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Alex Wright on The Forum Sale, New Town Center Playground and More [Podcast]

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2 years ago

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City Councilman Alex Wright and Rico Figliolini talk about the Forum on Peachtree Parkway sale and what may happen there, the new playground at the Town Green, extending the Autonomous Vehicle route from Tech Park to the Town Center, and more.

Resources:

Alex’s Email: AWright@PeachtreeCornersGA.gov
City Council Website: https://www.peachtreecornersga.gov/government/mayor-and-council/meet-the-mayor-and-council
Playground Creations

Timestamp:

[00:00:30] – Intro
[00:00:45] – New Planned Playground
[00:11:52] – Peachtree Corners Decathlon
[00:17:07] – Reupdating the Forum
[00:28:10] – Intuitive Campus
[00:31:29] – Autonomous Vehicles and Curiosity Labs
[00:41:25] – Mixed Use Development Ordinance
[00:46:36] – Closing

“But one of the purposes of (the decathlon) was to say, Hey, there’s this fitness trail there. I can’t tell you the number of times I talked to someone and they’re like, I didn’t even know that was there. You know, it’s kind of off in the woods and we want to encourage its use. To encourage people to be active.”

Alex Wright

Podcast Transcript

[00:00:30] Rico: Hi, this is Rico Figliolini, host of the Peachtree Corners Life. A podcast that centers around the city of Peachtree Corners. And today we have a special guest, Alex Wright, City Councilman district three. Hey Alex, thanks for joining us.

[00:00:42] Alex: Glad to be here. Good afternoon to you.

[00:00:45] Rico: Yeah, thank you. And this is a great time to be able to go through a lot of the things that are going on. I know that getting your regular newsletter sent out to your constituents really does explain a lot to people about not only currently what’s going on, but what’s coming forward in the next few months. Great that you’re sending that out. In fact, we’re going to go through that newsletter a little bit. We’re going to go item by item to discuss some of the things. Like the planned new playground that been worked on and actually, I believe is out for a bid at this point. This is separate from the small slide playground that’s at Town Center already. And separate from the fitness trail too. So tell us as I go through this, tell us a little bit about where this playground is actually situated. And as you’re doing that, I’m going to put some slides up from the Town Center. The first one is going to be actually with the Cinebistro behind me. I took these shots this morning and with me standing at the front, if you will, by the stage.

[00:01:43] Alex: Yeah, so from this vantage point, you can see kind of, off to the right, a wooded area. And the fitness trail is up in there, but there’s an access road further up, other side of the Veterans Monument. So if you were standing on the green, looking at the woods from all the way from the access road, which is beside the Veterans Monument all the way to where the other sidewalk is that runs beside the Cinebistro down the side of it.

[00:02:11] Rico: So I think the picture here has that road on the very left, you can barely see it.

[00:02:17] Alex: Yeah, that’d be the access road, and you could see the entrance to the Fitness Trail there. So basically all that, all the way down to the beginning of the Cinebistro, if you drew a perpendicular line out from the front of the Cinebistro, that entire frontage probably going back, I don’t know, 50 to 60 feet, maybe more is where the playground is going to be. So a lot of the landscaping that’s there right now, that was planted a few years ago that, that’s all going to come out. There’ll be a few trees that will need to get taken down. Several as we went through it, probably should be taken down anyway. They’re not in good condition. But anyway, it’s pretty large. Especially in contrast to the little one we’ve got right now. So this is going to be a major upgrade to the Town Green here for kid activities and there’ll probably be some adults that get on this stuff, cause it’s, some of it’s kind of neat.

[00:03:15] Rico: And I’m going to throw up a rendering. That was one of the original renderings, that was produced for it. That said, sort of give us the elements, not necessarily the positioning of it.

[00:03:25] Alex: Yeah, so if we start left to right, you know, the left is that’s the access road. And to your point, it’s not going to look exactly like this, but it’ll be similar. So the first, it’s kind of a small, it looks like a swing almost. The original designer we had, or he still is the designer. We were kind of brainstorming with him about what we were looking for. Found out that this guy had a background in not just landscape design, but also a passion on the side of helping special needs kids. He used to be a counselor at a camp and does all kinds of different activities with them. Anyway, the point of it is when he gave us the original design, one of the things he had done really without us asking, was incorporate some equipment and other design features that would be very attractive to people with special needs kids. And especially like kids with autism, for example. So that swing, it doesn’t swing, you know, like say this that’s more flat like this. And it’s large enough where you can actually push a wheelchair into the middle of it. And I don’t, I’m not that familiar with all autism, but apparently there’s some sensory aspects to this specific swing that they find very soothing. So, Yeah, that was kind of an added benefit of this guy we picked. Where he introduced some ideas to us that we’d not really even thought about. But after hearing them we like, know, embraced it. That’s probably a segment of the population that doesn’t have a lot of attention given to as far as playground designs. So anyway, so that’s one of the things. Now to the immediate right of that is a very large covered area. And that is called a Quantis and there’s a video link that I had sent out before and it might be something I can share on some of your platforms. That it illustrates a lot more effectively than just this picture. But this thing is really big. You don’t really get a good scope in this, but it’s very large. And so you can see it’s like in a figure eight formation. And it’s got, where you can kind of bounce on it, if you will.

[00:05:40] Rico: I’m going to put the link on there for video in our show notes and people will see you’re absolutely right. This really does not show them the bigness of it, if you will.

[00:05:49] Alex: Yeah. So it looks like different things attached to it underneath, it’s got some different kinds of slides off of it. Some, some grip where you can do activities or whatever. But again, I would encourage people to go once you get the link up to check out the little video, cause it’s a really impressive piece of equipment. One of the things we had said to the designer originally was here’s the piece of property. We want you to go and be as creative as possible, come up with ideas or things that you can’t really find anywhere else. And this Quantis, they make it in, it’s in Minnesota or Canada, I can’t remember. But, he was telling us there’s only one or two in the United States right now, and one of them is in San Francisco and then maybe one other one, but it’s a very unique piece of equipment that I think even adults will find that they’re attracted to. And you can see it’s also covered, which is going to be nice in the summer, obviously when it gets pretty hot. Moving to the right from there, you can see two towers and then a blue, long blue slide coming off of that. Now there are some other things that come off of that. But one of the things that we found in the little playground, kids love that slide that’s there, but it’s metal, which gets pretty hot in the summer, which you buy those little rocks. So what we wanted to do is create a slide that was not gonna get as hot, I guess you could say. But also was higher up. And the, one of the things you can see here, there’s a slight elevation change that’s already there. And then we’ve put the tower up on top of that elevation change. So from where you’d get in that blue tube, down to the bottom is about a 20 foot drop. Which is, I mean you could see it’s covered, so you’re not going to come out of it. But if you’re a little kid, that’s going to be pretty exciting with a 20 foot drop. And there’s a few other slides off of there, but one of the things, and I remember being a kid where you love to climb into things that are enclosed and this has got that aspect to it.

[00:07:42] Rico: And then, was it the Jones bridge park has a playground that has also a tube-like, tube slide like that. But not 20 feet I don’t think.

[00:07:50] Alex: Yeah, it might be six maybe, cause I can stand up and touch the bottom of it. So you’re talking three times as high. Now, to the further right, I don’t know if this one really illustrates it very well, but the third major thing is going to be something called a bamboo jungle. Which is, imagine metal poles into the ground that are six, seven feet tall. And then occasional foot rest, for lack of a better word, where you can climb through this thing. People of all ages would enjoy that. Now, in addition, there’s a few other, you can see this little slope here with some other slides on it and then a cement area that’s covered. And it’s not going to look exactly like that, the covered area will be bigger than that. But one of the ideas was, we wanted an area where the parents could hang out, just kind of relax, watching their kids play. Like on the other side, one of the things that turned out to be a big hit was having a covered area right beside the play area. We wanted to replicate that on this side and you can see where a lot of these things kind of flow into that, that semi-circle area, which was the intent. To bring people to, the smaller kids especially, keep them flowing in to where their parents were sitting. That wall, that’s actually not going to be there. We’re going to have that sloped down. And so one of the things that’ll be kind of a side benefit, of this, is it’s going to create more seating when we have concerts. Sometimes, before the virus, some of the concerts were really well attended, I guess you could say and actually needed some more space. So this will be again, a secondary benefit to the playground, plus some seating area. And then you can see behind the playground is a sidewalk and that’s really for making it more handicap accessible. And there’ll be a stone wall behind that, that you could sit on. And then there’ll be a low fence behind that wall that you can lean back into, which will make it a little more comfortable. But you know, the contract went out for bid a few days ago. And what we’re hoping is to have this thing up and running in May, weather permitting. A lot of the equipment we had already ordered. That the bid for contract was for the land movement. The equipment was, we’ve already ordered that, it takes about three months to build some of these things. And so one of the things I’ve mentioned is that the ground is not going to be the AstroTurf like we’ve got on the other side, which we’ve had some problems with it tearing up. It’s going to be a rubber material. And it’s going to be blue and green, like the city colors and have some of the designs of the city, the tree. So I think it’s going to be, it’ll really add a nice color pop as well. Anytime you’ve got a play area, it just seems more I don’t know, fun if you’ve got some bright colored stuff.

[00:10:42] Rico: For sure. And it probably works, just like a lot of Gwinnett County parks. I mean, a lot of drainage opportunities, to drain faster, dry faster. Like you said the turf won’t be torn up. You won’t have turf to be torn up and then have to be re fixed later. So people looking at this rendering as I understand, this is sort of a representation, but obviously elements will be a little different on this, including the positioning of some of this and the terrain, but the sloping and the general area is correct.

[00:11:12] Alex: Yeah, it’s got the area right. It’s got the major components, but it’ll look a little bit different. It’ll look nicer than this. You know, this was an earlier rendering. But it’s, I think it’s really going to add, there’s always kids at the Town Green already, but I think this is going to give just a whole new level of attraction. Because what we see now is kids like at a certain age, they don’t want to play on the playground we’ve got now because there’s really not much stuff there. And they ended up migrating over into the woods and nothing wrong with that, but we thought well, let’s give them something more than what we’ve got now. Videos I’ve shown to friends of mine that have smaller kids they’ve all been really excited about it.

[00:11:52] Rico: With the video that I saw, this is a huge piece of, just the one, the Quantas is a huge piece to be there so I can imagine the rest of it. So it can’t wait for people to see that. So check out the show notes and you’ll be able to see that video also, I’ll get that link on there as well, when this comes up. Let’s also talk a bit about what you just did. You put together the first official event, which was the Peachtree Corners Decathlon which takes place in the fitness trail that was expanded from seven pieces to ten pieces. So tell us a little bit about how that went, what’s going on there and when will the next one be this year coming?

