Join Rico Figliolini as he sits down with Peachtree Corners City Councilmember Eric Christ for a deep dive into the latest city developments, from parks to elections and housing.

🔹 Simpsonwood Park – What’s next for the 227-acre green space? Eric shares updates on possible improvements, conservation efforts, and the latest community input.
🔹 Jones Bridge Park Concerns – How the city and county are addressing parking, litter, and after-hours issues.
🔹 Housing & Development – The Gwinnett Housing Authority’s new apartment conversion project and its impact on the area.
🔹 Upcoming City Elections – Why voting might finally get easier and how local races could shape Peachtree Corners’ future.

Resource Links:
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Follow this link for other social sites and to signup for Eric Christ’s newsletter https://linktr.ee/votechrist

Podcast Timestamps:

⏳ [00:00] – Introduction

• Rico Figliolini introduces the podcast and guest, Councilmember Eric Christ.
• Shout-out to sponsors EV Remodeling Inc. and Vox Populi.

⏳ [04:10] – Simpsonwood Park Updates

• Overview of Simpsonwood Park’s history and transition from a Methodist retreat center to a Gwinnett County park.
• Discussion on the conservation easement ensuring the park remains a natural space.
• Planned improvements: meadow restoration, trail enhancements, new restrooms, and additional parking.
• Dog park and overnight camping were removed from the plans.

⏳ [22:30] – Jones Bridge Park Concerns & Community Efforts

• Issues with parking violations, littering, and after-hours activity.
• Gwinnett PD’s increased enforcement, including license plate tracking and towing.

⏳ [35:45] – Gwinnett Housing Authority’s New Apartment Project

• Plans to convert a problematic extended-stay hotel into affordable apartments.
• Target tenants: young adults aging out of foster care and low-income seniors.
• Security & management: On-site staff and case manager to assist residents.

⏳ [46:00] – Upcoming Peachtree Corners Elections (November 2025)

• City elections for posts 2, 4, and 6.
• Push for Gwinnett County to merge city and county elections into one location.
• Challenges with the current voting system requiring two separate polling places.

⏳ [59:30] – Closing Thoughts & Eric Christ’s Newsletter

• How residents can stay informed through Eric’s City Council newsletter.

Podcast Transcript:

00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life here in our little smart city just north of Atlanta. And I have a great guest today, Eric Christ, who’s a city council person at large. Hey, Eric. Thanks for joining us.

00:00:08 – Eric Christ

Great to be here, Rico. Thanks for having me.

00:00:20 – Rico Figliolini

Yep. We’re going to be discussing quite a few things. So stick around. But before we get into it, I just want to say thank you to two of our sponsors, EV Remodeling, Inc. that’s owned by Eli and his family. They live here in Peachtree Corners. They do a great job if you’re thinking of doing like design to build, home renovation, bathroom, kitchen. They just bring your world to life in the way you’d like it. So check them out at evremodelinginc.com. Our second sponsor is Vox Pop Uli, a voice of the people, it makes sense. They’re a company here in Peachtree Corners also owned by a family. Andrew’s the father. You have Daniel, the son and wife in there and daughter and everyone else. And employees are considered family as well. And they do anything you can think of that deals with imprinting to anything, whether it’s a car wrap, and they’ve done over, I think over 6,000 cars and trucks that way, to trade show booths, to store displays, to imprinting on almost any object you can think of. Give them a challenge and they’ll come through. So check them out at voxpopuli.com. I’ll link in the show notes as well. So, Eric, it’s been a while since we’ve had an interview here.

00:01:35 – Eric Christ

Yeah, it’s been a little while, Rico, but great to be here. I’m glad to talk about whatever you think is on the mind of folks here in Peachtree Corners.

00:01:42 – Rico Figliolini

You know, there’s so much going on, it’s ridiculous. But, you know, let’s start off with the thing from last night. There was a meeting last night about Simpsonwood Park. There’s been a lot of talk about it. About what should be done with that park. Even though there was a master plan some years ago when it was first bought, that was surveyed and put together, but never executed. But that SPLOST money, I believe, still sits there.

00:02:10 – Eric Christ

Yeah, let’s take a quick step back, just in case people aren’t familiar. So what’s now known as Simpsonwood Park was obviously for many years, since the 70s, owned by the Methodist Conference. And they operated a retreat center there and various different, they had an office building and all sorts of things. And they decided that they didn’t want to be in the retreat center business anymore. And so they sold the property in 2015 to the county as a park. And so, yeah, they went through a master planning exercise to say, hey, here’s the buildings on the property today. Here’s what we envision. Hiking trails, modern bathroom facilities, and other types of park -type features.

00:02:55 – Rico Figliolini

And for people that may not remember, there was literally a resort hotel almost.

00:03:00 – Eric Christ

Oh, yeah. It was quite an operation. 170 hotel rooms. They had a dining hall that could feed 350 people at a pop. They had 20,000 square feet of meeting space. They had a three-story office building, which served as the offices for the north georgia conference of the united methodist church that’s where the the bishop of that conference had his offices, her offices. And 400 parking spaces at one point they had an rv campground they had, they had a ropes course they had there was there was a they permitted overnight camping by like slow scout troops on a lot of different. And while it was their private property they did permit people to you know come onto the property and use it in a sense like a park right so you could walk your dog in there you could come and just stroll through the grounds during you know sunrise to sunset type of hours. But they did that, they didn’t have to do that, they could have had you know a gate at the front and said no this is the Simpsonwood retreat center unless you you’re there to do you know, to stay at the retreat center, attend an event, you know, that type of thing.

00:04:14 – Rico Figliolini

And most of that, if not all of it, has been removed. I mean, all the structures have been removed, the parking space.

00:04:21 – Eric Christ

Pretty much. I mean, the couple things that are still there that the Methodist Conference had built were, one, a chapel. There’s a 75-seat chapel. There was a large pavilion and a volleyball court and a single bathroom facility. Otherwise, pretty much all of the buildings are gone. There’s a maintenance shed that still exists back in the woods that the county uses. And then there is another tenant back there, which is causing a little bit of disruption right now, which is the Department of Water Resources has their Wolf Creek pump station. And they’re in the midst of upgrading the sewer line that runs to that pump station.

00:04:55 – Rico Figliolini

How many acres are there? 

00:05:06 – Eric Christ

227 acres.

00:05:08 – Rico Figliolini

And the chapel is still being used as Gwinnett Park as a rental for weddings?

00:05:18 – Eric Christ

Right. Yeah, I just actually posted that on my Facebook page yesterday. I happened to be on the website looking at it. Gwinnett Park, in addition to, people don’t know, you can rent their pavilions. You can reserve a pavilion for a birthday party or something like that. But they also have what they call premier facilities at some of their parks. Like Pinckneyville Community Center is both under the Gwinnett Park system. So that’s off of, you know, Peachtree Boulevard. And you can rent space there. But yeah, you can rent the chapel for weddings, vow renewals, anything. There’s no, you know, it doesn’t have to be for a wedding or a religious service. So you can rent the chapel, you can rent the grounds, which has a small gazebo if you want to do something outdoors, or you can rent both for a fairly reasonable fee. It’s like $125 an hour. 

00:06:09 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I was going to say, it’s not expensive in the grand scheme. So let’s…

00:06:15 – Eric Christ

I remember saying, so they did that master planning. It was on the, so we had a SPLOST that we voted on back in 2017. And they put this, the improvements to Simpsonwood on the list but they put it in what they called tier two and what that meant was tier two projects only get funded if they first fund all the tier one projects and they didn’t so they, the amount of money that SPLOST raised or maybe those projects you know got more expensive there wasn’t any funding available for tier two projects. So then in 2023 we had an, or 6 years, yeah, 2023. We had another SPLOST, which are running for the next six years. And so this time Simpsonwood is a tier one project. And they have earmarked $8 million from the current SPLOST, the sales tax towards enhancements to Simpsonwood. And so the county, I think. It was a good move to say, hey, it’s 2024 when this process started. We built that original plan eight years earlier in 2016. Let’s dust it off and go through a planning process again to see if things have changed. Are there things people would like to see in the park? Last time, there were lots of discussion around, should there be a fenced-in dog park-type area inside the park or not? They said, we want to get more input on those types of questions. They’ve embarked on about a year-long planning process. We’re just about halfway through. It’ll wrap up in August of this year with a final plan. Last night was the third of six meetings to look at different plans.

00:08:16 – Rico Figliolini

So a lot of people that make up the committee, I guess, isn’t there?

00:08:23 – Eric Christ

Yeah, what they did was, yeah, so same thing they’d done back in 2016. They got a steering committee together of primarily nearby residents. And so they did the same thing again this time. First, they asked people who had been on the committee in 2016, hey, did you want to do this again? And about half of those folks said, sure. Like one of my neighbors here in Neely Farm, who was on the committee then, said, yeah. They then asked the city of Peachtree Corners, you know, and I volunteered or didn’t step back fast enough.

00:08:59 – Rico Figliolini

Good for you. No, we need a good rep on there. That’s good.

00:09:02 – Eric Christ

And then they solicited and, you know, they said, hey, Simpsonwood Methodist Church, do you want to have somebody on the committee? Local organization representatives. And then they opened it up to the general public. They had a big community meeting at Simpsonwood Methodist Church and took applications from people. You could just apply by email. They took all of those applications and they said, well, one, we can’t have a committee of like 60 people. That’s not practical. And they also said, we want a variety of members, but concentrated here in Peachtree Corners. So of the 31 committee members, 27 are Peachtree Corners residents.

00:09:45 – Rico Figliolini

That’s actually very good, considering it’s a county park, not a city park. Maybe one day it could be a city park, but not now.

00:09:56 – Eric Christ

We do have, in a sense, I don’t think, the Town Green is our city park today, right? And it has many of the same elements. A playground, a lawn, a stage, bathrooms, you know, trash cans that have to be emptied, all those kinds of things. So, yeah. So what they did last night was they, the prior meeting about six weeks ago, they had presented three concept plans, three different maps, and each of them was slightly different. And so based on the feedback that the committee provided last time, they merged all that into a single map and said, hey, what do we think about this? It’s still not, they didn’t even call it a preliminary plan. There’s still two more stages to go. They said, we took all your feedback and we fit it in here. 

00:10:52 – Rico Figliolini

What can you say was left in that map? Or what is the version, the highlights of it?

