Meet the City Officials who Keep Peachtree Corners Humming: Greg Ramsey Feature

Photos by George Hunter

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.

Public Works Director- Greg Ramsey

Greg Ramsey has his mind on the gutters, and on the roadways, sidewalks, storm drains and other existing and planned public city infrastructure that falls on his watch.

The Peachtree Corners Public Works Director loves his job keeping the city’s public facilities humming along in good shape — and planning for the future. He loves his job and its variability.

Asked what occupies the bulk of his workday, he replied, “Honestly, that changes from day to day.” Obviously, on a rainy day stormwater is a big issue, making sure the system can handle the runoff, he said, and engineering projects for development is a big consumer of time, as are city “customers” who find problems and report issues.

“It’s spread out pretty evenly and that’s what makes this job interesting,” he stated.

Ramsey came to work for the city in 2014 and was part of the public works operation startup in November of that year, taking over from Gwinnett County. He said one continuing challenge is that Peachtree Corners was mainly built out by the time it incorporated. There is more of a concern with retrofitting and assessment management, which are part of two major linchpins in his job description — project development and infrastructure.

Another challenge that has emerged is residents’ changing taste in public amenities.
Sidewalks are a good example. “They weren’t a priority back in the 70s when a lot of stuff was built. They just built roads,” Ramsey noted. “They didn’t contemplate a future where people would want to walk for pleasure or walk their dogs or walk for transportation.”

Recent years have brought a much greater emphasis on sidewalks and on the trail network the city is now building.

The takeover from Gwinnett involved handling a good bit of road maintenance. “The Gwinnett footprint is so huge that we had the ability to narrow the focus on the smaller geography and, for example, we certainly had some opportunity to expand the sidewalk network,” Ramsey explained.

One of the new and signature projects he’s most proud of is the pedestrian bridge that links the Forum with the Town Center.

Perhaps less high profile, but no less important, are such projects as a stormwater replacement/upgrade that became necessary after a tropical storm washed out a roadway in his first year at the helm. Pipelines and pipeline replacement have also been major undertakings. And the expansion of the trail system is under his umbrella.

Ramsey also looks to the future and the city’s long-range transportation plans. “Traffic is certainly not going to reduce over the coming years,” he noted. That argues for the need for continued traffic improvements. At the same time, he’s proud of what’s been done up to this point to get people out of their cars and make it more feasible for them to bike and walk.

His biggest frustration about the job? “It’s that I can’t please everybody,” he said. It’s a reminder of finite resources pitted against many, many requests.

Ramsey IS pleased to coach his kids’ baseball and softball teams in his time off. He’s also an avid golfer.