[00:12:26] Alex: Right. So we had a decathlon, like an obstacle course decathlon, back in early November on the fitness trail. And a decent turnout, about 50 people in one of the things. And it was really designed, it was a rolling start, which meant every five minutes a person would enter into it. And each, every five minutes you would rotate to a new station. So the nature of that kind of, it’s not like a 5k where you can have 500 people start at once. So the number was going to be limited. You know, there’s only a certain number of people that are kind of interested in that thing. So we knew it would be a different type of event. So there was, for me personally was kind of a lot of apprehension at the beginning not knowing, you’re building something from scratch. Like someone’s going to show up, are they going to have fun? And, A, the weather cooperated, the vibe we were looking for was a community event. Family’s come out, cheering people on. And we had all that in spades. A lot of very impressive athletes were there. Very humbling when you get older like I do. It really kind of slaps in your face, I’m really old compared to some of these guys. They were impressive. But I had a great time and an award ceremony a few days later at Anderby. Which got a lot of great feedback on that. And during the event we had, photographers there taking pictures of people, which we would then put up on the big screen.And people really liked that as well. So, I thought it was very successful. And so anyway, yeah, we’re going to do it again next year. A little bit earlier, probably mid to late October around with some of the feedback we got is, Hey, can you move it up just a little bit?

[00:13:59] Rico: Actually, that’ll be this year, so.

[00:14:01] Alex: Yes, October 2022. It’ll be the decathlon again, probably the same obstacles. We’re hoping to get a little more attendance. One of the big things was just trying to describe to people, what is this? People when you tell them hey, you’ve got to climb a 20 foot rope, they you know, some people get scared off by that. But one of the purposes of this was to, Hey, there’s this fitness trail there. I can’t tell you the number of times I talked to someone and they’re like, I didn’t even know that was there. You know, it’s kind of off in the woods and we want to encourage its use. To encourage people to just be active

[00:14:30] Rico: No matter how many times you put out things, where the city puts out the information through a variety of channels, including Peachtree Corners Magazine, these podcasts, the website, your website, social media. There will always be people that miss any of that because it’s not on their radar. They’re not thinking about it. You know, unless you’re at Town Center and even sometimes if you’re at Town Center, you might not walk all the way there. Or you might, and then try to figure out what it is. The cool part is that, really that fitness trail started because of you, I think. Because you started it out with seven, you know your idea was to put a fitness stations there. Because during, at the beginning of COVID, YMCA closed, there was really no way to do any work like that with your friends. And it’s cool that it started out that way, and now it’s expanding even further. So it’s kind of neat that you were able to do that.

[00:15:21] Alex: Yeah, you know, I’ve said this to people before where, this virus obviously has been very disruptive, continues to be disruptive. But often good things can come out of bad things. And this was a perfect example of where, this probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise because there was no impetus for it because, Hey, we’re going to the Y or whatever. And so yeah, this turned out to be, we created a something for the whole community to use. You know, some of the obstacles are very specific for people that do like Spartan races and that kind of thing. And I’ve bumped into people there who had driven from other parts of the Metro area that, you know, they’ve heard word of mouth, Hey, that you’ve got this and this. I can’t practice anywhere else on this. And if you think about it in terms of just on a very micro scale, you know, the economic development. Like, hey, we’ve got people coming into town just to use this and it gets our name out there. Again it’s, we’re talking to micro scale, but it’s creating something unique.

[00:16:18] Rico: And you know, something that’s a one-time investment. Granted there’s maintenance upkeep on it. But a one time investment that provides that type of economic impact, even on a micro scale, over a period of time, over several years, you know, the more that’s added. The same way, like this playground as unique as it will be, it’ll be a different thing. So it’s not just pulling in maybe from people from, normal retail pulls them for maybe three, four mile area, sometimes two mile area. This will draw maybe a little wider. You know, the more things we have. Like the concert, like you said, the extra seating that will be there. The first original concert had close to 5,000 or over 5,000 people on that green.

[00:16:57] Alex: Yeah. There’ve been some that were, yeah. At a Queen concert, I think back in 2019. And it was just a madhouse. It was a lot of fun. I looked forward to one day having that same kind of vibe.

[00:17:07] Rico: Yeah. Going from the Town Center, let’s keep on track a little bit in talking about the Forum. Because there’s a few things going on there at the Forum that ‘s been talked about on Next Door. So you know, one of the things going on is that there’s been some shop closings. I know that I normally, when I go to Dunkin Donuts, get my coffee, I’ll drive through the forum occasionally just to do my count to see how many stores are closed at the Forum. And it’s varied between 14 to 16, I think, closed stores. Small stores, big stores, and then you get a Lemon Lulu that does the pop-up. That pop-up is not a pop-up anymore. It seems like it’s there permanent because they’re doing really well. And if I ask my young kids why they don’t go to the Forum, they’re like, why should I go there when I can go to the Avalon? Or even if I go to the Forum, there’s really no shops for me, except for then maybe that Lemon Lulu or the Barnes and Noble, or those or Ulta. That was the other thing. So those three things for a younger, like we’re talking about twenties, late twenties, maybe early thirties. It’s not doing so well. I mean, you’ve got right now, for example Williams Sonoma is leaving the store. They’re closing up shop. But by the way, you can go to Avalon or the Avenue at East Cobb to go see them. They’re just one store closing. Dress Up just closed, I don’t know how many weeks ago or a month ago. Now there are new stores coming in, but what do we do with the place? What can be done there, Alex? I know the city is trying to do some stuff. But tell us a little bit more about what’s going on.

[00:18:32] Alex: Yeah, so we, you know, if you remember the Forum was sold it was 2015 or 2018, I can’t remember to a company it’s a REIT out of Boston, you know, real estate. And I think Behr was the managing company, doing the leases and all that kind of thing. And just not very interested in some of the, cause we approached them about, Hey, we think you need some type of activation on the property. Like there was a company that contacted the city a few, I don’t know, probably last year that does Pickleball. Something Pickleball and Waffles or something like that. I can’t remember the name of the company, but it’s trendy. And they actually wanted to, that wooded area we were just talking about beside the Town Green, they wanted to buy that and take all the trees down and build Pickleball courts. And obviously that didn’t go anywhere luckily. But we have suggested, hey, why don’t you go across the street to the Forum? You can take some of that parking in the back that’s never used and right near the bridge. And we’re just trying to be creative, something where people want to go and hang out. And they had no interest in that. We talked to them about taking the middle area and making it, taking the parking out, making it not necessarily grass but an area you could hang out in. No interest.

[00:19:51] Rico: No interest from Behr or the REIT that owns it actually.

[00:19:54] Alex: That’s correct. They’re just very rigid in their thinking. And what I kept thinking about was that scene from Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise is saying, help me help you. You know, we want to invest in your property, even though it’s struggling. Because if it goes down, it’s going to impact the whole area. As you probably know, it went up for sale again, I don’t know, a few months ago. And I believe that it actually, so there was a bidding process where they didn’t just have a deal with one company. They put it out there, hey, best offer and several companies bid. And I guess they needed to get over a certain threshold. And then after they did that, they did it again. They said, okay, we’re going to make your best last offer or last best offer. And so my understanding is a winner, I guess you could say, has been selected during the due diligence period. And assuming nothing weird happens, there’ll be a new owner here very soon. And at least what I’ve heard, through back channels is that of all the companies that were bidding on it, this was the best outcome for us. This is a company that’s willing to have a long-term vision. Hey, maybe we take some short-term hits, we’re in this for the long haul. They’ve been, because several of these companies came and contacted the city and said, hey, would you be interested in doing something with this. It’s almost like what we had already been doing. And this company in particular has been open to all the different ideas that we’ve thrown around. So I’m very cautiously optimistic that we can turn things or help them turn things around. It would include some limited investment from the city, some type of private, public partnership. I think ultimately, we don’t want to see the Forum go down. And now I would say, the future of retail obviously is different than 10 years ago. I mean, it’s going to become more of, I think, of an experience than, hey I’m just going to go roam around and look at stuff in here. Because you can buy it cheaper and easier online. It’s obviously evolving. It’s not just the Forum right, they’re kind of figuring that out. But it’s going to have to involve some things other than just retail.

[00:22:07] Rico: I think you’re, I think you’re right and part of what I understand is that the current owner, if I understand correctly some of their other properties are multi-use properties where they have residential components, office, retail. Like a Halcyon type property, like an Avalon type property. So they’re divesting themselves of properties like this that have less stores, that don’t have multi-use components to it. So now you’re talking about, if I understand correctly, the company you’re talking about that is in that due diligence stage is probably North American Properties who owns Atlantic Station, Colony Square, Avalon. The exact type of places that have a multi-use components, residential, office. Now, granted, even the Forum has an office component. Probably some people don’t even know in some ways, but there’s office components too. But no residential obviously at this point. So it sounds like maybe North American Properties may be looking to be able to do. And I want to put up some illustrations of what possibly, for example, this is one of the renderings I got my hands on that was shown to the companies where, you know, the green space would be that central part, just like you would see at Avalon, just that like you would see at Halcyon. And now granted that would take away some parking spaces, but you can note anyone that looks at this, can see the possible parking decks above and below that would essentially be owned by the city, I guess was one of the pitches. Similar to the parking deck that’s owned by the city at Town Center.

[00:23:37] Alex: That’s correct.

[00:23:38] Rico: So it’s an investment that the city can make to help further what can be done here? There was a couple of other illustrators, let me throw them one at a time up here. I believe this is that Halcyon if I understand correctly. Green space in the middle of retail, right? Which the Forum currently lacks. One of the other places, I think this was maybe I think at Avalon is what that one’s at. Is another one, type of green space or places that would allow people to essentially come to provide. Here’s a new one, this was one that was the beginning of where you see Belk’s and stuff with a small stage over there. These were just suggestions that could add energy if you will, to the surrounding areas. Because there’s no where to hang out. There really is nowhere to hang out there.

[00:24:26] Alex: That’s correct.

[00:24:27] Rico: Do you find that, I believe fervently that density is important too. And we discussed this the other day as we were having some difficulties with the original podcast schedule, which I apologize for. But we talked about density and we talked about how the apartments and the Indigo, planned Indigo hotel, boutique hotel, a Town Center is no longer viable. Because that zoning expired sunset, after five years. And that was what, a few months ago, I guess?

[00:24:54] Alex: Yeah, in December. They had a four year of special use permit and it expired. So it’s reverted back to the earlier zoning, which I think is commercial.

[00:25:04] Rico: So commercial and for retail, I think. Which was the original or maybe just offices?

[00:25:10] Alex: I can’t remember, but I know it’s not any type of residential.