00:11:01 – Eric Christ

Sure, yeah, a couple things come to mind. The first thing, you know, what I think was big news coming out of last night was, and I sort of prompted this because I pushed him on it, is that commitment by the county to keep the park natural and specifically to stay within the constraints of the conservation easement. So when they bought the park, there wasn’t any, if you will, underline or overarching boundaries or limits on what the park could be, right? So they could have had playing fields with lights and that sort of thing. But the steering committee back in 2016 pushed hard to say, we need to put out what’s called a conservation easement, which an easement is a restriction placed on land. And so in 2020, The board of commissioners voted unanimously to put a conservation easement on the land. And what it says is, one, the land can only ever be used as a park for the general public. So it can’t be developed into houses or used for a commercial property. And then it also limits the types of things that you could do at this park. Like it can’t have active playing fields. You can have a meadow where you run around and toss a frisbee, but it can’t have soccer fields. It can’t have lights, you know, lighted playing fields. So, for example, there’s a volleyball court there today, and that can stay there, but you can’t add lights to it, right?

00:12:37 – Rico Figliolini

That’s in respect to the residential area around it, I guess.

00:12:43 – Eric Christ

Yeah, I think that’s based on feedback. And also, I think the other thing that we pushed them on for that conservation easement was the priorities for the things that are going to happen at Simpsonwood and right at the top of the list last night that they committed to was that it’s about the primary purpose of the park is the natural resources that are there at the park. And so there was a lot of talk last night about investing in the park to do things like to restore the meadows. One of the meadows right now is full of dirt and rock from the sewer project which the department of water resources will remove and then getting that meadow back to what they call the Piedmont Prairie. That’s, I guess, the type of meadows that we have here on the southeastern part of the U.S. So that was big news. And in fact, they used the word in perpetuity, the conservation easement restrictions. And I pushed again, and they even said, well, Eric, we’re going to go even, you know, be more restricted even than what that document says. Like, that document says we could have, you could have theoretically have pickleball courts, right? Without lights, but you could have courts. And they said, no, we’re not doing that. You could have mountain biking trails under a conservation easement. And they said, no, we’re not doing mountain biking trails. And both the head of the park planning process, as well as the director of Gwinnett Parks himself, Chris Miner, was there. And they both publicly said, no, this is our commitment to this park. So that was exciting. The other things they shared, or in this the new plan they had in prior concepts they did have a dog park area like a, you know fenced in two acre area for dogs, that’s not in the plan anymore. There was a small overnight camping area which the church had actually permitted camping and in a section for scout troops right, that’s been pulled out of the plan.

00:14:45 – Rico Figliolini

So wait so there’s no more, no more camping there at all then?

00:14:50 – Eric Christ

Correct. Correct. I don’t know if that’s immediately enforced, but they’re saying the concept plan that they had shared last time had kept these ten little tent sites near the front of the park off to the left. So they’ve taken those out of the plan. In the concept drawings, there were going to be two multi-use trails. And one which would go from the center of the parking area down to the river and back. And then the other one, there would be a loop around the Great Lawn, the big meadow that’s there today. And they’ve taken that second one, the one around the Great Meadow, off the plan. There’s still a path, but it’s not, their definition of multi-use trail is a paved, improved trail that someone in a wheelchair, stroller, a kid on a push bike could use. So there’s now down to one multi-use trail, just the loop that would go down to the river and come back up sort of along the current road. I don’t know if you’ve been in Simpsonwood, you know, past the chapel.

00:16:01 – Rico Figliolini

Are they going to improve? I think there’s a mulch trail or natural trail there or two, at the 1.2 miles or two miles. Are they going to keep or improve those trails? 

00:16:16 – Eric Christ

Yeah, they talked about that a lot. They sort of had three categories of trails. The first one, what they would call multi-use, which is a paved asphalt or potentially concrete with a maximum of 5% grade, right? So that it’s, you know, reasonable for a wheelchair user or something or, you know, pushing a stroller. And then they have what they called accessible trails, which would be wherever possible, natural surface. There might be, if it’s steep or it’s crossing a creek, then there’d have to be a bridge. If it’s steep, they’d have to potentially do asphalt or concrete there because of the erosion, right? As people walk up and down a steep section. And that’s what they call the accessible trails. And then all the rest would do what they call hiking trails would just be natural surface trails. But those trails would still be intentionally laid out, right? So what we have today in the park is you know, the Methodist church, when they operated as a retreat center, they didn’t necessarily plan these trails. So they’re sort of called, you know, green trails, right? People walking said, I want to go that way. And so you have some situations like you have trails like right next to each other in parallel. You have trails that go up a pretty steep section rather than having like a little switchback. And so they would come in and lay out those hiking trails and put signage. You know, you can if you want to, you can go off trail and walk through the leaves. It’s not going to be stopped there. One of the things I asked about, because I’d heard feedback from my constituents in Revington, which is the neighborhood along the north side, is that there is a current amateur design trail or just an organically occurring trail that comes really close to their homes, to their backyards. And so the county committed that, no, no, when we lay out the official trails, there’d be a goal of 100 to 150 foot buffer between the trail and any adjoining residential parcel.

00:18:17 – Rico Figliolini

That would make sense. Still, I would imagine there’s going to be, because the bathrooms are really bad, for even the scouts to be using. They’re going to probably improve that, I would imagine.

00:18:32 – Eric Christ

The current facility is quite old in comparison. Very poorly, I had a chance to take a tour two Saturdays ago with other members of the committee. And we went to some of the current parks and yeah, the restrooms do not meet the Gwinnett standard. And so they would take that one down, replace it. And then they would also add a second one down towards the chapel, actually a little past the chapel. So if you’re down at the river and you need, if you have a young child and have a bathroom emergency, you don’t have to make it all the way up to the front. Or even if you’re, if you’re having an event at the chapel right now, if you’re, it’s quite a little walk. You almost want to get in a golf cart or get your car to go use the restroom.

00:19:12 – Rico Figliolini

I mean, yeah, I agree. And that’s a great idea to think about that. But holding events, that would make sense. And they’re adding also, I would imagine they’re adding some additional parking because there’s never enough parking for even the current use over there.

00:19:29 – Eric Christ

Yeah, so what they talked about is, yeah, so when it was a retreat center, there were over 400 parking spaces between the retreat center and the office building. Right now, there are about 90, depending on how you count, because there’s some gravel, you know, they don’t have areas that don’t have specific, you know, line spots, right? They’ve talked about three paved areas with 30 spaces approximately each. That would be 90, about the same as there’s now. And then down near the chapel-ish area, a overflow parking area, which would be just grassy, like hardened grass.

00:20:06 – Rico Figliolini

Impervious?

00:20:08 – Eric Christ

Right yeah it would still be impervious right. But and it would, if you had an event like the walk through Bethlehem event that the Methodist church does every year, or if you  had I mean, I’m thinking you know it’s a 75 seat chapel and all of your guests come two to a car that’s still 30 cars or 35 cars right and then plus the normal visitors on that day. So anyway so they ended up with about 90 paved spaces and I think it was 60 unpaved.

00:20:39 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. And that sounds reasonable. Are they still?

00:20:43 – Eric Christ

More in total compared to the 400 that were there before.

00:20:45 – Rico Figliolini

Well even the way it’s split up and stuff it makes, it’s not all one big area so that’s better looking and better use of the land, I bet. Outcrops overlooking the river, I think there were two plans. Is that still part of the?

00:20:58 – Eric Christ

Yeah, they still show those. I mean I think what they’ve, I heard this back in 2016 as well, serving on that steering committee, is that the purpose of the overlooks is actually to protect the environment. And so how does it protect the environment to build these overlooks? And the answer is, as humans, as soon as we know there’s water nearby, we want to go see it. If we can, we want to go touch it. We’re just sort of instinctually drawn to do that. So they know that if they don’t provide these overlooks, essentially outlets for that instinctual drive, people will push their way through the undergrowth, they’ll try to climb down the banks, that sort of thing.

00:21:40 – Rico Figliolini

That happened at Jones Bridge Park. I think that’s why they eventually started years back putting outcrops and rocks and the steps leading into the river and stuff.

00:21:51 – Eric Christ

What they’ve had to do at Jones Bridge is they’ve fenced in certain areas to try to let the bank recover. And we actually saw this on our tour, one of the little parking lots we parked in and we were walking this way. And we said, what are these fencing around these trees? And they said, well, we’re trying to let, these are new trees here. And if we didn’t fence them in, just people walk where they, but people always take the shortest route. Not necessarily thinking about what’s happening to the tree roots and that sort of thing.

00:22:22 – Rico Figliolini

Any other, any surprises or anything additional or something different from?

00:22:27 – Eric Christ

No, I think it’s pretty, everything that, yeah, nothing new added to the concept plans and more things, you know, a shift in, what I view as a shift in focus about natural resource management, the restoration of the meadows, better management of the forest. One of the things we had learned was that about 20 years ago, there was a pine bark beetle infestation in the park. And so the church actually clear cut some big sections of trees if you’re going down the center road along your right. And then they didn’t necessarily focus on forest management, so it grew back as sort of dense scrub pines, which actually now makes it more likely to have another pine bark beetle infestation because the trees are so close together. And so the ecologist who’s on consulting with the park system had made some recommendations about, here’s the type of, what a healthy forest looks like and the mix of trees that you have and just a bunch of scrub pines and a dense thicket is not an ideal environment.

00:23:38 – Rico Figliolini

I’ve got to say, Gwinnett Parks has won quite a few National Park Awards. I was on the Park Authority some years ago, but it doesn’t seem to have changed a lot. They do great work, so I have all the respect for them.

00:23:54 – Eric Christ

Yeah, they mentioned last night that they had been up for an award and they lost out to the city of Minneapolis park system. And where they got dinged was that they didn’t have a natural resource plan as part of their planning process, specifically looking at trees and vegetation. Not that they weren’t doing it, but they didn’t have it as a formal part of their planning process. they’re doing that now for Simpsonwood and that they mentioned two other parks, I’ve forgotten the names. 

00:24:32 – Rico Figliolini

So let’s, I mean if that, I think that covered pretty much. 

00:24:36 – Eric Christ

Yeah to wrap it up so what happens now so three more formal meetings of the steering committee between now and August. So they’re just going to keep refining the plan. What we’re supposed to see next time is a more refined version of the single concept plan. Then the next one will see costs, which would then potentially say, here’s how you’re going to have to phase it. Maybe the total plan is $12 million or something to do all the things on the plan. So here’s how they would phase it in. And then the final step, who is approving this? As you mentioned, it’s a county park, not a city park. So this will go to the Gwinnett parks recreation authority. They vote on the plan and then it goes to the board of commissioners for final approval and funding.

00:25:23 – Rico Figliolini

Right and we have two, if it’s the same. We have two appointees from our commissioner that represents us on that. 

00:25:31 – Eric Christ

Right, yeah. From district one yeah. And there are two members, two of them are from the parks authority Eric Thigpen, who’s the current chair. And then, I forgot her name, another woman. She actually lives in Lawrenceville, so she’s presumably not a District 1 representative.

