Meet the City Officials who Keep Peachtree Corners Humming: Kym Chereck 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.

City Clerk- Kym Chereck

Kym Chereck was raised overseas by parents who worked government jobs. She has found a home in Peachtree Corners where she and her husband raised two children and where she serves as city clerk.

The clerk’s job is heavily bound to record-keeping, as the office keeps official and historical records of the city. It also provides support to the mayor and council, helps facilitate the city’s legislative process and supervises elections.

Chereck said she moved over from Alpharetta to begin work on Dec. 12, some six months after the city officially came into being. She was one of a trio of initial official city employees.

“The day I started there was no phone, no furniture, nothing,” she recalled. Because the office lacked outside communications, she gave her personal cell phone number as a route by which officials and citizens could contact her.

“A lot of people still have it because we didn’t get a phone for a couple of weeks, but it’s fine, that’s what I’m here for, to answer questions,” she said.

And the questions come with regularity. At press time, many of them involve getting set up for the Nov. 2 election, in which three city council positions are up for grabs.

“It’s been very interesting,” Chereck said of the training and certification process and her track record of finding people and dealing with setup and logistical issues.

“I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite thing to do,” she added frankly, “because it’s stressful. But it’s very rewarding.”

Chereck said she got interested in government as a youngster while observing her mother’s work with the state department and her dad’s career in a classified military job. At one point, her family lived in Cold War East Germany and she passed armed checkpoints daily to go to school on the west side.

She came to Atlanta to visit a sister and her daughter, “and I wound up staying.” Putting down roots — she’s a 25-year resident of the Corners area — has made her a solid member of the community. That plus being here for a good stretch of time has given her a solid sense of where to send people who need help or have other issues.

That strong orientation toward helping has served her well in city government, she indicated — and did from the outset. “The first couple of weeks we didn’t have anybody to clean or sort the mail or do things that people might think beneath them,” Chereck said. “I made it perfectly clear. Anybody I hired, I told them that cleaning the bathroom was not beneath them, and that I was not going to require it…but that we work as a team.”

She said that with an “amazing” assistant and a supportive city manager, she is a part of the governmental mix for the duration. “They’re going to have to kick me out,” Chereck said.
When she’s not clerking. Chereck says she enjoys boating. swimming, reading and traveling.