[00:25:14] Rico: No, it’s not. In fact it might be just office. I think it was C1, but heck if I remember now. It was four years ago. But so that’s expired. So those apartments that were planned originally and that boutique hotel is no longer going to happen there. So as far as density goes, unless they sell that property to someone that’s actually you know, willing to do it. Would the city think of rezoning this again? I mean.

[00:25:38] Alex: I think that a boutique hotel is a great idea for that area. And we were talking the other day about Intuitive moving in. And that’s when I heard was about 15 to 16,000 visits a year from surgeons coming into town to learn on their equipment. I mean, I don’t know that many surgeons, but I think they make pretty good money and probably would like to stay in, you know, somewhere nice. Not that we don’t have some nice hotels, but I think that location would be very attractive in the sense that, let’s say you’re staying at the, you’re over at Intuitive, you’re doing some training. You have to come over to the Indigo. I can walk to eat, I could go hang out through Town Green, I could walk over the bridge. It’s like that, all that kind of connectivity we wanted. We’re putting it in place. Now we need people there in a hotel. You know, when some of the, I talked to Mr. Roberts, this was a couple of years ago. I mean, he had some kind of neat ideas. Like he talked about having a rooftop restaurant where you know, you can get to see pretty far away. I loved that idea. I’m not sure why it didn’t work out, but yeah. I’d love to see a nice hotel in there.

[00:26:45] Rico: And it’s amazing to me with the amount of the low interest rate that development could have happened, that it didn’t happen. And now interest rates are going higher. And quite frankly, I wasn’t exactly supportive of an apartment complex, which is how that was zoned actually. The apartment 200 plus units, the Indigo hotel had to be built at the same time. And then otherwise it wouldn’t happen.

[00:27:07] Alex: That’s correct.

[00:27:08] Rico: You know, I would have preferred seeing equity owned, like condominiums.

[00:27:13] Alex: Absolutely. I voted against the project primarily what you’re talking about, like I wanted the hotel and I didn’t mind the residential, but we’ve already got over 20,000 apartment units in the city. So it’s like half our housing stock, something like, do we really need more? So anyway, that doesn’t matter now because it’s reverted back. but You’re talking about housing at the Forum. I do think that’s something that will more than likely be requested. This is obviously not formal because they haven’t even finished buying the property yet. But I wouldn’t be shocked if they didn’t want to put some type of housing component in there. Just like with the green spaces. You know, it’s an activation component. If you’ve got people living there on site, they’re going to be walking around.

[00:27:56] Rico: You’re talking about the Forum now, as far as residential on that side.

[00:28:00] Alex: So yeah, I’m not sure where. But that’s my speculation is we will probably see that request at some point. Probably sooner.

[00:28:10] Rico: And I agree. I think that has to be probably part of what they’re going to be doing. And there are spots to be able to do it on the existing plane, unless they decide to cut out some retail to be able to build something up. But certainly, yeah, I agree. And in fact that whole area zoned so then they can. I think with the special use permit maybe, do a seven like seven story mid-rise condo or apartment. I would love to see more equity owned property. But because there’s already over 300 apartments that are going to come in on the south side, east side on Peachtree Parkway. I think it’s about 320 odd units and that’s apartments right there. So, and also we talked about, you mentioned Intuitive. So there’s a piece of property where there’s about 50 units that wants to be developed that sorta goes behind Creme De La Creme and QT, I guess?

[00:28:58] Alex: Yeah, yeah. Kinda in between that. Well, you know, it’s just dirt right now. If you were looking at Creme that’s to the right. And that’s coming before the council, I believe later this month. And one of the issues, issues not the right word, but concerns was the traffic. Because if you’ve ever tried to take a left out of QT on the Peachtree Corner Circle or left out of the Forum, it’s dangerous. We didn’t want to approve something and then it makes an existing situation worse. So we, you know, have requested a traffic study, slash hey, bring us a traffic solution. Because otherwise, I just don’t think it would be a good decision. Because you’re making something worse. But the idea of you know, an equity right there, right near the Forum, I think it’s probably pretty good. And like your point it’s right near this new, what I’m going to call the Intuitive Campus. There’s talk about a trail connecting up into that. So yeah, that, that whole, again, that whole connectivity we’re talking about. It furthers that walkability, people living there and they could walk to work, walk to the Forum.

[00:30:01] Rico: Right. And that campus, they’re already doing some renovation work on Spalding Drive. They’re talking about a 1200 employee growth there. Over the period of a few years, maybe four or five years, I think as they build out these campuses. As they build out some of the buildings actually. Because I think, right now I have a map in the last issue, I think of Peachtree Corners Magazine that shows the campus of five, six buildings there.

[00:30:24] Alex: Yeah, my understanding of how this is working is there, they move a lot of people into one building, then they’ll move people out of the building, renovate that building. And then they kind of, they’re just kind of moving on from building to building. But I think the goal is to have everything done by 2024. And what I’m hearing and what little I’ve seen is they’re already hard at work doing this. So, it’s a five, $600 million investment. It is a really big deal for the city.

[00:30:53] Rico: Yeah, for sure. I know one company is leaving to reposition themselves in Dunwoody. But I don’t know how many jobs actually is being lost from there, from the city.

[00:31:02] Alex: Yeah, I’m not sure. I think it’s several hundred. But you know, one of the things that we’ve suggested to Intuitive was, hey, you know, Hapag-Lloyd is moving out, maybe you could get that building. Because it’s literally right beside where their campuses are going to be. So who knows what will happen there, but.

[00:31:18] Rico: Right. And for those people that don’t know maybe, isn’t that the building with the anchor?

[00:31:23] Alex: Yes, it’s right at Spalding and 141. It’s got the anchor. Yup.

[00:31:29] Rico: Yup. That’ll be the perfect place for that. For someone to purchase it as a showpiece anyway. So yeah, we’re talking density, we’re talking growth of a city. We’re talking a smart city, right? We’re talking a city. That’s going to be the place. I forget what month it is, I think March or April maybe. Where the V2-X Live Conference is going to be held. We’re talking about a city that has a lot of companies working through the Curiosity Lab. A lot of news stories coming out of there just recently. Was it Brodmann 17, I think was another success story that has used the autonomous vehicle street. But I think you were mentioning to me earlier at some point about extending the autonomous vehicle road up too. So talk a little bit about that. I think that was a mobility park that you were talking about and maybe even the planned autonomous vehicle reach up to Town Center. Not that they’re the same, but tell us a little bit on that.

[00:32:24] Alex: Yeah. So let me, I’ll talk about that part first. So, originally when this whole concept came up, one of the objectives was, this is before the virus, years before the virus. You know, a lot of traffic in Peachtree Corners. A lot of that traffic was people driving through Peachtree Corners, which obviously we could have no ability to really control, but we thought well, how can we make it easier to move around inside Peachtree Corners? And when we started talking about, I brought up the idea about autonomous vehicles since we were kicking that idea around. Kind of the original idea was maybe we could use the autonomous vehicles to you know, move people in between Tech Park and Town Center, you know, take a few cars off the road that was kinda. And then we got some really smart people on staff. Who’ve also worked with consultants and they took this kind of a different direction, which probably ultimately it was the right thing. Well it was the right thing to do because this is still very evolving technology. They’ve taken it in an economic development path, which is really a big success for us. But the reason I bring all that up is, we’ve never really forgotten about that original idea of moving people within Peachtree Corners. Because what happens now is people drive down Technology Parkway, they’ve heard about Curiosity Lab. They’re like well, I don’t see anything going on. They occasionally see the shuttle or I go, what does that doing for you? You know, the visual is there’s no benefit to them that’s tangible. And so what we’d like to do is extend the loop, if you will, where it goes. And I say up 141, not on the road, but we would take the existing sidewalk, expand that. We’d have a dedicated lane for the shuttles and have it run up to Town Center and back. And obviously there’s more than one shuttle now, there’s four shuttles. The analogy I always give is, years ago we went to Disney World and my wife wanted to stay, I call it on campus. But she said, you know we’re closer to everything, it’ll be more fun. You know, even though it’s triple the cost. I’m like, alright. She goes, we can ride the bus. So we found after about two days was, riding the bus was not a good idea because you had to go all these places you didn’t want to go. And I said, let’s just get back in the car and pay the $10 to park. It makes more sense. That’s the story, but the point of the story is to illustrate, you can’t get people to change their behavior unless you present an option that’s as good if not better than what they’re already doing. So recognizing that you could’ve just had one shuttle, that’s coming by every 30 minutes. Someone’s going to use that. Because right now I’ll just hop in my car. So this wouldn’t happen immediately, having the four shuttles, it would make it again it’d still be kind of a novelty thing. I get that, but it’s kind of the beginning of that idea of, hey, this thing’s going to be buying three minutes. I’ll just hop on it and go back to work or wherever. Because I think this is really the beginning of maybe in 20 or 30 years, we’ll look back and say, oh yeah, I remember when I used to own a car. I use the analogy of, everyone used to ride a horse and then around the turn of the century, cars came into the model. And that was decades of transition where you had both of them kind of interacting. And I think you’ll have something like that with autonomous cars and man cars. Who knows how it’s going to evolve? But I do think, you know, if you think about your car as an asset, how often do you use it? Maybe 5% of the day and the rest of the time it’s just sitting there, depreciating. So, it’s a horrific investment. If you’ve got something that you’re just using kind of on demand. I mean, when my kids first started driving, I learned about teenagers insurance. It’s wow, this is really expensive. And I won’t go down that tangent, but this was the beginning. So where we are as far as getting approval. So you have to get, Technology Parkway is a city street, so we totally control it. Unless you get onto a county or state road, you’ve got to work with the other governments. So we’ve been working with Georgia, with GDOT, to get approvals. To have an autonomous vehicle on their side of the road. And we feel pretty good where we are. And the governments tend to be pretty conservative and that’s when it comes to these kinds of new ideas, because it’s always about well who’s going to sue who and that kind of thing. And I get it.

[00:36:51] Rico: Liability, sure.

[00:36:52] Alex: Yeah. I will say that the visit we had recently from the Secretary of Transportation, from the federal government, that at least what I’m hearing has helped as far as, giving credence to, hey, we like these ideas. We want to push these ideas. So what I’m hearing from staff is that, we hope within the next few months, knock on wood, that we’ll get the permission if you will, from the state to run this thing up at the Town Center. And we’ve already got designs, I haven’t seen them yet, but the Public Works people tell me they’ve already got designs for the expanded sidewalks. So they’re thinking ahead. I’d love to see it happen this year sometime. I mean, it might not, but we’re definitely in that direction.