00:25:50 – Rico Figliolini

So let’s segue then into this. So there’s another park here in the city, Jones Bridge Park. I mean, there’s several besides these two. So Jones Bridge Park is another one that has had some issues people are a bit upset with. Things that go on there sometimes on off hours or even during the weekends where garbage is overrunning maybe or, you know, just things that happen. Do you have any insights?

00:26:18 – Eric Christ

Sure. Yeah, I think there’s a group of local residents who’ve formed. I don’t know if they have an official name. We’ll call them the Friends of Jones Bridge Park, right? So they live nearby or they enjoy the park. And they had reached out and gotten in touch with the park system. And so they’ve had a couple meetings, at least two, and I think gotten a very good response from both the park system and also Gwinnett Police, who’s responsible for patrolling the parks, as well as our own city marshals who’ve helped out as well. And so I attended a recent meeting of this Jones Bridge Park community meeting. And so one of the things that I recall was, you know, there had been problems with people parking outside of designated parking spaces, right? And specifically, there is actually a good amount of parking in the park. Because if you go farther into the park, up towards the soccer fields, there’s parking there. But people were just being a little lazy and saying, I don’t want to go to the soccer fields. I want to go to the river. So I’m just going to park on the grass or pull over, you know, pop two of my wheels up on the curb. So Gwinnett police, starting in July, had gotten more aggressive about warning and then towing. So they’ve towed 45 cars since July. Although since October, they’ve only had to tow two. So the message seems to be getting out, you know, find a parking space.

00:27:51 – Rico Figliolini

Well, the weather is getting cooler and come the summer.

00:27:53 – Eric Christ

Yeah, that could be right. Fewer people there. The trash, you know, the county had committed to adding additional trash cans. You know, Rico, when I go to a park or any public space or even our Town Green and I see an overflowing trash can, I don’t see a problem with citizens. I see a problem with the city or the county that we’re not emptying that trash can. What I see is that somebody tried to bring their trash to the trash can, but it was full. Presumably, they didn’t take it to their car, you know, and so they put it next to the trash can. So that says we either need to empty them more often or we need to have more of them. And that’s not to say that as in any park, any public space. No, there certainly was, is trash not near trash cans down along the river or something. And that’s the you know, the yeah, sometimes people treat public spaces differently than they do their personal spaces. The other thing that the county had committed to reacting to the complaints about after-hours activity, all Gwinnett parks close at dusk. And so the county has or is going to put a cutoff timer on the power outlets in the pavilions at Jones Bridge so there won’t be power after 6 p.m. or you know, it literally detects that it’s dusk or anything like that. The other thing that the city had done is we had installed a license plate reader camera on the road that, leading into Jones Bridge park and it’s programmed to if it sees a license sees a car, sees a license plate after hours it sends an alert to Gwinnett PD okay. And if they have, maybe we can talk about that a little bit, if they have an available officer, that officer will respond to that alert. And the major said, West Precinct commander had said that since July, they had been to the park 150 times. So that’s almost once a day. So that seems to be working.

00:30:16 – Rico Figliolini

Were they going to do, I know someone was asking about 24-hour camera surveillance in the park.

00:30:25 – Eric Christ

Yeah, so once again, the city had offered to subsidize, purchase through our Curiosity Lab, we have pretty good connections with vendors, and we don’t mind trialing new technology. So we’d help get cameras inside the park. At this meeting, this might have been a result since that meeting, they were working on improving the internet infrastructure and the power availability. But essentially what you do is you replace like the top of one of the street lights in the park with a new head unit, it’s called, which would have cameras. So the city is still happy to help support that effort.

00:31:04 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. So, you know, these things progress. I mean, we could always talk about at another point, the city taking over those parks and they become city parks. But then again, we’d have to stand up a parks department.

00:31:18 – Eric Christ

Yeah, because right now, you know, our staff of 28, whatever we’re at right now, you know, we do, I think, a pretty good job of managing the Town Green. But yeah, that’s, you know, managing, you know, a 230 acre park like Simpsonwood or Jones Bridge is much smaller, but it has active playing fields with, I think you actually wrote an article about him, in Peachtree Corners Magazine, the Jones Bridge Football Club, I think.

00:31:45 – Rico Figliolini

Right, 50-year anniversary. Yeah, football and soccer. It’s a soccer club, right?

00:31:51 – Eric Christ

And to maybe wrap it up and draw a distinction with Simpsonwood, Jones Bridge is certainly not under a conservation easement. It’s an active, what they call an active park with playing fields, with lights. And sort of a mini version of what we have over at the Pinckneyville Park, right, with softball fields. So a different experience, for sure.

00:32:14 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. I mean, we have good parks around here. Alright, let’s move away a little bit from the parks, and let’s get into, let’s talk a little bit about what just recently got voted on. There’s this trend of doing office conversions to apartments or hotels to apartments or multifamily. So there’s one that you were telling me just before we started the show, that Gwinnett Housing Authority has taken over and will be managing. And this is in an area by Jimmy Carter and Peachtree Boulevard. I have to stop from saying Peachtree Industrial Boulevard.

00:32:52 – Eric Christ

I introduced the resolution to change the names. I’m glad to see you. You know, after Chamblee and Dorville had changed Peachtree Industrial Boulevard to Peachtree Boulevard. Georgia Department of Transportation changed the signs on 285. And now they just say Peachtree Boulevard. So they said, well, I said, well, we need to update the name as well. But yeah, so a couple of years ago, six years ago, the staff was thinking ahead and they created a new option in our residential code that would permit an extended stay hotel to be converted into apartments through a specific process. You know, normally residential and hotel space, you know, different sections of the code. But we said, as we particularly, unfortunately, our friends to the east in the city of Norcross have had some challenges with extended stay hotels that they essentially go down in quality, go down in safety and security and become a problem. So on Jimmy Carter Boulevard, just when you come off Peachtree Boulevard, there’s a car wash there. There’s the Crown Sports Bar across the street from what I still think of as the old LA Fitness Shopping Center. There were actually two extended-stay hotels just down a short road. And one of those particularly problematic regular visits from the police. And Southern Gwinnett Housing Authority, said we’d be interested in purchasing that property and but we don’t want to run it as an extended stay hotel right? Extended stay hotels are you you rent by the week and it’s a very tough environment for the people living there because because it’s a hotel you don’t have any tenant rates so you can be kicked out without notice because you’re a hotel resident not a lesser right, or a lessee. And it creates this challenging environment. And so they said, we want to convert it into apartments, which will be rented by the month, by the year type of thing. And so they came to staff. Staff worked with them on some conditions for the property, one of which was that the total number of units would stay the same, 73 units, and that they would do refurbishment and investment in it. Ordinance actually says to do this conversion, you have to put a washer and dryer in each unit to make it a true apartment. And they said, these units are pretty small. There’s already a central laundry facility. And could we get a waiver from that one requirement? And the staff recommended approval of that. So they came before city council last Tuesday and they presented. A couple of questions I asked was about who are the target market for these apartments? And they said, as the housing authority, they have specific objectives of what the type of housing they’re trying to provide. And so their target market is a twofold, it’s young adults who’ve aged out of foster care, no longer eligible to be part of the foster care system. So that’s 18 to 24 years old. And then also seniors. So they have low income, fixed income seniors who are struggling to find a safe place to live and that they have some experience both here in in metro Atlanta but in other states that having a mix of young people and seniors creates this great synergy. And so and they also, one of the questions I asked was you know staff on site right? And so they said yep, of the 73 units two of them would be for staff. One would be for a property manager, full-time property manager, who would live on the property. And the second would be for a case manager from the housing authority who would provide social services to both of those constituents or types of residents. And so that request passed unanimously, which sometimes when it comes to housing and the word apartments, we don’t always get unanimous votes on council. But this one, I think everybody agreed. I don’t want to speak for my other council members, but it certainly appeared to me that replacing an increasingly problematic extended stay hotel with apartments that would serve underserved communities would be a good change.

00:37:31 – Rico Figliolini

Interestingly enough, the other day, I forget who I was speaking to, it was someone in the police department, and they were mentioning that that area of Jimmy Carter and Peachtree Boulevard. I keep wanting to say PIB at least instead, or PB. Yeah, so that area, if you take that and work your way out as a circle, that is the higher crime area, if you will, moving out from that circle in this area. And you mentioned that that was obviously an extended stay hotel. And there’s one right next to it, actually, as well. Well, now that there’s one there, that’s one of, what, three? 

00:38:22 – Eric Christ

Yeah, there might be three left in the city after this one. And then there are a couple right on our border, right? People don’t always necessarily know where Peachtree Corner ends and Norcross starts. And, you know, we’re working to support City of Norcross as well as they deal with these challenges. And I certainly don’t want to, you know, blame the residents of the extended stay community. Right before I started, we talked about that the city of Norcross happens to have a housing authority and they had done a study that actually gone and knocked on doors and said, hey, how long have you been in an extended stay? Why are you here? And they found different types of residents. Those that were families, one of the most common reasons they were in an extended stay was not that they didn’t have jobs and couldn’t afford apartment rent. It’s that they didn’t have enough cash reserves to fund the security deposit and the first month’s rent.

00:39:17 – Rico Figliolini

That’s right.

00:39:18 – Eric Christ

Let’s call it two months rent. So getting that. And so like Norcross is looking at creating a, they’ve already done so, a grant program to say, hey, if we can get you into an apartment, you’ve got a job, you’re going to pass the background check at the apartment, that sort of thing. We’ll help, you know, give you the table stakes to get into the apartment.

00:39:38 – Rico Figliolini

And that’s a great idea. And that’s, yeah, that’s really a good idea. It’s like someone, like a business owner, investing in their property to a degree, but their operating, the operating funds could handle the operation, but maybe they can’t pay off the debt. And that’s how that feels like to me. You want to be able to do it. You can pay for it, but it’s getting over that hurdle.Before we get to, I know you have limited time, so I just want to make sure we cover also the next thing, which is the upcoming elections, right? You’re running for re-election in post four as an at-large seat. 

00:40:22 – Eric Christ

No, I’m district two. I’m post two district two. Four is Councilmember Joe Sawyer. And six is Councilmember Bert Ratwick. Yes. Yeah, this November.

