with training for the local fire department and EMS services.
“Our response time goal is for an officer to be on-site in an emergency within 30 minutes,” he said. “But that doesn’t happen.”
Extended-stay hotels tend to attract crime, so Newton said the city has worked with owners to improve lighting in the public spaces to deter criminal activity.
“We’ve partnered with nonprofit businesses and local stakeholders to support social services employment opportunities for at-risk individuals,” he said. “By working together with various organizations and entities were able to address the complex challenge of public safety.”
Community accountability
With no police force, Berkeley Lake relies heavily on cameras and old-fashioned “knowing your neighbors,” said Salter.
“Some of our individual HOAs are buying and furnishing and paying for cameras to safeguard their neighborhoods,” she said.
Although there may be pockets of criminal behavior around the city, Salter said a police officer once described Berkeley Lake as a “black hole” of crime because there’s so little crime data.
“One of the reasons for that we feel is that historically we’ve been a very neighborly people,” she said. “There is an amazing system of community cohesiveness.”
Peachtree Corners is taking its own approach.
“We’ve recently added a Marshal Service and as Lois mentioned we’re also leaning on technology,” said Mason.
The marshal department doesn’t take the place of the services provided by Gwinnett County Police, it primarily enforces city code and aids Gwinnett PD when necessary.
“We’re utilizing as much technology as we can,” said Mason.
Gwinnett PD is instructing where to locate cameras and the city keeps adding them. There have been several instances in the last year or so where coordination among agencies and the use of technology have thwarted or caught criminals.
At the end of the day, the three mayors said the cities all rely on each other. Being so close means that economic development, enhanced entertainment and other desirable amenities are boons for them all.
With community development director Diana Wheeler stepping down to pursue a consulting career, Peachtree Corners city leadership turned a challenge into an opportunity.
In January, Shaun Adams was hired as the assistant city attorney to oversee compliance for land use and economic development-related matters and help with legal issues.
His background in public and private sector development made him the ideal replacement.
As luck would have it, Adams moved to Georgia in 2005, selling real estate while attending law school.
“I actually started working down at the capital a lot, lobbying on various policies right out of law school,” he said. “I was the legal counsel for the Senate Judiciary, and that exposed me to ACCG, which is the State County Association, which represents all staff and elected officials for counties across the state.”
With the motto, Advancing Georgia’s Counties, ACCG helps with the policy aspect of things like training and education.
“While I was a lobbyist for them, I focused on economic development, infrastructure-related issues and whatever policies went into place,” Adams said. “We also went around the state and trained our commissioners and their staff on some of those policies and put their new processes in place.”
Local government possibilities
“After a handful of years, I got lured away into the private sector,” he said.
Working on land use and government relations matters from the other side of the table, Adams represented developers and investors.
“Sometimes [investors would] come to me with a property that they bought, and they’d say, ‘Hey, we bought this on investment. We’d like to see how we can make the highest and best use of it. Help us create a vision,’” he said. “So, I helped put a team together to determine what we thought could go on the site based off of local government zoning.”
His job entailed working with architects and engineers to design the site and help the client take it to market. Ultimately, the contract purchaser would come in and seek needed entitlements.
“I would help with that,” Adams said. “Those were the fun ones because you got to start on the ground.”
Adams got to know many different local government jurisdictions and worked extensively around metro Atlanta on various matters. On a busy week, he may work with five different jurisdictions across the state.
As a family man with a wife and two sons, he began looking for something that would keep him closer to home.
A perfect fit
City Manager Brian Johnson says it was serendipitous that Adams was looking for a position at a time when the city needed someone like him.
“It’s actually a hard position to fill, and I just happened to catch him,” said Johnson. “We were familiar with each other because he’s represented a number of clients coming before the city.”
Johnson said that Adams was legal counsel for some of the most significant developments in the last few years: North American Properties purchasing and revitalizing The Forum, housing development Waterside, and Intuitive Surgical moving its headquarters from the West Coast.
“He was on the other side of the table as we worked together to make these projects ultimately better for the city and better than they were upon their initial submittal,” Johnson said.
“And I knew then that he was a really knowledgeable guy that really knows how to deal with people. He’s a problem solver. He’s always looking for ways to figure out how to resolve conflict and navigate minefields as it relates to land use and all the laws and zoning that apply to it,” he added.
Changes to the job
Although Wheeler is no longer a staffer, she’s still doing work for the city.
With Adams’ legal background, the events planning team will be transitioning out from under community development.
“By taking that off my plate, it’ll allow me to do more with the legal side of things that the position didn’t do previously,” he said.
There will also be a shift with code enforcement duties moving under Chief Marshal Edward Restrepo.
“I moved code enforcement underneath the city marshal’s office because code enforcement and law enforcement are almost like fraternal twins — they both do very similar things,” said Johnson. “Each of them is enforcing a different level of law. Code enforcement is municipal code, and law enforcement is state code, but they work hand in hand.”
The events planning through the end of the year has already been moved from the community development director’s department. As a consultant, Wheeler will work with other contractors to manage the happenings at the Town Center. Director of Communications Louis Svehla has already moved into managing premier events, Johnson said adding that the city may use more consultants in the future under Svehla’s management.
“He has really shown his ability to manage special events very adeptly. He really showed me that skill set when we had last year’s Criterium bike race,” said Johnson. “I decided to take advantage of some opportunities, including our partnership with Audi, which we were going to announce to the whole vulnerable road user thing.”
With only three months to prepare, Svehla pulled off the event without a hitch.
“He did an outstanding job and so he is capable of taking the management of our community events, our concerts and stuff,” said Johnson.
Johnson said the city is still utilizing consultants for some aspects of special events, but if consultant fees become more expensive than hiring someone full-time to assist Svehla, he’ll make that call.
“All those moves have happened, and I’ll sum it up by just saying that I’m just playing to the strengths of these people and utilizing a great team that I have, and it’s working out really well,” Johnson said.
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