[00:37:35] Rico: Yeah. I’m excited for that because you’re talking about Technology Parkway coming out at 141 near Walgreens on that side, right? Where Curiosity Lab, that road starts, there’s a couple of hotels along that road. And as you come back out and then let’s say you come left onto Spalding Drive, however that’s going to run. Or unless it’s running the other way along Peachtree Parkway, you’re going to come across several more hotels. Offices, density. And then moving that all up past Wesleyan into Town Center. You know, I think autonomous vehicles, I know we’re far from doing autonomous vehicles generally on a road, but I think the faster progression of it will be long distance trucking. Will be these types of things that are a closed road type of thing. Still has to deal with people crossing, still has to deal with driveways and stuff. But less random things going on, then if you took a car driving into a neighborhood and then some kid runs out into the street. That’s a little different, right? So, yeah. I can see that moving along way faster and having, like you said, if you have four of those vehicles. There may be more eventually cause really, how much do they cost?

[00:38:48] Alex: Yeah. You were talking about trucking. I mean, they already can run a semi, they’ve done this from California to Jacksonville on an autonomous trip. And granted, there was a person in it. But they were not driving the truck. So this, it’s already happening. It’s just, normally if you don’t see it with your own eyes you don’t really know what’s going on. You’re busy, you know, living your life and that kind of thing. But it’s, what we’re finding is that, when you’ve got this emerging technology and you’ve got, and I say competition. For us to stay relevant for businesses to come and want to use our test platform, you’ve got to constantly be thinking up new ways to make yourself attractive. Because the barriers to entry, if you think about our barrier to entry is what there’s just a road. And we’ve got some technology on it that they can use, but it’s not super expensive to get into. So you’ve really got to continue to think outside the box. Which leads me, when we’re talking about the mobility part, which is, that’s the term I came up with. I’m not sure what we’re going to call it, but it’s a piece of land at the corner of Technology Parkway. And I think it’s Scientific Drive, but it’s beside the old Honeywell building, which is now Bright Tree. An empty parking lot now. But we’re going to make some of that, I think that some of it will be green space where you can have mini concerts and hanging out for people in the Tech Park area, but maybe some EV stations. But we’re trying to think, how can we incorporate this into the Curiosity Lab? Using this piece of land to further that and one of the things that we’ve been talking about is you’ve got an autonomous vehicles. But you’ve also got drones as a way to transport maybe it’s food or different kinds of things. I mean, these drones aren’t gonna carry huge things, but again, it’s a way to take cars off the road for transportation. With drones, just like with vehicles, they need a place to test. And so we’ve been talking about how do we take our existing platform and make it potentially an area where drones can also test. And taking part of that, you know, mobility parking will and making that somehow incorporating that into a drone test platform. Maybe they’re taking off but, I don’t really know. The idea being, is you can’t just stand back on whatever successes you’ve had. You know, we were talking, or I was talking to someone the other day about using GM as an example. Most people think of GM as a car company, but for them to succeed, they have to think of themselves as a transportation company. Because otherwise you’ll just get left behind eventually if you’re not constantly evolving. And so same idea with Curiosity Lab. How do we constantly evolve to make ourselves relevant to these new evolving technologies.

[00:41:25] Rico: For sure. And you have good leadership there and you have good people like in Brian Johnson and Brandon and others technology companies that are there that are working through the resources that the city’s providing. A city like this needs energy. A city like this has a mission, right? But the mission that the leadership of the city has provided in moving forward on all these things is very strong, I think. And I think that leadership should also extend, this is my personal opinion, into residential. Any new developments like condos or equity owned or apartments should be LED compliant. Should be working with smart technology within those buildings. Controlled access, utility management, EV charging stations within those buildings. There’s so many things that can be done in a smart way in these. And we should be leading that. We talk about ourselves as a smart city. We should really be talking about that within the zoning of an urban center like ours.

[00:42:20] Alex: Yeah. I don’t know, I don’t remember all the details, so don’t quote me on this, but I know we recently passed a mixed use development ordinance. And one of the pieces of that was, how do we incentivize people to do some of the, like what you’re talking about right there with making their buildings carbon neutral or have EV stations or whatnot. And we put in a whole series of incentives. One of the incentives, maybe it’s hey, donate land to the trail system. Again, making mobility a bigger deal. But in exchange, you know, hey, we’ll give you more density. So, using density as a way to get some of these investments. Exactly what you’re talking about. So that again, I can’t remember all the details, but that definitely was one of the things that we urge.

[00:43:08] Rico: Right. And I think one of the changes was actually, and I don’t know the details either, but was the mixture of what we call retail within a multi-use. Because right now, retail in a multi-use prior to that change, could have just been a coffee shop or a breakfast place in a large complex. And still call it multi-use when, in actuality, that’s not really multi-use when there’s only one retail shop. Not that a city should drive someone’s marketing or development.

[00:43:35] Alex: Yeah. We had that discussion at, I guess it was one of our retreats. You know, twice a year, we go off site to set our vision for the next six months. And that very topic came up about, I’m not going to name the development, but there was a mixed use development that was approved recently. And technically, you know, they met the letter of the law, but not really the spirit of the law. So we kicked around trying to define, well what is it that we’re really looking for? And talk about having a range of percentages. Because to your point, like you don’t want 99% residential and then a little coffee shop just because they can placate us.. So that’s definitely on the radar screen. We did not reach a consensus on that because, as one person made the point do you want to have 70% residential with the required 30% retail? And then that retail is just sitting empty, they just kind of plan on it. Not succeeding. It’s kinda tricky. You know, you want to push things a certain direction, but not be so rigid that almost cause people to fail.

[00:44:38] Rico: But it’s exciting to be able to find places, companies like North American Properties that owns like Avalon and those places that may have an incentive and interest to actually develop something a little better than what exists. So we just did, we’re still in the midst of a Reader’s Choice Awards survey that we’re doing. So we’re getting people to come to answer the survey questions. Right now we’re over 1800 respondents on it. 1800 respondents in a short three weeks is a lot of people to do the survey. So one of the things that we asked is what would you like to see in the city of Peachtree Corners? Now, granted I put a ABC choice in there. But they’re giving us other choices in the other section. There’s like a hundred other suggestions. But the top three is, one of the top ones is, they want to see more green and venue space at the Forum. The other thing is that they would like to see more immersive events and programs. Like the Beltline’s Illuminarium. So, we’re getting suggestions about venue, green space at the Forum. We’re getting suggestions about immersive technology and events like the Illuminarium them at the Forum, or the Van Gogh exhibit that you mentioned the other day. People would like to see that here. Those are things that, to speak to what you said earlier, less retail. Yes. But more immersive events or programs or businesses that people would want to visit and come to. And that would be, and they would stay maybe to have food, have drinks, maybe shop a little bit. This is why Avalon, why some of the other places like Atlantic Station. Not just for those reasons, but giving people an experience, giving them a better choice of retail, maybe. But to be able to attract that retail and keep it, needs that type of venue, green space, energy that does not exist at a open air mall that’s been there for 20 years and hasn’t really changed what they’re doing.

[00:46:34] Alex: Absolutely.

[00:46:36] Rico: Alex, we’ve been like going on this for almost an hour. And I appreciate your patience and your being with me on this. For those that are listening, if you’re still hanging in there with us, I appreciate that. And you’re gonna find more information relevant and related links video, probably on our show notes. So check that out, with regard to the podcast, share this with your friends. If you have any questions, certainly post it in the comment section, if you’re on Facebook or on YouTube or email Alex Wright. Alex, where can people email you or get your newsletter or?

[00:47:04] Alex: Right. So I’ve got, you know, multiple emails, like most people do. But my city email address, if you just go to the city website, you can find it under council. But it’s basically, it’s AWright@PeachtreeCornersGA.gov. That’s probably the easiest. You can email me there. If you want to get my newsletter, you can send me your email address and I’ll put it on. We’ve got probably about six between six and 700 email addresses on there. Always love to add people. You know, like I said, it comes out every month or two. And one of the advantages, if you will, over what the city is able to do is, I can sometimes share an opinion or give some insight that the city is not always in a position to do so. Or maybe I’m jumping the gun sometimes and they can’t really stop me, I don’t know. But you get a little different spin on things.

[00:47:55] Rico: Yeah, for sure. People should email you, get on his list. Every time I get it there’s always something new I don’t know. Because I don’t know everything, even though I published Peachtree Corners Magazine, people think, did you know about this? It’s no, that one I didn’t know about. But it’s good that people are hungry for news. Don’t just trust the things that you might see on Next Door or other social media. Be a critical thinker, check out for the facts yourself. Look at what people are saying. If you want to know what’s going on in the city, ask your city council people also. Look at the social media that’s related to city news. If that’s related to our magazine and stuff where we’re validating certain news items and getting information out there as well. So share this. Alex, I appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much.

[00:48:38] Alex: I enjoyed it.

[00:48:39] Rico: So did I. Thank you everyone, and check out our next issue of Peachtree Corners Magazine. We’re going to have several features in there. Hopefully you’ll be interested in including the Reader’s Choice Awards coming out in that issue. As well as a we’re doing a roundup of commercial and residence developments that were approved and ongoing now in 2022. We’ll have a map in there as well. So check it out. Again, leave your comments in the comments, put your questions there or email Alex. Thanks everyone.

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City Government

Mayor Mike Mason and the City of Peachtree Corners Join the Mayor’s Reading Club

Published

2 months ago

on

August 4, 2023

By

Mayor Mike Mason

At the July 25, 2023, Council Meeting, Mayor Mike Mason and the Councilmembers issued a Proclamation supporting the Mayor’s Reading Club.

Georgia City Solutions launched the Mayor’s Reading Club program in August 2022 to encourage, support and lead city mayors in improving literacy skills and early reading success for children and youth in Georgia cities.

Designed to foster partnerships and collaborations between the city, county, local nonprofits, schools, libraries and business community, the program can be delivered virtually, in person, on-demand, year-round or at specific times.

In addition to the Mayor, other elected officials, city staff, youth and community members can participate in the program as guest readers. 

To learn more about the Mayor’s Reading Club, visit gacitysolutions.org/Programs/Mayor-s-Reading-Club.

A copy of the full proclamation is below.