00:40:33 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, sorry about that. This November, we have city elections. So we have elections every, you know, there’s seven of us on council, the mayor plus the six council seats. Half of us plus the mayor are elected in one cycle, and then the other three seats are elected two years later. And so we call that sort of our, our big and our small election. Alright, cause one is four, Mayor plus three and one is three. So this year it’s the small election. So posts two, four and six will be up for reelection. The election is like, you know, every election, the first Tuesday in November. So November 4th. And one interesting thing about this year’s election is because our city elections are in the odd years, we don’t normally have other countywide elections happening at the same time, right? Because the presidential election is in the even years, and then the midterms are in between that. That’s an even year, as well as our gubernatorial and our state legislative elections. But every now and then, the county has an election in an odd year, and it could be something like in 2015, there was the most recent Board of Education SPLOST. This year, there actually will be a county-wide election because of a state mandate that it’s finally time to have some elections for the Public Service Commission. There was some litigation over the PSC, and so elections were delayed, but two of the seats on the Public Service Commission will be on the ballot this November. So on November 4th, there will be at least two elections, the PSC and if you live in a city here in Gwinnett, there’ll be city elections. And a personal pet peeve of mine has been the fact that when that happens, that we have to go to two different places to vote. And the reason is that Gwinnett, in contrast to all the other counties in the metro Atlanta area, and in fact, I haven’t been able to identify a single county in Georgia other than Gwinnett who doesn’t offer the cities inside the county the option of combining elections. And this, I’ve been working on this project a long time because when I started this after that, actually back in 2016 when I first ran I was in a special election in an even year, I was in 2016 and so to vote in my election you had to go to two places in May of 2016. So I said this is dumb. And at first I was told, well, the Board of Elections has a policy against providing city elections services. So I went to the Board of Elections and lobbied them and said, this is dumb. And so I got them to rescind that policy. And so now here in 2025, this is the first time since 2013 for the city of Peachtree Corners that on the same day as our city election, there will be a countywide election. And so what we’re asking the county now to do is please just tell us what the cost would be if we were to tag along on the election you already have to have. You already have to open up all 156 polling places. You already have to have your three weeks of early voting. We know it’s an electronic ballot that can, when Rico walks in, it can say, hey, Rico, in addition to the PSC, because you live in Peachtree Corners, I’m going to show you these additional you know, races. And we know they can do it, Rico, because in 2013, 12 years ago, that was still during our two-year transition period with the county when we first became a city. They did this exact thing for us. We had our 2013 council elections, and we even had a referendum about this tax allocation districts that people voted for. So we know they can do it. Just right now have been sort of dragging their feet on telling us what it would cost for us to hire them to manage our election.

00:44:55 – Rico Figliolini

How many precincts are in the city of Peachtree Corners?

00:44:56 – Eric Christ

Yeah, so if you look at the county precincts, because when the lines were drawn, that predates the city existing. So it’s eleven or twelve, of which nine, if I recall correctly, eight or nine are wholly inside the city, right? So every voter at that polling place like the good age building in Jones Bridge Park is a resident in the city of Peachtree Corners and then the other three are split. But which they already know how to do this that they have other precincts where they have some of the people vote in some state house race and some people don’t and the computer system takes care of that it just, I mean you when you log in, or when you log in, when you check in. 

00:45:40 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. I can’t imagine, I mean it costs us what $50,000?

00:45:45 – Eric Christ

We generally budget $50,000. Yeah, Kym Chereck our city clerk does a great job. She comes in below that. But it’s also just the confusion and the inconvenience. Because here’s what’s happened. People are going to, for the PSC, somebody’s upset about their electrical bill. The Public Service Commission regulates Georgia Power and other electrical monopolies. That’s their primary function. So they’re going to go vote early, let’s say, over at Pinckneyville Community Center. And then they’re not going to see the city races on there. And then they’re gonna go, I have to do this again? What? Or they’re going to come to City Hall on Election Day, vote in the city races, because you’re going to have local candidates trying to get their vote out. And then they’re going to vote for the PSC thing. Well, you’re going to have to go to Peachtree  Elementary. You’re going to have to go to PCBC. And they’re going to go, well, I got to go to work. I don’t got time to do that. And, you know.

00:46:43 – Rico Figliolini

No, I agree. I mean, even under $50,000, I mean, how much can it possibly cost the county to add for what we’re talking about when they already have the precincts in place? Everything’s in place. They just have to, really, it’s almost a programming issue.

00:47:00 – Eric Christ

It is. It’s literally just programming to say, if voter you know, reside in Peachtree Corners, then show these races on the ballot. And we know from 2013, Rico, the last time this exact situation happened, they charged us $35,000.

00:47:18 – Rico Figliolini

There you go. Okay.

00:47:20 – Eric Christ

So yeah. But let’s add some inflation in there. So, okay, it’s 50K. Even if it’s more, you know, it’s 60. Even if it’s more than we’ve read it, it’s still, from Eric’s point of view, that’s still the right thing to do for the voters.

00:47:32 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. I totally agree, and I’m glad that you did that because I always thought that it was stupid to have to do that, to go to two different places. And not just the pain of doing that, if you will, but it’s almost undemocratic because it forces the well-intentioned voter to have to go to two places. And not everyone is like that, right? So you end up disenfranchising quite a few people by forcing them to split up and making choices. Now, granted, there’s early voting, but we don’t have early voting in the city. You vote on that day, right? I mean, there’s absence of people.

00:48:22 – Eric Christ

Now, in the last couple of elections, we have had a smaller period of election voting, but it’s generally because our city clerk, and this is one of the reasons why she’s been able to keep the cost low is that we’re open from like nine to six, right? We’re not open at 7 p.m. You know, when the county does it, and I love what they do there is, you know, they’re open for like 20 straight days, Saturdays included at 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. so you don’t have to remember because everybody knows election day. But also for the cities in Gwinnett, we do have a few cities in Gwinnett who do hire a county to manage their election. But those are cities who cross the boundary. So like the city of Auburn, which is in northern Gwinnett, is partially in Walton County. So they hire Walton County to manage their elections. And Walton is much, much smaller than Gwinnett. But they say, sure, we’re happy to do that. It reminds me, if I recall, back in 2018, we had a city special election to vote on something called the brunch bill. This was about whether restaurants could serve alcohol before noon. And so for us, the first opportunity to do that was in 2018, but our next scheduled election wasn’t until November 2019. But we as a council said, we don’t want to wait because we don’t want our restaurants to be at a disadvantage. If John Streif does it, then people want their mimosa or their Bloody Mary at 11:30 in the morning. So we said, we’re going to go ahead and do the election. So what we had to do, our city clerk had to get the polling place, which, yes, is our community chest room. Hire the poll workers. Advertise the election. All that just to ask the single yes or no question. So she did all that. We held the election. Cost us about $20,000. And we had 4% turnout. Rico. 4% of the people in the city came out. City of Johns Creek did the exact same thing on the same day. But all they had to do, they picked up the phone, they called Fulton County, and they said, run our election. And Fulton County did everything else. They had 64% turnout participation in their brunch bill. And then here, to add insult to injury, Gwinnett County, for the unincorporated parts of Gwinnett, right? So there’s only 20% of it comes inside a city. They also had to hold the brunch bill referendum. They did it on the same day as ours. And they had 55% participation across the county, but they wouldn’t add ours to their ballot back in 2018. So I’m pushing hard on this issue. I got the council unanimously endorsed a resolution that I had drafted that called on the county. All we’re asking for right now is please give us an estimate of the cost. State law already allows us to hand over our election management responsibilities to a county, state law already permits this. But we said for us to decide whether we need to do that, you know like because, I don’t know the county comes back and says it’s three hundred thousand dollars. Well why they would come and, no but let’s just say they did right, we might say whoa no. If they come back anywhere near close to 50,000 then I think there would be you know, I’m certainly gonna argue passionately, I wish that, we should on these elections.

00:51:56 –  Rico Figliolini

I’m totally behind you on that one. Yeah. So I don’t even see that there should be an argument on their part.

00:52:04 – Eric Christ

We’re trying to figure it out. Because as I said, I researched this. Every single county around us, even Little Hall County, it’s not that little anymore to our north, they offer it to the city of Gainesville. Dunwoody, to our west, DeKalb runs the elections.

00:52:20 – Rico Figliolini

How late do they have until. Well, how late do we have until they have to?

00:52:26 – Eric Christ

Yeah, we still have some time. The biggest stumbling block is we have to update your official voting. So right now, if you look at your voter registration card, it says for federal and state elections, you vote at, like for me, I vote at Peachtree Elementary School. But it says for city elections, I vote at city hall. So legally, we have to tell people. Update your voter registration, your polling place. And so, and there’s a postcard that gets mailed out when that happens. So the elections in November 4th, early voting, if we piggyback on the county and they do three weeks of early voting. So, yeah, we need to decide probably within the next, you know, 45 days or so just to get, because what would happen is the county comes back with a cost estimate. We then also have to negotiate an agreement with them. In DeKalb, for their cities, they say, we’ll run your elections for you, but we don’t want to do the candidate qualification piece. That’s where you show up at City Hall, you sign a form, you write a check. And our clerks are like, no, that’s perfectly fine. She already has to do that today, so that’s not a problem at all. And the other thing those agreements say is, if there is a lawsuit over this election, the city has to be the one to bear the burden of that lawsuit. And our answer is, of course, that’s fine. It’s our election. We’re just hiring you to run it. If somebody wants to sue over it, yeah, we’ll take the lawsuit. Yeah, that’s perfectly fine. So get a cost estimate, get a contract. And as it’s been with lots and lots of other counties doing this, there’s lots of examples of how to do that. And then move forward and get it done so that when people show up in November, they can go to one place.

00:54:26 – Rico Figliolini

Excellent. Eric, I appreciate you spending your time with us. Eric Christ, he’s a city councilman post two, right? Running for re-election. You know, ChatGPT just got that information wrong. I was being a little lazy and I used ChatGPT.

00:54:47 – Eric Christ

Yeah. Well, you know, so for city elections, we don’t have primaries, right. So that everything happened for us, the candidates will qualify in August. That’s when you officially become a candidate for reelection.

00:55:03 – Rico Figliolini

Because it’s a nonpartisan race.

00:55:05 – Eric Christ

That’s correct. Yeah. We don’t run with party labels. A few big, big cities like Atlanta have run partisan elections. But of 538 cities in Georgia, the vast majority are nonpartisan elections. 

00:55:21 – Rico Figliolini

Well, we’ve been speaking to Eric Christ. Thank you, Eric. Appreciate you sharing the information on Simpsonwood Park, on the elections and all these things. There’s definitely going to be a lot of stuff to talk about over the next three months, four months that’s going to be coming up. So I’m sure we’ll have you back again at some point to talk a bit about some of these things.

00:55:45 – Eric Christ

Sure. I’m always happy to do it.

