Consider a high-performance vehicle — bright, shiny and powerful. It leaps ahead quickly when it needs to, but can also settle back to a comfortable cruising speed. It’s nimble, able to turn on a dime or smoothly reverse direction, if need be.
Ever wished for a vehicle like that? The good news is that if you live within the city limits of Peachtree Corners, you already have one.
Gwinnett County’s largest and newest city has a most efficient “vehicle” for governing its home turf — a staff helmed by experienced department heads who put their shoulders to the wheel, are adept at balancing the sometimes-clashing interests of residents, the business community and other constituencies and aren’t afraid to embrace unconventional approaches.
City Manager- Brian Johnson
“It’s a high-performing municipality within the council-manager form of government,” summarized City Manager Brian Johnson.
“When you look at everything from streets and drainage to business licenses to zoning to document storage to elections — across the gamut — when you add up all of those areas, they should be the sum of all the parts, and with each of those areas you have a senior member overseeing it,” he said.
Johnson’s job is not that of a direct service provider. He supports his departmental chiefs to help them get the resources they need, puts out brush fires, interfaces with the mayor and council and isolates subordinates from politics and distractions so they can get their jobs done in the most efficient manner possible.
He indicated that the city’s organizational chart is an effective display of its leaned-out approach. “A lot of cities have a finance director and also a budget director,” he noted. “We have one person who does both, and as a result he can do certain things in regard to organizations we’re dealing with; he can make decisions quicker because he has authority over multiple areas.”
That means that those decision-makers don’t slip a card into a time clock and punch out at 5:01. And there are those phone calls and emails that arrive outside of normal business hours. All part of the mosaic, and Johnson is proud of the team that has been painstakingly assembled.