A PROCLAMATION OF THE CITY OF PEACHTREE CORNERS, GEORGIA SUPPORTING THE MAYOR’S READING CLUB 

WHEREAS, literacy is not just an education issue. It is an economic, workforce, and quality of life issue; and

WHEREAS, research shows that children who can’t read proficiently by the end of third grade are more likely to experience poor health, have discipline problems, and drop out of high school; and

WHEREAS, each year in the United States, low literacy levels are linked to hundreds of billions of dollars in non-productivity, healthcare, and judicial costs; and

WHEREAS, 68% of Georgia fourth graders do not read proficiently; and 

WHEREAS, collaborative efforts and strategic partnerships must be undertaken to address literacy issues; and 

WHEREAS, the Mayor’s Reading Club program is offered through Georgia City Solutions, a Georgia Municipal Association nonprofit; and 

WHEREAS, the goal of the program is to improve literacy skills and overall success with early reading among children and youth in Georgia cities through encouragement, support, and leadership from city mayors; and

WHEREAS, Georgia City Solutions has commissioned a children’s book series to use as part of the program to teach young readers about local government and a copy of the first book in the series titled, Georgia Caroline Visits City Hall, is provided in the program starter-kit; and

WHEREAS, the Mayor’s Reading Club is flexible and can be delivered in person or virtually and promotes partnerships and collaboration between the city, county, schools, public libraries, local nonprofits, and business community.  

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT PROCLAIMED by the Mayor and Council of the City of Peachtree Corners, do hereby join the Mayor’s Reading Club program and proclaim July 25, 2023 as:

“MAYOR’S READING CLUB DAY”

In Peachtree Corners, Georgia and encourage all residents, businesses, and community partners to help promote and elevate literacy as a community priority and support the Mayor’s Reading Club to improve Georgia’s economic vitality one book at a time. 

SO PROCLAIMED AND EFFECTIVE, this day, July 25, 2023.

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Business

Peachtree Corners Awarded GFOA Certificate of Achievement for Fifth Straight Year

Published

2 months ago

on

July 26, 2023

By


The City of Peachtree Corners’ Finance Department has been awarded a Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting from the Government Finance Officers Association of the United States and Canada (GFOA) for its 2022 financial year-end comprehensive annual financial report (CAFR).

The GFOA’s Certificate of Achievement is the highest form of recognition in governmental accounting and financial reporting, and its attainment represents a significant accomplishment by a government and its management. It is the city’s fifth year of receiving the award and represents a significant accomplishment by the City’s Finance Department and its leadership.

According to a GFOA release, “The report has been judged by an impartial panel to meet the high standards of the program, which includes demonstrating a constructive ‘spirit of full disclosure’ to clearly communicate its financial story and motivate potential users and user groups to read the report.

“We are pleased to again receive this honor,” said City Manager Brian Johnson. “Our finance department, and Finance Director Cory Salley, are to be commended for this achievement as it is the highest form of recognition GOFA presents.”

The city’s Finance Department produces the CAFR each year and works with independent auditors to verify the city’s financial situation and standing. The CAFR is judged by an impartial panel to meet the high standards of the program, which includes demonstrating a constructive “spirit of full disclosure” to clearly communicate its financial story and motivate potential users and user groups to read the report.

“This is an important award that validates Peachtree Corners’ commitment to go beyond the minimum requirements to prepare comprehensive annual financial reports in the spirit of transparency and full disclosure,” said Assistant City Manager Brandon Branham.

The Government Finance Officers Association, based in Chicago, is a non-profit professional association serving approximately 17,500 government finance professionals. With offices in Chicago and Washington, D.C., it serves the member organization by advancing uniform standards and procedures in financial management for governments and assisting with professional development for public finance managers.

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City Government

On topic with Alex Wright: Ingles Shopping Center, Tech Park Acquisition, Public Safety and More

Published

3 months ago

on

July 13, 2023

By


City Councilman Alex Wright and I discuss a proposal from the owners of the Ingles Shopping Center for redevelopment and other housing developments in Peachtree Corners. Plus, we discuss a new Tech Park acquisition for the city, public safety, the new City Marshal system, a possible Pickleball Complex and its economic impact, and more.

Resources:
Decathlon Info
Promotion Video for Decathlon
The First 48 Episode

Timestamp:
[00:00:30] – Intro
[00:04:06] – Closure of Anderby Brewing
[00:05:56] – The Pickleball Complex and its Economic Impact
[00:09:13] – Ingles Shopping Center and Housing Developments
[00:26:07] – More on Zoning and Developments
[00:31:24] – City Marshal System and the Hiring Process
[00:45:30] – October Decathlon Event
[00:48:37] – Closing

Developer rendering of a possible look of a renewed property that is currently the Ingles Shopping Center.
City acquisition of a building in Atlanta Tech Park, across from Curiosity Lab at Peachtree Corners.
The Charlie Roberts property behind Chase Bank.

“I think we’ve got a significant housing shortage in that area, and it’s not just limited to one demographic. We’re experiencing a shortage of housing options for younger individuals and families who aspire to own their homes rather than renting. It’s important to address this issue because owning a home provides stability and builds equity, allowing people to invest in their future. By creating more affordable and accessible housing opportunities, we can support the dreams of individuals and families who want to establish roots in our community and contribute to its growth and vibrancy.”

ALEX WRIGHT

Podcast Transcript

Rico Figliolini 0:00:00

Hi everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life, a monthly podcast with different people, different individuals that influence the things that go on in this city. And today we have a special guest, City Councilman post three, Alex Wright. Hey Alex, thanks for joining us.

Alex Wright 0:00:17

Thanks for having me. It’s good to be back.

Rico Figliolini 0:00:19

Yes, it’s always good to be able to talk to people that know what’s going on because I don’t know everything and to get it from those that are plugged in would be fantastic. But before we get into today’s question and answer and things that are going on I’d like to ask you about, I just want to say thank you to our sponsors. We have two. EV Remodeling Inc. and Eli, who owns that company, and lives here in Peachtree Corners. They are a terrific company that does design and build from ground up remodeling, whether it’s your bathroom or your whole house. EV Remodeling does a great job and they’re local to Peachtree Corners and they’ve been a great sponsor of ours. If you go to their website, EvRemodelingInc.com, you’ll see some great work that he’s done, some videos. You’ll get to know a little bit more about Eli and the work they do and check them out because remodeling is their business. Second is a new sponsor of our corporate sponsor and that’s Clearwave Fiber. They’ve joined us over the last month or two becoming a good supporter of ours, our journalism, our podcast, they are here in Peachtree Corners throughout the state of Georgia, really, and the Southeast. But they’re really big here in the city of Peachtree Corners with more than 5000 businesses that they do work with right here in the city of Peachtree Corners, providing services, launching the fiber optic setup that they have. And they’ve been a clear supporter of the City, of Curiosity Lab, of the recent Criterion Road race that was happening here and they’ve been a good strong supporter of what goes on in the city and a good sponsor. So I want to welcome them. You can find the link in our profile to Clearwave Fiber for the Peachtree Corners Life. So check them out and see what they can do for you, whether you’re a business or even a resident. So check that out. So let’s get right onto it. It’s amazing the things going on in this city and the stuff that I don’t always know about because I don’t know everything. Even though we publish Peachtree Corners magazine, we do these podcasts. But Alex is on here because specifically because I subscribe to his newsletter that he puts out every so often and there’s things in there that Alex has brought up and I just want to know more about. So thank you Alex, for putting out that newsletter to your list of residents and people that follow you. I want to say thanks for doing it.

Alex Wright 0:02:49

It’s definitely a good way to stay in touch with people. Obviously you can reach out to a lot of people at once versus being on the ground. That’s not always the most efficient way to communicate.

Rico Figliolini 0:03:03

No, but doing that and quite frankly, even have life podcasts like this and articles that we put out. I mean, all this stuff that we put out, the content that we put out comes from knowing what’s going on in the city, whether it’s from Brian Johnson, the city manager, or Mike Mason, the mayor, or you or Eric Chris or any of the other councilmen, the great people that work for the city Peachtree Corners as well. So got to say that. So there’s a lot of things going on, and I know you plugged into quite a bit of it because of your position. So I guess let’s start right off. Well, first things first. I hadn’t acknowledged this before as far as and to Be brewing, unfortunately, they’re closing their doors. Actually. They’ve closed their doors as of the weekend of July 4, set to see them go and close up shop like that. I think they may be doing things in the business and the industry still, but and to Be brewing is is no longer a place, I understand. How do you feel about when things like that happen? They were one of two brewers in the city.

Alex Wright 0:04:06

Yes. I’m kind of a risk averse person to a certain extent myself, so I’m always impressed when people are willing to kind of follow their dream like that and put so much at risk to do that. It’s kind of inspiring in a way. So you hate to see it when it doesn’t work out, though. I was over there actually the day closed, talking to one of the owners, and she was telling me that they’re going to continue to be in the, I guess the brand business, if you will, where I think outsourcing some of the brewing of their brands. So they’re still going to be around in that regard. And she said that might lead to depending on how successful that is, just to stay in that route. So you alluded they’re not going. It’s just that bricks and mortar location unfortunately won’t be available anymore.

Rico Figliolini 0:04:57

Yeah. Too bad because they’ve been around for, I think it’s been four years.

Alex Wright 0:05:02

Yeah. I think they went in there right before COVID and obviously that wasn’t part of their business plan. I think they were counting on a lot more office workers right there in Tech Park stopping by.

Rico Figliolini 0:05:15

Yeah. And that blew it during COVID But they sounded like they were coming back at a point. But I guess once you go through that, sometimes it’s never coming back. That was a whole year and a half and they thought they were coming back. There was March 2020 when everything looked life. It was coming back. And then all of a sudden things shut down again, like three months later.

Alex Wright 0:05:37

Yeah. Every time I would drive by there. It seemed like they had a good, decent round. So I I don’t know the details, but it’s I’m not a big beer drinker, but I did like going there just for the I was talking about newsletter. Just had kind of a fun vibe. You could bring your dog or kids. It’s just very welcoming place.

Rico Figliolini 0:05:56

Yeah, no, the owner is precedent. His wife and the other people that worked there very passionate about what they do. I mean, he was doing stuff in his kitchen before he got to the brewery, so it wasn’t like he just decided to do it. He was passionate and still is, I think, with what he’s doing. So the other thing that we’re talking about, business is closing, businesses opening. Maybe there’s been a feasibility study that may be finished by this point or not. I don’t know about a potential pickable complex. Private public partnership, possibly maybe 30, 40, 50 courts. So there’s a company that was hard to do that feasibility study. I think I was at one of several meetings, stakeholders or shareholders, I guess, to give feedback or to give their point of view on it. So have you learned anything more or do you have a thing you want to talk about as far as how you feel about it?

Alex Wright 0:06:50

Nothing really new since that meeting that you’re talking about. I think we actually both were that one.

Rico Figliolini 0:06:55

Yes, correct.