00:55:47 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I appreciate it. I want to say thank you also to EV Remodeling Inc. and to Vox Pop Uli for being supporters, not just of these podcasts, which includes this, Prime Lunchtime with City Manager, and UrbanEbb, but also Peachtree Corners Magazine and Southwest Gwinnett Magazines. So appreciate them supporting us, our journalism, and the ability to put out this stuff. And just, you know, listen, we’ve been doing this, I’ve been doing this for seven years, and nothing, you know, things just get more complicated as we go and having media out there to be able to bring people like Eric on to explain things is really important to do that. So if you found this podcast, whether it’s video or audio, whether you found it on Spotify or on YouTube, please share it with your friends that live here in the city. Let them know what we’re doing and let them know what’s going on. So thank you again, Eric. Appreciate it. Appreciate you being with me. Let me, one more thing, I guess. If anyone wants to sign on to your really, really good newsletter, I love your newsletter. You give your opinions on things. You share all sorts of stuff going on. Tell them where to find that and how to get subscribed to it.

00:56:56 – Eric Christ

Yeah, the simplest thing to do is, the URL’s a little complicated for the MailChimp sign-up form. If you go to my Christ for City Council Facebook page, it’s a pinned link on that page. It’s probably the easiest way to. You can direct people.

00:57:13 – Rico Figliolini

And they can find that by searching, is it Vote for Christ?

00:57:17 – Eric Christ

Well, yeah, just go in Facebook, Christ for City Council. We’ll take you there.

00:57:24 – Rico Figliolini

Cool. Alright. Hang in there with me for a minute. Everyone else, thank you again. Leave your reviews, your comments. There’ll be links in the show notes as well for most of what we’ve discussed. So check that out.

In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, host Rico Figliolini sits down with City Manager Brian Johnson to discuss pressing local issues, including deer overpopulation and potential culling efforts, a school digital signage request, and Simpsonwood park. They also dive into the latest legislation affecting impact of tort reform on city liability, annexation, and drone regulations. Plus, hear how the city’s marshals uncovered an illegal nightclub operating under the radar. Stay informed on the latest developments shaping Peachtree Corners. Listen now!

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THANK YOU TO THE SPONSORS OF OUR SHOW

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Timestamped Topics:
00:04:09 – Deer Overpopulation and Potential Culling Efforts
00:14:41 – Digital Signage Regulations for Community Schools
00:20:00 – Navigating Lawsuits and Tort Reform
00:30:50 – Parking Lot Slope Adjustments and Liability Concerns
00:32:31 – Navigating Legislation Impacts on Construction and Annexation
00:38:33 – Regulating Drones in Public Spaces
00:44:24 – Uncovering an Illegal Nightclub Operation
00:51:37 – Discussing City Matters Behind the Scenes

Transcript:

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. I appreciate you joining us. We have Brian Johnson, city manager. Hey, Brian.

00:00:08 – Brian Johnson

Hey, Rico. How are you? 

00:00:13 – Rico Figliolini

Good. Thanks for being with me. As usual, we’re going to be going through a bit of information about new things that we haven’t covered before. So there’s a lot of stuff going on in the city our size. Little things, big things, but everything needs attention. And everyone has an opinion. So it’s good to be able to go through this. Yeah, it’s good to go through this. But before we get there, let me just say thank you to EV Remodeling for being a sponsor of our show, as well as Vox Pop Uli, another company that is a tremendous supporter of ours as well. And you can find their information in the show notes below. But we thank them for supporting us. Both of them are businesses located here in the City of Peachtree Corners. One of them does remodeling from Design to Build, evremodelinginc.com. And the other one, voxpopuli.com, does anything that you need marketing, imprinting, object imprinting, from trade shows to vehicle wraps. Just, you know, just check them out. Links below. And if you’re watching this on YouTube or any of the other video channels like Facebook, subscribe to us. I appreciate that. So let’s get right down to it, Brian. I guess the first thing we talked about that would be on the list is something that my wife even was asking me about the other day. And I’ve had questions of it, and I’ve seen it. I mean, deer overpopulation in the city of Peachtree Corners, it’s not been like this for the longest time, I think. What are you hearing? What is allowed to be able to do? I know thinning of the herd is something that people talk about, but what is the reality of what can be done or can’t be done in a county park? Because that’s where a lot of them are.

00:02:10 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, so locally, so there’s a couple things to consider here is, you know, one, if you live anywhere in Peachtree Corners, really near the Chattahoochee River corridor, it is definitely as a protected corridor and serves really as a place for wildlife to go up and down because it’s a water source. And so, you know, a lot of people have seen deer in the past, but we have noticed that the city that we’ve had a lot more deer car interactions, if you will, in which the deer loses that battle and we end up getting a request to remove a deer. Which, you know, can also get complicated because some people have deer that die in their backyard way off the road and then they’ll call and say, can you pick it up? And we can’t go on to private property to do that because that’s, you know, a gratuity, if you will. But if it does get close to the right of way, we will take it. So, you know, even those aren’t even, you know, as cut and dry as we would like. But we have noticed that there’s been a lot more, you know, deer collisions with cars. And unbeknownst to us, but coincidentally at the same time, Gwinnett County asked the State Department of Natural Resources or State, you know, Game and Wildlife, one of the environmental, but I think it was DNR, to do a deer population study at Simpsonwood Park. And, you know, in Peachtree Corners, we have a couple of areas that are undeveloped that are even more, you know, of a great location for deer to, you know, stay around. The back of Neely Farm along the river has a big area for the residents. The back of Riverfield where the Fields Club has a really big area back there. The back of Waterside has an area along there. And then, you know, then you run into Jones Bridge Park and then a stretch where there’s not a lot of open area. And then you’ve got Simpsonwood Park. And so those areas are where a lot of deer are, you know, congregating. And so Gwinnett asked the state to do a study. The state came back and said that there is a significantly, you know, overpopulation of deer in the area. And they in turn asked, and then they provided the county with a lot of reasons why that’s not good. You know, everything from deer eating higher off the ground up, you know, onto the trees. You know, it’s got ecosystem effects, coyote attraction. Even, you know, the deer that are around, all of them aren’t as healthy as they could be. And there’s a lot of these second, third order effects. They laid out and said, hey, we do this elsewhere in the state, would like to be involved in, you know, deer overpopulation, you know, culling of the herd. And Gwinnett informed them that they can’t do it at Simpsonwood Park because the county has a policy of no hunting on county-owned property. So we didn’t know any of this was going on until then the state of Georgia approached us and said, hey, city, do you guys own any property that would be large enough for us to do, you know, set up a controlled hunt for the purposes of culling the herd? And we don’t specifically own any. You know, again, I ran through the organizations that really would be the ones that could say, yes, you could come out there or not. Neely Farm HOA, Waterside are the main ones. And so right now there is a conversation between us, the state, some of those entities of which we might end up being a facilitator of some sort. We obviously wouldn’t be doing it. It would be the state. It might be we’re merely making the introduction and then one of those property owners, if you will, says it’s okay and they coordinated with the state and we’re just communicating to the residents, could be.

00:06:55 – Rico Figliolini

It’s interesting that the county, I can understand that. I remember that rule about hunting on county property, which makes sense. You don’t want that happening. But this is a controlled thing. This is an environmental approach to something. This is something different than banning hunting because you don’t want people out there hunting. But this is something more controlled that the state would be doing, apparently. That doesn’t make sense to just say, well, we don’t allow hunting and that’s it. How many accidents, do you know how many accidents like that have occurred in the city? Are there any numbers?

00:07:32 – Brian Johnson

Oh, yeah, we have numbers. I mean, off the top of my head, I do not know. I would say within the last six months, we’re probably averaging probably one a week.

00:07:45 – Rico Figliolini

Wow, that many. Do you even know the number when they say overpopulation? How many deer are there out there that they’ve numbered in Simpsonwood? Do you know?

00:07:55 – Brian Johnson

I don’t. I didn’t see the report because, again, the only time we got involved is when the county told the state, hey, thanks for doing the study and confirming what we had already thought or what users of the park had told us. But if there’s anything that’s going to be done about it, it’s not going to be done on our property.

00:08:15 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, that’s sad because the overpopulation, I mean, they don’t have a natural predator, right, unless coyotes show up. God knows coyotes have been reported, at least on Nextdoor with pictures and stuff, not too far from here. Like, you know, Alpharetta, some other places north of us.

00:08:34 – Brian Johnson

I just saw one, Rico, with my own eyes about a month ago when I was walking my dog, because, you know, I live along the river, and I saw one on an evening, you know, probably six. I mean, it was really near sundown, and I saw a coyote running right along the…

00:08:52 – Rico Figliolini

In Peachtree Corners? Wow. Okay.

00:08:52 – Brian Johnson

It was running away from me. It wasn’t, you know, bothering, but yeah. I mean, so now there’s some other things too. Now, you know, I know mayor and council have had people approach them about this. You know, it isn’t as easy as we would like, because for all the people who are like, look, deer are posing a problem for motorists, for the ecosystem, the health of deer, you know, things like that, attracting animals like coyotes or whatever. For all of those who are like, something needs to be done, there’s the other ones that are like, no, you know, let nature take its course. There shouldn’t be any hunting, you know.

00:09:46 – Rico Figliolini

That’s the problem. Nature is not taking its course because there are no predators here.

00:09:51 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, well, but I mean, you know, what you get is, and then we also struggle with deer feeders. We don’t currently actually have a regulation prohibiting them. Some people have expressed to council that that should, you know, that they know of locations in which somebody is specifically trying to attract deer. And when you have a lot of deer, you don’t just attract one or two anymore. Now you’re attracting, I know there was a place at Waterside that I ended up talking to the resident that was nearby and was doing it. I rolled through there one weekend morning, you know, right as the sun was coming up, and there was probably 30 to 40 deer in the area, and there was a big feeder. And, you know, it’s just like, hey, this isn’t, you know, this isn’t good. And it was not too far from East Jones Bridge. So you start getting into them crossing it. So, you know, but then others are like, I enjoy the deer coming and feeding at my location. And, you know, don’t take that away. And so, you know, it’s unfortunate, but, you know, in our line of work, you know, local government management, there’s never a decision that’s just easy with you know only one side and everybody is on it so you do have some who are like don’t do it. But that is a problem and you know I wanted to bring it up just because people are talking about it. What is going to be done? We are trying to facilitate again, we don’t own property that is an area that you could do a controlled hunt. There are a few organizations that are in that position that may end up agreeing with the state for them to come out and do it once or twice during hunting season type of thing. But it does appear that Simpsonwood Park is not going to be one of those locations. So we’ll do what we need to, including if we have to facilitate the removal of the meat, you know, because the controlled hunt doesn’t just stop with, you know, there’s a deer that’s gone down, then what are you going to do with the carcass? You want to remove it. There are programs, including ones that harvest the meat and donate it to food banks and things like that. So we’re working through all of those. But we do scientifically have a deer overpopulation problem that does not have a natural way of getting better.

00:12:34 – Rico Figliolini

This is just a good argument for the city to take off over two public parks in its city property here. So from what I understand, it wouldn’t be expensive either. It’d be really cheap to buy those two pieces of property. The city could directly control everything. But I’m sure there’ll be people against that also because that’s an expansion of government. Which, you know, if you want control over some things, then you’ve got to do what you got to do. But speaking about that, let’s segue into something else too, which is a small thing necessarily, but there’s pros and cons to it too, I guess. And that is that Simpson Elementary is looking to do the same thing as Pinckneyville, a middle school house, which is a sign. I don’t know if it’s as grand as that, but they want a digital display sign possibly to go up at Simpson Elementary. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

00:13:33 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, so the Simpson Elementary principal, and I don’t know if it was based on PTA encouragement or maybe the public school system maintenance, I don’t know. But anyway, she was the point person to say, hey, we would like to take our current main sign in which they put messages up there, but they have to go out and put the individual letters in and spell it out. She was like, we would like to have a digital, you know, turn it into an LED display, a digital message board. Which functionally is, you know, just on the surface is a, you know, should be a no brainer. A school can have a sign, communicate with the community in a more, you know, really a more efficient way because, you know, on a computer you can type in the message and it automatically goes out there. You can change the messages a lot so you can put a lot more information. It makes sense. But like all things, it’s not so simple. You know, oftentimes you think signs, you know, okay, just where’s the placement and, you know, does it interfere with sight lines or cause a hazard to a motorist? And that’s the only thing you have to consider. But on LED displays, a whole different ballgame when you’re talking about something that illuminates and illuminating signage in which also there’s flashing with the fluctuations of it because things change. So it’s not just turning on a static light and then turning it off, now you have all of the different, you know, displays doing things, which, you know, also can be a distraction to motorists. So, you know, we’ve got to, you know, we’re going to help them navigate through this, but we do have, it is in a residential area with residents that live very close to that sign. And, you know, we’re going to end up having to consider the permitting of this in a way that hopefully doesn’t detract from the quality of life of the residents, but yet provides the benefit that we all know a digital message board would provide to a very important community school.

00:16:05 – Rico Figliolini

Right. So, Paul Duke High School, STEM High School has a digital sign, granted that’s on Peachtree Industrial Boulevard. Pinckneyville has their sign. And I get it. It’s kind of bright sometimes when there’s a white background to the sign versus a blue or a different color background that is way brighter. The lumens on it, it’s just so bright. I’m imagining those things can be toned down a little bit in a sign, and it doesn’t have to be as bright as that because that’s overpowering sometimes. It just depends when you come by.

00:16:42 –  Brian Johnson

And, you know, this whole process went through with Pinckneyville Middle, and it wasn’t without its detractors either of the people who do live there. You know, and say that it’s going to interfere with their ability to either, you know, enjoy their back or front yard or, you know, could be a distraction to motorists. Those are things you have to consider. It can be done, you know, but you have to regulate, you know, also hours of operation. And there’s even regulation at the state and federal level on certain roadways in which how fast the signs can change. Because if things start to get to where it’s not just a transition to a new message, but things are flashing, that creates, you know, distractions from motorists and that’s considered a driving hazard. So yes, everything from how bright to how quick you can change message, to even hours in which you can have digital messages on there. All have to be discussed.

00:17:49 – Rico Figliolini

And if it’s, you know, for the school purpose, right? I mean, the great thing about digital is that you can dim the lights a little bit. You can adjust the hours on it because no one’s going to be driving to school at six o ‘clock, seven o ‘clock in the evening, unless there’s an event that night. Different, right? But even still, like at a certain hour, it can be shut off or it can be dimmed down where you have to literally be within 40 feet of it to see the sign maybe.

00:18:41 – Brian Johnson

So at the end of the day, look, I think everyone would agree having that ability, a school that’s a very important community school and being able to, it’s going to make them much more productive and efficient when it comes to communicating with the community. 

00:19:01 – Rico Figliolini

Right, right.

00:19:01 – Brian Johnson

We just have to navigate this very carefully. But that process is being done. And, of course, mayor and council are very supportive of this as long as we, you know, my directive is navigate the minefield that is the local resident concerns and, you know, motorist safety.

00:19:22 – Rico Figliolini

The good part of this is that these are quality of life issues that a city can address better for its residents than a county can, I think, on a county level. One good reason for having a city is to be able to address some of these issues that, you know, really on a county level, someone voting on it from the other side of the county or something, deciding what the effects are in our city wouldn’t make sense, right? There is also, let’s, the capital is in session. Which can always be dangerous, but also good.

00:19:58 – Brian Johnson

It is always dangerous.

00:20:04 – Rico Figliolini

You never know what goes on there. And the cities that, not just people are affected, but cities are affected, right? The biggest thing is tort reform right now that Governor Kemp is looking at. Southwest Gwinnett Chamber had a big talk on tort reform recently, a few months back. And one of the things I didn’t know was that settlement of lawsuits can garner a lawyer as much as 40% of whatever is settled for. It’s not 20%, it’s not 25%, it’s like 40%. I thought that was ridiculous, that number. Not only that, but when you’re suing, some lawyer told me once that when you’re suing something on a case, you sue everyone. It doesn’t matter if you think they’re not involved, they’re involved. You sue everyone and let the judge decide who’s involved or not. Which draws in a lot of different people, right? So the city can be drawn into lawsuits that really may not be, you know, their fault per se. You know, and I always think about lawsuits as a good way of punishing those that need to be punished a little bit because money speaks, right? But sometimes it can be carried away to a crazy extent. You were sharing an example with me about Milton. So why don’t you talk about that a little bit and talk about that and about what that tort reform might look like for us.

00:21:28 – Brian Johnson

Yeah. So, you know, scenarios you just brought up, Rico, are very common for us. We get named in a lot of lawsuits. We have active, you know, local governments always have a multitude of active lawsuits at any one time at various stages of it. And yes, the shotgun approach of suing everybody and then just letting the judge figure it out is one where if it happens within our corporate limits, we’re more times than not just pulled into it. But, you know, again, the ability to sue and having legal rights and, you know, remedies is important to have. 

00:22:13 – Rico Figliolini

For sure.

00:22:13 – Brian Johnson

So, you know, the dilemma is always where do you balance that against, you know, being overly litigious as many people are? And, and, you know, I could tell you horror stories of the trip and fall lawsuits we get where somebody literally just trips on, you know, the world is not flat literally or figuratively and they’ll sue us just because. Now that being said, we do have a large, call it, you know, geographical area in which we are responsible. All the public right of way. Sidewalks, streets, all of the property we own at City Hall or Town Green are all ours. And so, you know, there is some things that, you know, general liability insurance we have to carry because there are things that can happen that we do need to be protected. Now, there’s an interesting case, though, that just came up that contributed to the governor’s tort reform. That is a big case that the city of Milton had. And it was, I guess, a jury verdict not too long ago. And this is a case where before the city of Milton was created, when it was still unincorporated, was it Fulton?

00:23:47 – Brian Johnson

Right.

00:23:48 – Brian Johnson

An owner who had a driveway coming out to one of the public streets put a planter, which was a truck tire, turned on its side and filled in with dirt and made into a decorative kind of, you know, gateway piece to their driveway. It was laid, though, in what was the edge, but the public right-of-way. It still was on, kind of call it the shoulder of the road, if you will. This is a two-lane road. Well, then at some point, not too long ago, a couple years, I think, but now the City of Milton is a city, there was an individual college student who lost control of his vehicle, single vehicle accident, but hit this planter and died. I don’t know if it was the impact or his phone from the vehicle, but he died. His family sued the city of Milton, saying the city of Milton should not have let that planter be in its right of way. And prior to that, cities and counties had always been like, look, we’re regulating the travel way making sure that it’s free of obstacles, but there are impediments in the shoulder. Probably the most common one are utility poles. Georgia Power, using them as an example, is not going to want to negotiate with every single property owner to put a utility pole on their property. So what do they do? They come just inside of public right-of-way. Place it as far away from the road as they can, but it is still in public right of way. And that way they only have to negotiate with essentially one entity, a public entity that owns this stretch of. So now the lawsuit, Milton through sovereign immunity and other stuff, won the first one. And then on appeal, the family was awarded a $38 million verdict. And right now there’s, it’s being hopefully taken up by the Georgia Supreme Court because of the, you know, bigger picture impacts that this could have on any impediment in the right of way that then the city should be of, you know, should have knowledge of. And we’ve got to remove it or else we’re going to be, you know, at risk for being, you know, liable for some lawsuit. So it’s an example where, you know, again, sometimes being overly litigious ends up creating, you know, situations. And if this appeal stood, cities and counties would end up having to take a real hard look at what it permits, how it permits it, not just along the roadway, but I mean, way out of the roadway all the way to the edge of it. And then Georgia power is going to, you know, and some other utilities, you know, you have traffic cabinets and traffic signals, you know, you see the green boxes there or whatever color they are, but you know, the boxes there that are regulating the signal phase and timing of a signalized intersection. If somebody hits that. We have to bury every single one of those, which will.

00:27:18 – Rico Figliolini

But even the poles, I mean, I think there’s a pole by Peachtree Baptist Church, that intersection in the Y. It was a pole in the middle of a triangle thing, I think, at one point. I don’t know if it’s still there. But it was knocked down once. I mean, there’s plenty of those types of things where cars get out of control for whatever reason. They go slamming into a pole. It’s like one of those walk-flashing.

00:27:44 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, it was from, yeah. A pedestrian actuated crossing where you hit it and it flashes. Yeah.

00:27:49 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. So, I mean, there’s that. I remember even along the median, like Peachtree Parkway, I think at one point someone had told me that they don’t do hardwood trees anymore. They do what they call breakaway trees. Because if a car hits it, it should break away and not cause too much damage, right? But if you’re hitting a hard oak wood tree, that person’s going to die. Now, these things will happen anyway. There was an accident on Peachtree Parkway going south. I remember seeing a car. It pretty much, it was crepe myrtle trees. So those are considered breakaway, I guess. It had jumped the sidewalk and went right into that tree. It was burning. There was some, I think there might have been a fatality, certainly injuries there. That was during last summer, I think it was. These things happen all the time. But if they’re taking up tort reform, I would hope that they’re not just looking at the reward amount, because $38 million, I mean, that just seems to be overly blown. But how do you value a life? But $38 million is just for a city, for something like that. Hopefully they adjust. I know it doesn’t affect the city, but the outcome of payment to lawyers, they should really restrict the amount of money being paid out to lawyers. Is that $38 million? Without doubt is at least 30% of that is going to the lawyer, to the law firm that’s suing, which will be interesting about tort reform because apparently most of the house, most of the capital is made up of lawyers or consultants. So it’d be interesting if they actually do anything.