Alex Wright 0:06:57

So still waiting to hear back from that company, though I’m obviously very interested in the money part of it, but I suspect there’s a lot of, whether it be cities or companies or whoever, thinking just like we are, like, hey, this is a huge opportunity. And I’ve used the analogy of 25 years ago, search engines, there’s so many of them. And Google basically won that. Now it’s a verb, but you got to get there first and kind of establish your dominance, if you will. It’s the kind of way I’m thinking about this, where if we wait a couple of years to see what happens, someone else is going to. When I say get in there, I think what we’re looking at is not just say, let’s have ten public pickleball courts. I guess that’s an option. It’s more of an economic redevelopment opportunity in maybe an area that I mentioned my newsletter, like down Holcomb Bridge, where because it’s got a good if you think about that intersection, Holcomb Bridge, and say, 141, that’s only four, actually, probably about 4 miles to 285. So good access to the interstate. Wright but if you built a complex there, I think Brian’s probably mentioned this on one of your podcasts, where the ability to host big tournaments, you can bring a lot of people into town for that. I don’t think we’re just envisioning just pickleball ball courts, but something where it’s a destination unto itself, almost, where you’ve got locals going there, whether they’re playing or not, just to hang out. So you’ve got your local crowd that be there all the time and then layer on top of that the tournament aspect, that could bring in a lot of activity for the city, hotel rooms and restaurants and things like that. So my thought is if the numbers look good, you got to move quick because someone else is going to move quick as well. So the quick you get in there, you’ll get the word out, hey, we’re almost like a dog mark in this territory. Like, hey, we’re here, and other people will say maybe just move on. We don’t want to cannibalize.

Rico Figliolini 0:09:13

I think you have to if you’re going to go in, go in big the expression, I guess, yeah. I think part of that discussion was obviously private public partnership versus the city running it. City doesn’t want to have a parks department or anything where they’re going to do ten pickable courts and have to maintain it. Right. And if it’s going to be a pickable complex or center, it’s really maybe an entertainment complex that has pickleball restaurants, maybe playgrounds, maybe certain other amenities that draw besides the pickleball. I would think Wright or something along those lines.

Alex Wright 0:09:51

Yeah, that whole Holcomb Bridge corridor, if you will. Literally almost from day one, the city has tried all kind of different things to get, I say redevelopment, some kind of I always use the example of over. I used to work, I still work over in Cobb County, but worked near Franklin Road, which street of kind of dilapidated apartments. Marietta came in, bought several of those up, tore them down and they said, hey, here’s some dirt, come in, try to attract come in. They got landing. United’s Training Facility there. Home Depot did a big data center there. The reason I mentioned that is you really just need say one thing to come in, make a big splash and it can create redevelopment. I mean we’re already seeing that, like with the town center where areas around that they want to be near that. I use the analogy or the metaphor of an anchor, people want to be near it. And we’ve had several different things that just didn’t come to fruition, unfortunately in that area. But kind of the way I look at this is we inject some of the money deal, but to your point, we’re not owning it, we’re not running it, but if it’s enough to make the numbers work for a private company, then ultimately the ripple effect more than pays for the money we would inject into it.

Rico Figliolini 0:11:15

It’s similar to, I guess, the town center when that first happened. I mean the city bought property there and then eventually sold it to the developer that developed the property there. And I guess we own certain portions like the parking deck and the town center, but the surrounding part of that town center versus the green and the veterans monument probably.

Alex Wright 0:11:35

Yeah. So that land originally was 21 acres, we ultimately ended up with eight. And the reason that kind of worked out that way was the developer to kind of make their numbers work, they wanted to build apartments. And for that particular piece of land, we had just bought it to stop apartments. It was like, okay, that doesn’t really make any sense. So to make the numbers work, we said, well, we’ll keep these eight acres and do these other things with it. So that’s an example of they need to show a return on their investment. The city doesn’t have to do that. So those eight acres, we can say, well, three years, we’re going to have an ROI that pays for that. But I would argue that by basically putting that money out there to hold that property, to build the green, which the developer didn’t even want to build because he couldn’t monetize it without the green, that was just another kind of almost a shopping center. The Green is really the difference maker there. And so that’s the difference what government can do. They can invest money and they don’t have to have a private equity firm that’s breathing down their neck to pay. Where’s our 22% annual return, right?

Rico Figliolini 0:12:40

Especially when it’s a developer that’s just a retail developer that has no interest in managing really the place. I mean, I understand Fuqua Development probably wants to sell most of what they have already. It’s just they don’t want to be a mold developer, right. Or retail developer like that. They want to flip it. So that worked out great. I mean, we get we there are concerts there with 5000 people showing up. There’s all sorts of events that go on. I know that at the beginning, some people were vocal about why is the city doing it? Why are they spending money, why are they buying that land? But to me it was similar to life. The Simpson Wood Park. Why did the city put up a million dollars to help that purchase or get involved in it? Well, that was also going to be sold to apartment developers, or to developers, I should say, because I don’t know if apartments would ever have been able to be zoned there. But it’s still a park because the county came in and bought it and is managing it versus the city being having a parks department and doing it. So there’s potential out there. And then you have North American properties right, that bought the Forum and they’re committed to it. They’re willing to put green space. They’re willing to put a stage in there. They’re willing to do things similar to Avalon. And I know there’s always another side to that. People don’t want that type of density coming or that type of traffic coming. But you know as well as I do, the Forum was heading south with almost 17 vacant storefronts. At one point, you were part of the group that decided that that made sense North American Properties being there. Right.

Alex Wright 0:14:23

The purchase of that, someone definitely needed to buy the forum. The previous owner, I think, was a REIT out of Boston. We had approached them about this green idea in the middle and even said, we’ll help fund that because we were so worried about the Forum and they had no interest, which I found baffling was like, we’re offering to literally almost give you money and you don’t want it. So someone that sat incompetently run it’s good that North American Properties bought the property. There are aspects of vision that I’m not crazy about, but as a whole, one of the things I did like about North American Properties was unlike most of the other developers that we’ve interacted with, mr. Perry definitely had a vision beyond just their little piece of property that this whole downtown Peachtree Corners life idea had. I liked that because I agree that there’s some synergies between the two properties and he got that that these other folks were just looking for that return every quarter. So NetNet it’s definitely good that they ended up with the property.

Rico Figliolini 0:15:34

So talking about also that whole area, Alex, I think that whole area, I think, has an overlay. That’s an entertainment overlay, if I remember correctly, right, that includes the Forum, includes town center, then goes into where Lidl is and also includes the Ingle shopping center, that whole part there, which is what we are calling the downtown area, essentially. Correct. So to that effect, there’s other things going on. For example, ingle shopping center. At one point, Ingles came in, they wanted to see if they can do gas pumps there, similar to, let’s say, Costco’s or Kroger’s. That was denied probably for a variety of reasons. But now the owner of that shopping center, not just Ingles, but everything that’s in it, has approached the city, I guess. Tell me a little bit about what’s going on there, what they’re looking to do.

Alex Wright 0:16:26

Wright so just back up just a second. Sure. They have developers that will approach the city kind of a regular basis, all kind of stuff. For example, a lot of the office parks near the town center, we’ve had people approach and say, hey, we’re interested in doing some kind of mixed use because they want to be near the town so much, the town center as the town green. They want to be near the activity there because people life, I think people naturally like to gather and be part of what’s going on. So it just happened to be that in the case of Ingles, that the council was given a briefing about this. And it’s not so much that the staff is saying, well, we’re not going to tell the council about this and we’re going to tell them about this. It’s just there’s so many that they try to be prudent about, okay, we think this one is serious enough to loop you in on some conversations. And so basically the update was Ingles lease apparently is coming up the next year or so. The owner kind of looked at the situation, said, all right, well, we obviously don’t want to lose Ingles. But Ingles was telling them is we’d like a smaller footprint. Apparently that’s the thing now in new grocery stores is a smaller footprint, more like a sprouts size. So they were looking to not so much leave, but shrink their footprint. So I think the owner looked at this as an opportunity. We’re looking to better monetize this property. We see what’s going on at the forum with the redevelopment. We see the town center. They probably hear about some of the other things behind the scenes that are potentially on the horizon. And they wanted to approach this. What they did, they approached the city and said a lot of times the way this will work is they’ll say, we’ve got this kind of rough idea of what we might want to do. Do you think that the council would be open to that? Obviously the staff has no idea the council is going to vote on anything, but normally have a good pulse of life. I might have a certain view of how I want things to be in five years and some of my colleagues different view and good staff is going to going to know that. And so that helps to be able to tell a potential developer, hey, we don’t know exactly what will happen, but this is kind of the sense we have and it helps them determine whether to move forward with a proposal anyway, kind of the pitch, if you will, that they put out. There was, again, another mixed use development which would include a housing component. But one of the things that made this different than some of the other ones we’ve seen is it included a senior living component. And at least it’s just my opinion, but we are in really short supply of that. I know we’ve got Waterside, which is coming online, but I hear a lot of people say it’s more than I want to pay and I’d rather live near things I could walk to. What a lot of people I know we spend a lot of time trying to attract young professionals. But if you follow demographics, the United States had a below replacement birth rate for almost 50 years. It’s kind of been masked by immigration, but you’re seeing this happen all across the world. So the point, point of my story is that in absolute numbers, there’s less 18 year olds today than there were ten years ago, 20 years ago. But the number of people that are 65 and older continues to go up. So we really need to give that some attention as well. We want places for those folks to stay versus having to leave Peachtree Corners. So when I heard that, I was very interested in that proposal because I think we’ve got a big housing shortage in that area. And I think we’ve got a big housing shortage for people, younger people who want to own versus just rent. Most people, if they’re 28, they’re not going to move into a $500,000 house. That’s just difficult.

Rico Figliolini 0:20:29

I think you had said active living community.

Alex Wright 0:20:33

Yeah. So this isn’t like at least my interpretation of it wasn’t assisted living or memory care. Like what you’re talking about active people, maybe they’re 55 and they want to move out of their 5000 square foot home into something smaller, which I know Waterside has got that as well. But they’ve got more some other stages as well. I don’t think this included that is significant housing piece that was the grocery store would stay but shrink the retail. So all the retail, the grocery store, it would move up closer to 141 and then the housing and maybe some other things could go further back. So you ultimately would take some of that cement that’s unused right now and put it to good use. When I say good use, they’re going to be able to monetize it. So it’s a win for them.

Rico Figliolini 0:21:29

I think they had a rendering you shared in your newsletter.

Alex Wright 0:21:32

Yes, there was actually several renderings. That one was just one of probably like four or five. We saw different kind of combinations of things.

Rico Figliolini 0:21:42

Okay.

Alex Wright 0:21:43

The other ones were a little more like drawings, more so this one looked more appealing to the eye, I guess to illustrate what is possible.

Rico Figliolini 0:21:52

I was looking to see if I could put that up. What I’ll do is I’ll include that in our notes, show notes, so people can see that what that picture looks like. And actually we have a writer that’s doing some work on this. I think she interviewed you already. Or we’ll be reaching out to you.

Alex Wright 0:22:08

Yeah, I talked to her earlier, either earlier this week or late last week we had spoken. Right.

Rico Figliolini 0:22:14

So we’ll have a bit of an article on that with the picture. Certainly I would think I would hope also with something life that that maybe there’s a possibility at looking actually even looking at the rendering right now is CVS and Dunkin Donuts. Those are not out parcels or are they to that process?

Alex Wright 0:22:34

Those two parcels are not owned by the guy who owns the company that owns the shopping center.

Rico Figliolini 0:22:40

Got you. Okay. So those are ad parcels along with the former McDonald’s property that’s on the other side.

Alex Wright 0:22:46

That’s correct. And also the daycare center is also separate.

Rico Figliolini 0:22:52

So it’s just everything other than that the parking lot and then that strip around Ingles and all the shops along that park. Correct. Is what we’re talking about. Okay. Hoping there might be equity type housing. There life condos, but versus granted it’s active living apartments, but versus another set.

Alex Wright 0:23:15

Of apartments, I got the impression that you never know what someone’s going to propose but that they understood that, hey, there’s been a lot of apartments approved recently that we’re looking for some balance. So I think that was communicated as well, that we prefer at this point an equity product. I’m not retirement age, but if I was, if I was going to downsize maybe I’m an apartment briefly, but probably want to own something or at least have that opportunity. Because I talked to the city manager sometime about this, where if you’re trying to create activity, whether it be at the forum or the town center, I mean, who better to have than an active, retired person who’s got plenty of time on their hands and probably a lot of disposable income to give that kind of all day activity that places want to have where they’re from nine in the morning till ten at night. There’s people moving around. I think the trick with the ingles is how do you transport people around where they’re not having to constantly get in their car? You know, that’s something, I mean, listen.

Rico Figliolini 0:24:29

Lawrenceville is city of Lawrenceville is doing something downtown that they’re looking to be able to provide, like a walkable supermarket in the downtown area versus having to drive to a huge place where there’s a Walmart or a publix. Just having a local neighborhood grocer like you said, life the size of Sprouts or something much smaller.

Alex Wright 0:24:50

Well, those, the people that live in the town homes over at the Town Center, if you think about they can walk to a grocery store. I think there’s a dentist at form. They’re ready to walk across those doctor’s office. They could just about walk to anything they wanted to. So there’s some of that vibe already going on that’s very convenient to just you don’t have to hop in your car, right?

Rico Figliolini 0:25:14

So getting onto that more, of course there’s the flip sides of these things, right? The more density, people don’t want more density, more traffic. There’s already a bunch of traffic going up John’s Creek, never mind trying to get into Peachtree Corners. Life but the next development is what some people call Charlie Roberts property, which is, I think you called it the dirt hole behind Chase. That’s that empty lot that everyone sees if they’ve ever been to Chase or look at HWD Steakhouse that’s looking to hire, by the way, if anyone’s interested. And that’s right near Town Center. I mean, that’s all in the ground. And I think that is definitely zoned for apartments at this point because it’s part of that multi use track now. And they could go up seven stories, I think, or six stories or something like that. So tell us what’s going on there because that sounds like there’s a movement.

Alex Wright 0:26:07

At least going sounds life that property, mr. Roberts has owned it for I guess, 20 plus years and probably about 2016 he approached the city about getting it zoned from, I think it was commercial. He wanted to get it changed to apartments anyway. That was a big discussion, and the compromise was you can have some apartments, but it’s got to be connected to kind of like a boutique hotel. It was all going to be kind of the same building. And the zoning, he had four years to basically start coming out of the ground, and if he didn’t, the zoning would revert back to commercial. And so I think within like a year or so, he had gotten a hotel brand to go in.

Rico Figliolini 0:26:56

Indigo. I think it was the indigo.

Alex Wright 0:26:59

And shortly thereafter, the world flipped upside down with COVID and no one’s staying in hotels. And that blew his plan up, no fault of his. And by the time the four years came, he wasn’t able to pull that off. So it reverted back to commercial. And I don’t know all the details behind the scenes, but some time goes by, north American comes into the picture as part of their Peachtree Corners Life downtown idea. They also looked at that property as part of that larger development of how do we create activity feet on the ground. So it got rezoned from commercial to apartments. Now, Mr. Roberts company is the one that got the rezoning. Even though that night at the meeting north American if you didn’t really know what was going on, you would have thought that they were the one getting the rezoning, which kind of made sense because their plan was as soon as it got rezoned, they would buy it and it would be part of their plan.

Rico Figliolini 0:28:00

So that rezoning was never done on condition of the purchase. That was rezoned, period.

Alex Wright 0:28:06

Right. There was no time limit. There was no conditions anyway. So get the Rezoning plans to sell it to North American, and then interest rates start to go up on everybody, and it starts to make the financing problematic is my understanding, which I think that’s case for all of us, our own personal finances or stuff’s costing more now, whether it be inflation or interest rates. Anyway, so North American, they basically didn’t have the money lined up or the numbers didn’t make sense at this point because of those two things. And so that deal fell through. So then I suspect at least what we were hearing kind of behind the scenes was Mr. Roberts was floating it around to other potential buyers and kind of heard through the Great Vine recently that he had found a buyer. I don’t have the name in front of me.

Rico Figliolini 0:28:57

I think it’s Tur. Villager Papas.

Alex Wright 0:29:01

Yeah, I’m not familiar with the company, but I heard from various sources that deal would close at the end of July. And if you kind of been paying attention over the last few months that I call it the Dirt hole, it went from having huge mounds of rocks and debris in it to totally cleaned off, ready to build. So obviously there was stuff going. On behind the scenes. And now when it closes, I suspect that will move pretty quick because the zoning is already there. All they have to do now is get building permits from the city.

Rico Figliolini 0:29:37

Really? Okay.

Alex Wright 0:29:38

Probably I don’t know how long that takes, but suspect that if I bought a piece of property, I’d want to get it to use as quickly as possible. They get the buildings built the quicker the money comes in.

Rico Figliolini 0:29:50

So I think if anyone wants to know what type of properties they do if you go if you search Sola, S-O-L-I-S Suwani, you’ll see the type of apartments they do. They’re all over the southeast. The biggest things is they have probably about 15 communities either planned or in place in Georgia. Swani, Sugar Hill, Decatur, kennesaw, Dumwoody, Dunwood, Gainesville. Bunch of places, I think. Sugar Hill 294 class A apartment with 12,000ft of retail and restaurants. I don’t know if they’re looking to do if that ever came up in that conversation either, but that’s in Sugar Hills Town Center. So they’re doing stuff in these places. All right, so then we’ll find out, I guess towards the end of the month, if they close on that.

Alex Wright 0:30:42

Yeah, like I said, that was all just I think these are pretty good sources that have been talking about this.

Rico Figliolini 0:30:49

And I think that was zoned. Not only was that enveloped or taken into the multi use track of what Town Center is right. I think it was included into that. And they’re zones for similar unit count, probably 200. And if I remember right, 200 and 7280 apartments.

Alex Wright 0:31:06

Yeah, something in the mid upper 200s.

Rico Figliolini 0:31:08

Right. Okay. Either way, that would have been there whether it was North American properties or a new developer.

Alex Wright 0:31:16

Yeah. Once they got that rezoning back in September, there’s going to be apartments eventually with somebody.

Rico Figliolini 0:31:24

Okay, cool. Let’s talk a little bit about I think the city Marshall system is going to be stood up the end of this month or the beginning of August is what I understand.

Alex Wright 0:31:35

So the new fiscal year began July 1, and that’s really the first year we had money budgeted for this. So there’ll be three officers. My understanding is two have already been interviewing. They’ve identified two. I don’t know if they’ve officially been hired, but they’ve got two that are been offered jobs, I guess you could say, got you. And then the third, which would be, I think the head person, will come on a little bit later this year. So then there’ll be three initially, right?

Rico Figliolini 0:32:11

Three marshalls.

Alex Wright 0:32:13

Yeah.

Rico Figliolini 0:32:13

I mean, they still have to work through. I think some of the original some of the preliminary stuff was done, like type of cars, equipment, some stuff. But there’s a lot going to this. Right. Office spaces.

Alex Wright 0:32:26

Yeah. So we’re going to obviously have to expand the footprint of the government. Some of that will be upstairs. City hall at the top level is private company rents from the city, which actually been a great deal for us because it’s basically been almost like a duplex. Right? They’re paying for the mortgage force. Yeah. And then we’re buying another building over near the old City Hall that’ll give us some additional capacity.

Rico Figliolini 0:32:55

That one’s across from Curiosity Lab. Right. That’s wright on the street side, I guess.

Alex Wright 0:33:01

That’s correct. And then on that whole kind of complex, if you will, those two buildings, a lot of flexibility.

Rico Figliolini 0:33:08

So there’ll be more on that as we get more details to segue into why, to some degree, this wasn’t necessarily why, but conversations I had with city manager information from before makes sense for us to have a city marshal system because they can do things that Gweneck County Police either weren’t able to or really not shouldn’t be tasked to. Like code enforcement maybe, and stuff like that. And to be able to, the city can sort of put their police force where they feel most necessary.

Alex Wright 0:33:42

Wright yeah, that’s all very accurate. The Gwinnett County Police, I think they’re budgeted for 930 officers, and I want to say they’re staffed right now in the upper six hundred s. And I don’t think that’s unique to Gwinnett County. There’s an issue across the nation with we could spend all day speculating on the why of that. But anyway, they’re not able to be fully staffed right now. So if you’re down, say, 30%, you just going to prioritize where you’re sending folks. Sure, we have an intergovernmental agreement with Gwinnett County. They provide our police services, but we don’t have any control over what they do. We can ask, hey, can you do this, can you do that? But they ultimately have to make decisions beyond what’s best for Peachtree Corners life because the west precinct is pretty large area. So it’s been a combination of the things you mentioned. One they’re just understaffed, and then they also have been directed by the legal department of Gwinnett County that if there are any ordinances in a city that are city specific, that they are not to enforce those. And an example of this, several years ago in a neighborhood here in Peachtree Corners, there was apparently a pretty big party going on really loud, and people nearby called when that county showed up and there was, I guess a city specific ordinance regarding I think it was the noise. I don’t know all the details. And basically the police officer said, this is a code enforcement issue I’m not allowed to involve. And so he left and then the party continued unabated. There was a lot of people upset about that. That’s just to illustrate an example of where think about it, if you’re having that party and you know the police aren’t going to do anything, some people it could easily spin out of control. So it’s not something you want to have happen. Again, that’s just anecdotal but it illustrates where those are two issues we’ve got. And I think a third part. We’ve had some things over the last couple of years, some of these intersection takeovers where people would get frustrated and in some instances, the police did a great job. They got there and arrested a ton of people. And then there’s some other instances where because of other commitments in the west precinct, they didn’t show up for quite a while because they just didn’t have the resources, the stuff to go to the residents and say, hey, there’s nothing we can do about it. They expect more. So I think some of what we’re doing is us trying to, in a measured way, respond to, okay, we are doing something, we’re creating resources that we can control. With these three marshals been at a stop at the intersection takeover? No. However, we’re showing that we get it, that people are frustrated. And I just got our crime from Gwinnett County just today, and it only goes through May. So this is an update from my newsletter, but the numbers through May for the first five months type one crimes, which are the more serious kind, up 60% year over year through April is only 39%. So maybe May is anomaly, I don’t know. But that’s not a good trend.