00:29:30 – Brian Johnson

And, you know, again, they serve a purpose, but, you know, we have had, I’ve had this in other cities I’ve managed too, an attorney will get with somebody who’s usually, has a disability that requires them to be in a wheelchair. And they’ll really, it’s not done right. It’s essentially they’ll conspire. By that, I mean, the person in a wheelchair will seek out instances in which a local government is not meeting code to the, you know, exact letter. And then they’ll, the attorney will reach out on behalf of his or her client and say, you’re in, you know, violation of American with Disabilities Act. And if you don’t do something within a certain period of time, we’re going to sue. And so then, you know, you got, now again, ADA exists for a legitimate reason.

00:30:28 – Rico Figliolini

Absolutely.

00:30:29 – Brian Johnson

And, you know, all that kind of stuff. But, you know, these would be people who I remember one of them, we had a parking lot that had the handicap spot, and then you have that hatched area next to it so that you could load a wheelchair. The slope of the parking lot was two degrees off the, you know, and required us to dig up a whole section of it just to move it two degrees.

00:30:57 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. Interesting. There’s, I think, Target and Publix redid their handicap and adjusted it. Way different than it used to be before, probably for some of the same reasons, the elevation issue and stuff. And I know the Town Green part where the Fort of Payne.

00:31:18 – Brian Johnson

Fort Payne, yeah.

00:31:20 – Rico Figliolini

Fort Payne. Fort of Payne. Fort Payne. The fencing had to go around there allows one entrance. Now there’s signage there saying, if you allow your kids in here or whoever comes in here, needs to understand that you could get hurt if you’re not, you know, doing it the right way. And the insurance company had told us, right? Had told the city that.

00:31:44 – Brian Johnson

Yeah. I mean, it was like, look, you have created an obstacle course. And it’s an advanced, it has advanced stuff. You can’t be letting, you can’t have it unsecure. So we have only one entrance. And then, you know, if you’re not with you know, a parent or over 18 years old yourself, you’re not supposed to be in there. And so if you just ignore it and get hurt, then our insurance feels like we’re, you know, we’ve mitigated our risk because we, you know, told them, hey, you know, you’re not supposed to be here without, you know, we also have instructional videos on how to do these things that you can use and everything we can do. But there’s still some people who will do it. I mean, again, we live in a litigious society. We all get it, but there are some things that we got to be careful. In this case, and obviously the city of Milton case isn’t ours, but it will impact us greatly if it is upheld.

00:32:45 – Rico Figliolini

Sure. Like a lot of legislation that goes on there that affects cities, construction material, what things can be built with, whether it’s steel or wood. And if it’s over, I mean, I remember that was a piece of legislation at one point. I think one city had that you couldn’t build something taller than three stories without using steel or metal. And that was struck down apparently.

00:33:07 – Brian Johnson

It was because the, you know, timber lobby in the state, like Georgia Pacific was like, no, no, no, no, we don’t want, we want to still be able to use wood, you know, up to, I think you can go up to four, two, four stories with wood before you have to go to steel.

00:33:27 – Rico Figliolini

Why build something that can last for 100 years?

00:33:33 – Brian Johnson

Right. And, you know, there’s even some, I mean, this session, you know, right now, procurement law in Georgia is if a project exceeds $100,000, you have to bid it no matter what. And it hasn’t been changed since 2000. And we’ve had inflation since 2000. It’s really hard for us to find projects that are less than $100,000 that are any. And so it just slows things up because then you’ve got to bid it out and you have to, you have to award it to the lowest qualified bidder. And so you run into, you know, problems sometimes where companies are underbidding to get the job with the knowledge you’re not going to be able to finish it with that amount. So they try to change order you to death.

00:34:22 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. Yes.

00:34:24 – Brian Johnson

So legislation, just real quick, is to raise that value to $250,000 before you have to bid.

00:34:31 – Rico Figliolini

That makes sense. Because I’ve seen projects where they do come in and low bid, and then you’re sort of forced to pay the rest of it because you need it done. It’s not like it goes from scratch again. We’ll hold them to it, too, because even with a bond or something, it’s just not going to happen. Some of the other legislation, I think another piece was about annexation. So in brief, how would that affect us?

00:34:56 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, so there’s still things happening at the Capitol that are removing a city’s ability to annex an area in which the people who live in that area or own property in that area want to get annexed into the city, that other parties could stop them. There’s legislation making it to where counties or in Georgia, potentially almost could get to the point where they could stop an annexation, which, you know, in a state that allows counties to charge a millage rate just to the unincorporated. In Georgia, that usually means that the county will lose a little bit of money when they lose property because they lose the ability to charge property tax to that entity. So counties are resistant. So that’s inhibiting cities to do it. Even the Gwinnett delegation themselves, you know, which are the legislators that represent a district that has some part of Gwinnett in it. They’re discussing having a rule that’s setting the Gwinnett delegation rule such that if there’s an annexation bill, you know, almost like if, say, the city of Peachtree Corners wanted to allow a area contiguous to us to vote on whether they wanted to command, say, a subdivision or something like that, that everybody in the delegation has to vote on having it move forward, not just the ones that represent the areas of affected. So, you know, we could have a legislator that barely represents Gwinnett up in, like, Brazelton or unincorporated area, and the county gets with them and they’re like, we don’t want this to happen. We’ll lose a little bit of money. And then they’re like, yeah, I don’t want it to happen.

00:36:47 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, that’s because of the trend of all these places like Mulberry, right? That’s the newest city in Gwinnett County. It’s the trend of all these cities coming into being, chopping away a little bit at that county budget. And now the county has to fight for the budget that they need. Although they have less area to cover, except for the emergency services.

00:37:14 – Brian Johnson

They do. But remember, they’re only losing a revenue stream, in this case a millage that’s charged only to unincorporated. And that’s their own doing. Like in other states that don’t allow that, say in North Carolina. Counties in North Carolina can only charge one type of tax, and that’s a property tax to everybody in the county. It’s one. They can’t then create special, you know, you know, focus taxes that only go to unincorporated. You know, in Gwinnett, Gwinnett has a countywide tax that even you and I who live in Peachtree Corners pay. And that’s for the countywide services like the courthouse, the jail, the health department. But then they charge very specific taxes just to the unincorporated area. Parks and Rec, police, you know, code enforcement, zoning administration.

00:38:15 – Rico Figliolini

That’s interesting

00:38:17 – Brian Johnson

They don’t have to do that. They chose to, oh, we’re going to. So it’s a little bit of a self-inflicted.

00:38:24 – Rico Figliolini

So the county charges for parks to the unincorporated. But we have parks here in the city. But we’re not paying for that fee.

00:38:33 – Brian Johnson

No, we’re paying. You’re paying for it.

00:38:36 – Rico Figliolini

Okay, we are paying for that.

00:38:37 – Brian Johnson

Just like police, we allowed, once we became a city, we allowed Gwinnett to keep charging that in our city limits in return for them continuing to operate the parks.

00:38:49 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Alright. Yeah, so we should probably buy those parks and just take over the whole system.

00:38:55 – Brian Johnson

Take over the millage.

00:38:58 – Rico Figliolini

All right, so drone, drone regulation. I think you mentioned there was drone regulation. I know a lot of people that fly drones around here. And certainly there are roofing companies that will do the drone thing and check your roof and stuff and show you where the damage is and stuff like that. Building inspectors do that to some degree. So there’s also, and people, just individuals going around to Town Green and doing his own drone. And so there’s legislation up maybe, right? And part of that is probably because of all the drone stuff and the unidentified UAPs up in New Jersey that everyone went crazy on, whether it was Chinese or Americans. And now we understand the FAA allowed some of that to go on. It’s like one of the things that just came out. But who knows, right? Could it be aliens? Could it be foreign governments or our own? I mean, there’s so many conspiracy theories that we’re tracking nuclear weapon transportation into different places. And it’s just like, you could go crazy. So what’s going on with the drone legislation here in Georgia?

00:40:05 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, so this actually isn’t bad. Although, by the way, you know, you laugh about it could be anything, which in a lot of cases, you’re like, really? But you do have to give some of those like, you know, tin hat, you know, tinfoil hat crowd, some a little bit of, you know, latitude, because we did have a, what is it? What do they call it? Stratospheric.

00:40:32 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. Those balloons. Yeah. Yeah.

00:40:34 – Brian Johnson

You know, I mean, so there are some unique things.

00:40:38 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. And that one was very unique. That was a huge one from China.

00:40:41 – Brian Johnson

It was in the stratosphere purposely, you know, going across.

00:40:46 – Rico Figliolini

And they have solar panels too. They were powering with solar panels too. So it was like a whole big thing. Yeah.

00:40:53 – Brian Johnson

I mean, so, but in this case. Yes, there was a Georgia legislator who, with the whole thing that was happening up in the coast of New Jersey and everything, was like, we should give local governments better ability to control unidentified aerial vehicles. And so in this case, the bill is allowing the local government to regulate drones below 400 feet.

00:41:26 – Rico Figliolini

Well because the FAA takes care of drones of a certain weight and higher, where if you have a large drone, you have to actually get a number for that drone.

00:41:36 – Brian Johnson

And have a FAA license, a pilot.

00:41:40 – Rico Figliolini

You have to actually take a course. Correct. So me as a commercial, let’s say I wanted to fly my own drone as a business because I’m going to shoot drone shots. I want to use it for the magazine and stuff. I actually have to be licensed or use someone that’s licensed to do that.

00:41:41 – Brian Johnson

You do. And for our concerts, you know, we use a third party, you know, firm to shoot video of it. And you’ve seen some of the video we’ve had on that. The drone operator who does the filming for it, he has a license and he has to get a permit from the FAA to be able to fly it.

00:42:18 – Rico Figliolini

But only because I think it’s by the FAA does it by weight versus by height. There is a height.

00:42:24 – Brian Johnson

There is a height.

00:42:26 – Rico Figliolini

But it does buy weight versus, because most of the stuff that a person like you and me would buy is under that weight requirement. But you’re saying that that legislation would then cover even those drones?

00:42:40 – Brian Johnson

Only if they’re going to be over public spaces in which there’s a public gathering, which I believe they define it as 50 people or more that are, that plan to be around each other for more than 30 minutes. And so that would be where, alright, now we don’t want there to be unidentified drone activity. That is where you get into, because even for our concerts, Rico, even below a certain height, the FAA regulates it because there’s so many people.