Rico Figliolini 0:37:05

That’s in the city proper and Peachtree Corners. Yes, those types of crimes include felonies, robbery, burglary.

Alex Wright 0:37:18

They could be property crimes as well, you know, breaking into a car or, you know, simple assault. But yeah, they’re definitely the more serious kind, the one that people that’s the stuff you read about on next door where someone’s window got smashed in or it’s the kind that really make people feel unsafe.

Rico Figliolini 0:37:37

Yes. And then obviously we won’t get into it. But then there’s the crimes unreported, like smash and grab, three or four people running into a store, taking what they please.

Alex Wright 0:37:49

Right.

Rico Figliolini 0:37:50

We could go through that and spend more time on it, but that’s okay. Yeah. Hopefully I understand we’ll be plugged into to some degree with Fusis maybe even. And we’re adding cameras, led cameras and stuff. Not Led, I mean LPRs, I think.

Alex Wright 0:38:07

We’Ve got to say 50 of the LPRs. Maybe it’s not that many. We’ve also got 82 cameras at the town center. Like literally almost every inch of that is covered. And I think the city manager said the forum is going to get in on the Fusis program. I have mixed feelings about the cameras because you’ve got the kind of the creeping Big Brother aspect, but then on the other hand, there’s a force multiplier. I don’t know if you saw the thing that was on an E a few days ago about there’s a show called 48 Hours. I don’t normally watch it, but it was about the young man who got murdered at the QT, I guess it was last year. And so this is like a national show. Very interesting because it went into the whole gist of the show is for crimes to be solved, you basically have to get on top of things within 48 hours because then things start to go cold. And so they had all of the characters from what happened with all the police officers, the families, they had video of these people being interviewed at the police headquarters. They showed how they tracked them down with the cameras and it was fascinating. So I would encourage we get done. I’ll shoot you the link, but it’s really interesting. But it showed the power of the cameras. That was the key for them tracking these guys down, using cooperating with other municipalities to track these cars down.

Rico Figliolini 0:39:34

Yeah, remember the I mean, I haven’t seen that. I’ll share that in the show notes as well. But I knew that they were able to track them down into Atlanta through cameras and other things and fuses with part of it. But that would be great to see that back behind the scenes stuff.

Alex Wright 0:39:50

It was very interesting because some of it was recreated, but they had all of the police officers that were involved in it kind of acting, if you will, recreating what went down. It was very well done.

Rico Figliolini 0:40:04

Wow, cool. I think within a decade, you can’t hide anymore. At some point, if you’re in the city causing crime, I mean, it’s going to be tough unless you have a bandana on your face or something, a mask. And even then, I think, from what I understand, from what Fusis is doing even, and the technology out there, that they can pretty much fingerprint a car based on dense colors. So you don’t even have to see the license plate anymore almost to be able to ID a car eventually using AI. And the way they track these things, especially the muscle cars and the stuff that the guys that do the spinning of the wheels of the street takeovers, I mean, they’re not doing it with cheap cars. They’re doing with these big cars, these really bulk down, pimped out cars and stuff. I’m sorry, that’s the Brooklyn and me, it just came out on that. But okay, cool. So, I mean, there’s just a lot going on and you hit upon the acquisition of the property in Tech Park for the city that’s going to happen and it’s just other things going on. We still have zero millage rate. Yes, quite a bit of money, unspent money in the bank. Is it $59 million or something?

Alex Wright 0:41:22

That’s correct. Now, to be clear, a lot of that money, it’s not just we can spend on anything there. Some of it is earmarked. When I say earmarked, it’s money specifically has to be spent, say on stormwater or on lost money. It’s got requirements. We’ve created some specific savings funds for different things. So it’s not just all laying around. We can go crazy and it’s unallocated. But we are in a very strong financial position. One of the ratios that I like to mention that apparently in city finances is one of the things they measure is they look at, they call the general fund, which would be things other than Sploss and stormwater and say, well how much money do you have saved versus what they call operating budget. So if our operating budget is let’s say $20 million, well if we had $20 million say, that means basically twelve months of savings. If you think about it in your own personal life, sure. The gold standard in municipal finances is roughly three months. So we on a regular basis are at and beyond twelve months of that. So that’s a good measuring stick that you can kind of compare against cities across the nation. So to think that we’re able to do that with a zero millage rate and I would argue probably the main reason is because we’ve got so many businesses here. If you look at your business to kind of residential balance, we’re about 60 40. If you went up to say, Johns Creek, it’s more like 80 20, which is the reason their property taxes, they’ve got one and we don’t. So we’re a very unique municipality in that regard. So that’s one of the reasons that is so important. The council is so focused on, hey, how do we help revitalize tech part because that’s the golden goose, if you will, that keeps us able to have a zero military. And that’s ultimately where your average person is going to pay attention to what’s going on is when suddenly say, hey, we’re going to start taking money from you. They’ll perk over and say, hey, what the heck is going on? You don’t want to do that.

Rico Figliolini 0:43:41

Spoken to a few people about like just because it’s Technology Park and its offices doesn’t mean it can’t be revamped into something a bit different. I’d love to see this college campuses that have offshoot. GSU has a satellite campus in Dunwoody, I think. And there’s no reason why Georgia Tech for example, can’t have a satellite campus here in Peachtree Corners taken over several buildings. I mean there’s things like that that can happen if it’s attractive enough for certain places, right?

Alex Wright 0:44:14

Yeah, no absolutely. I know the mayor has been a big proponent of trying to get the Gwinnett College or Gwynette Tech I can’t remember to open up a campus Peachtree Corners life that I don’t know the stats of that, but literally from day one, he has been an advocate for getting a local college presence here, which I think would be a great idea.

Rico Figliolini 0:44:33

Yeah, especially if it’s a technology based type of school. So yeah, I can see that. That would be great. The only other thing I would love to see is an art theater center, a complex of some sort.

Alex Wright 0:44:47

Be surprised if that I think that’s probably going to happen. I don’t know the timing but I’m just speculating here that. I would bet you in five years that the city’s got some type of facility. Again, it’d probably be like a private public partnership, something like that, if not sooner, is kind of my speculation.

Rico Figliolini 0:45:07

Good to say. Good to hear. All right, so before we end, I know it’s sold out, I think, so there’s no more places for it. But the Decathlon, the third annual Decathlon that you’re really invested and involved in and actually started was the founder of it, if you will. Can you tell us that’s coming up in October? October 21.

Alex Wright 0:45:30

That’s correct. October 21. So it’s held over at the fitness trail out the town green. And if you’ve never there’s a new playground there. If you ever kind of venture into the woods beyond the playground, that’s where all the fitness trail is. And kind of the origins of that. Not to go into too much detail, but I’m a member of the Y, and they used to have kind of a similar concept at the Y to raise money, and it was meant different things inside the Y. But basically the way it works is you would have ten events at the decathlon, and you had five minutes at each obstacle, if you will, and the quicker you finished it, someone will record your time, and then the rest of the five minutes was your rest, if you will. So it’s almost like capitalism. The harder you go, the more time off you got. So anyway, they would add up all the times, composite. Whoever had the lowest time was the winter. So we took that idea out to the fitness trail, and it’s very much a niche kind of thing, because some of the obstacles, like climbing ropes, most people can’t do that. It’s often kind of difficult to explain to people what it is. But I’m pretty excited because we sold out, like, in a month. And the reason there’s only a certain number of slots, because the capacity to handle a lot of folks is just kind of limited. But the word is spreading to kind of cross the north metro area. We’ve got a waitlist. And my biggest concern always is rain, because nothing I can do about that. The week leading up on just kind of a nervous rate, like, please don’t rain. But yeah, they got some really impressive people that come out and do it. It makes you realize how old you are when you see some of these ladies. I’m pretty excited about it. Definitely have a passion for it. I love going out to the fitness trail. I’ll just be walking through there and you’ll see people of all ages trying to do different things. And if you think about kind of our state of physical fitness, if you will, like in the country where my own kids, they’re on video games or whatever, where you see people out doing something, I love to see that. Especially like the younger kids, even if they can’t necessarily climb a rope, they’re intrigued through stuff, whether the playground, whatever. It’s great seeing that.

Rico Figliolini 0:48:01

Just get out there and do something, right.

Alex Wright 0:48:04

Do something.

Rico Figliolini 0:48:05

So 72 available slots, all gone. There’s a waiting list now, and we’ll have the Hype video, if you will, on our show notes. This way people can see what it’s all about rather than trying to envision it. So it’s a great video. I think Titan Pictures put that one together.

Alex Wright 0:48:22

Yeah, jim Stone did some videos from last year’s, and most of the people in there are local residents that you might recognize. That’s the other thing that’s kind of neat about it is very much a local kind of a community building activity.

Rico Figliolini 0:48:37

Very cool to see it. We’ve come to the end of our time together. This a little longer than we had planned, so I appreciate you hanging in there with me, Alex, and talking through this. Yeah, no, I think hopefully everyone listening to this or reading the synopsis of this, because we’ll be doing a short piece on this as well. Will know quite a bit more about what’s going on in the city. So appreciate you being with me, Alex. Thank you.

Alex Wright 0:49:03

Yeah, thank you.

Rico Figliolini 0:49:04

Stay with me for a second as I just close out. I just want to say thank you to everyone. If you’re listening to this on Audio Life, Apple podcast or something, like or review us, give us a star rating because this way people can find us. If you’re listening to this on YouTube or our Facebook page, feel free to share it with people or tag people in the comments that may want to find out a little bit more about what’s going on in the city of Peachtree Corners. Again, I want to thank our sponsors, EV Remodeling Inc. You can find them at evremodelinginc.com. And Clearwave Fiber. You can find them also on our link in our profiles as well. Thanks again and hope to see you soon.

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