00:43:16 – Rico Figliolini

Right. But if I was, and I’ve seen, lots of photographers do drones also because it’s part of that thing. They’ll go along the river, which is, it wouldn’t be a part, it’s both a public place, but there’s no people there maybe, or there are not enough people like you’re saying. So that’s a reasonable thing, I guess. That’s not covered by that probably.

00:43:37 – Brian Johnson

No, I mean, I think this is really more of public space where there’s a gathering of the public of more than, I think it was 50 people who are planning on being there for more than 30 minutes. Then, and only then would the local government be in a position to say you still need to identify who you are if you’re going to be flying below 400 feet. You’re still, above 400 feet is still out of our control.

00:44:05 – Rico Figliolini

So if it’s a private party, party in someone’s backyard and they have a drone, they want to fly it up and, you know, do that. That’s okay.

00:44:14 – Brian Johnson

That wouldn’t be because that wouldn’t be on public property.

00:44:16 – Rico Figliolini

Right. Okay. Alright. I guess that all makes sense.

00:44:21 – Brian Johnson

And again, trust me, this wasn’t our legislation. I’m just telling you the unique things. I mean, every day as I’m going through the bills that hit, you know, just to see our lobbyist is giving me, you know, a heads up on, hey, how does this affect you? I oftentimes have to tell them, hey, this wouldn’t be good. So you’re in a position to tell a legislator or the bill’s author in some cases to say, hey, can you tweak it? Whatever. We’ve had to have bills tweaked that would have inhibited our ability to have innovation get tested here in Curiosity Lab because it was a prohibition against certain activity across all sidewalks. And we were like, time out. We need to have the, you know, so we’ve had Curiosity Lab carved out of legislation before. We’ve had the bill language get tweaked before, and we’ve certainly done things to completely help a bill to its demise because it would have been harmful to us. In some cases, just us, or other cases, just all cities.

00:45:37 – Rico Figliolini

Interesting.

00:45:37 – Brian Johnson

It’s a dangerous time.

00:45:39 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, so many aspects of governing a city and what you all have to do. There is some good stuff, though, too. So let’s celebrate something as well that the sheriff department, I mean, the marshal department, sorry, sheriff marshal. The marshals did find some interesting illegal things going on in the City of Peachtree Corners.

00:46:05 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, so this is a good story that does reflect the fact that when you’re able to have more time, resources, and intimate knowledge of an area, you can oftentimes uncover things that you couldn’t or you’re not in that position. Our marshals were able to uncover what was, and I believe they only had operated it one or two times before he got involved, but an illegal nightclub. That was operating essentially like speakeasies used to operate back in the day, which is they found a location. I don’t want to get into the exact location right now because it’s, citations have been issued, but it hasn’t actually been, you know.

00:47:03 – Rico Figliolini

Because it was a commercial?

00:47:04 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, in municipal court. But found a location in which they could have a retail storefront. But then the storefront was very, call it shallow and small. And then there was a door both through the back of that and a side door in which, you know, two thirds of this lease space was actually an illegal nightclub, hookah lounge, you name it. But had not gotten anything permitted. They didn’t have plans that reflected this, so they were in violation of a building permit. They hadn’t filed for a business license. They didn’t have a license to serve alcohol, so the state’s Department of Revenue was involved. And they also, the fire code had been limited to like 60 people based on the square footage, and they were having 200 plus people, And our marshal’s intelligence, you know, network was able to then uncover the underground, you know, call it, you know, marketing that this place was doing and they were running a full on club. You know, like a black market club. And had it not been for the marshal’s ability to, you know, dig into this, you know, they probably would have kept going. And, you know, oftentimes the other and there’s no houses near this. So you didn’t have that aspect that could have come up. But the danger of these kind of clubs, whether they’re the ones that move around periodically or the ones that try to keep, you know, keep it quiet are there’s a reason that they’re trying to keep it quiet. These types of clubs generally have people that enjoy them. Well, at least maybe not a majority of them, but there are people that only like to go to clubs that are kind of secret because they’re wanting to do things that the law doesn’t allow them to. And oftentimes can end up in violence and other criminal activity. We may have averted that happening at this one. But, you know, why it was significant is there was a lot of money. This is not a open a door and then there’s this big room with some tables and chairs. This is a full-on outfitted, like remodeled nightclub. That was operating like a, in fact, the name of it was The Secret Lounge.

00:49:50 – Rico Figliolini

Amazing.

00:49:51 – Brian Johnson

And so, you know, kudos to them. There’s from the city attorney, you know, Gwinnett County PD was, supported this effort. But, you know, it was our marshal, led by our marshals, identified by our marshals. And, you know, the city was able to keep it from, you know, continuing to operate. So there are good things. We may have averted a disaster here.

00:50:16 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, it’s great that they’re doing a lot of good work out there. And all the technology that’s coming in, I mean, that certainly helps too.

00:50:26 – Brian Johnson

And, you know, and Rico, you’re talking about drones. We put up a drone to look at the traffic migration in this area to kind of help build our case, our evidence against the owner. Because we didn’t want the owner to be like, you know, what are you talking about? Or I haven’t had anybody come over here yet.

00:50:51 – Rico Figliolini

Right.

00:50:51 – Brian Johnson

So our marshals continue to use drones as a, you know, very effective law enforcement tool. So they definitely have their place.

00:51:01 – Rico Figliolini

No, for sure. And I’ve listened to some of the stuff that some of the products and tools of the trade, if you will, that they’ve investigated. Some really cutting edge stuff. So it’s all good. I think the city certainly gains by that. So you all, you know, I mean, listen, you all do a good job out there. Well, we’ve come to the end of our time. We’ve covered quite a bit. So Brian, I appreciate you doing this with me.

00:51:31 – Brian Johnson

Always my pleasure. Appreciate you providing this communication vehicle for, you know, those who listen and watch can learn about some things that aren’t necessarily always, we’re not necessarily always able to include in things like city council meetings or whatever, because this is kind of the, you know, the day-to-day type of thing that, you know, oftentimes people don’t realize goes on behind the scenes here. So I appreciate you letting, you know, our citizens have this opportunity to hear what is going on behind the scenes.

00:52:07 – Rico Figliolini

Absolutely. Love doing this. I love getting the word out. I don’t always agree with everything that goes on. But the good part is that we can talk back and forth about this and get out, you know, the facts and ask questions because I don’t know everything. So I’d like to ask lots of questions, doing this stuff. So I appreciate you doing this. Everyone else, certainly, you know, subscribe, like the page. You’ll get notified when we have more podcasts. We try to do this on a regular basis, like every month or every five weeks. Usually after a city council meeting, this way we could discuss what just happened, let’s say Tuesday of this week or the sessions like that’s going on in the capitol. So if you have questions, let me know. If you have questions for Brian, he can be reached at the city. Obviously, go to the website, PeachtreeCornersGA.gov, and you can find a way to reach that. Or put your questions in the comments. If you’re on Facebook listening to this, or X, or YouTube, our YouTube channel. And if you’re getting this off Apple or any of the other podcasts, just reach out to Peachtree Corners Magazine, Peachtree Corners Life, and we’ll answer those questions. Again, thank you for our sponsors, EV Remodeling, Inc. and Vox Populi. You’ll find their information in the show notes. So thanks again, everyone. Appreciate you being with us.

Andrew and Daniel Hajduk, father and son of VOX-POP-ULI, discuss their family business specializing in custom printing, embroidery and laser engraving with host Rico Figliolini. The Hajduks share their journey through the evolution of printing technology and their approach to creating impactful branding for businesses.

Discover how this family-owned business adapts and thrives in a rapidly changing industry. Don’t miss their insights into the power of branding and the joy of bringing client visions to life. Join us to learn how a commitment to quality and community shapes the future of a business.

Resources:
Vox Pop Uli Website: https://vox-pop-uli.com/
Facebook: / voxpopuli.inc
LinkedIn: / vox-pop-uli
Instagram: / vox_pop_uli

Timestamp:
00:00:00 – Vox-Pop-Uli: Adapting to Changing Technology
00:03:52 – Customizing Solutions for Clients
00:06:05 – Branding Importance for Clients
00:08:56 – Providing Seamless Solutions for Businesses
00:11:38 – Delivering Quality and Value in Business Relationships
00:14:37 – Diversifying Marketing Strategies for Business Growth
00:18:11 – Commitment and Adaptation in Challenging Times
00:22:00 – Hiring for Attitude and Growth Mindset
00:23:59 – Fostering a Growth-Oriented Workplace Culture
00:26:49 – Navigating Deadlines and Expectations in the Promotional Products Industry
00:28:45 – The Evolving Landscape of Business and Community Growth
00:30:55 – The Rise of Retail Density in Peachtree Corners
00:33:45 – Navigating Family Dynamics in the Workplace

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hey, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. Appreciate you being here with us, listening to this either on a podcast through Apple or iHeartRadio or Spotify or on Facebook on our live stream or YouTube as well. So I have some great guests today, father, son, Andrew, and Daniel Hajduk from Vox Pop Uli. It’s a business that I’m highly familiar with, the space and the industry. I have done some work in it a little bit early on when I was younger. God, when I was younger. But, you know, you do need experience in this business, and it doesn’t change. So, you know, putting things on objects, creating marketing collateral, this is what you all guys do, right? I mean, so tell us a little bit, Andrew, where this all goes.

00:00:46 – Andrew Hajduk

So, hi, my name’s Andrew Hajduk, and I’m the president of Vox Pop Uli. I started the company in 1996. At that time, I had a partner. We worked for a company that was kind of similar to this. Although the technology’s changed, but we thought we were smarter, we thought we were better and decided to go out on our own. We had a couple of clients that followed us and since then have always just worked to be super responsive to our clients and go where the technology is going. You know, when we started the company, digital printing didn’t exist. And we’ve gotten big into digital printing. We’ve gone into embroidery, into laser engraving. and all the different things that help companies communicate their brand.

00:01:29 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, it’s interesting. I think it was Curiosity Lab. Someone from there that told me, listen, I think they tried to do Louisville Sluggers, the bat. And they needed something printed on it. And they were like, you guys can’t do this, can you? I forget what the quantity was ridiculously small considering, you know, it could have been a thousand or 500, but it was a small number. You guys were able to do that too, I think. Just knock it out.

00:01:51 – Andrew Hajduk

We’re actually on the next generation of that, and I don’t want to spoil anybody’s surprise until that one gets unveiled. But, yeah, we did the first generation that the city used in some travel and some promotions, and it was a pretty cool combination because it was a little mini bat that was engraved and printed with city branding with the logos for Curiosity Labs and some of the city stuff.

00:02:13 – Rico Figliolini

It’s cool. I saw that on my little tour that you guys gave me, so I appreciate seeing that because that sort of got my mind moving along about what else can he imprint? Like if I give him something, can he do it?

00:02:22 – Andrew Hajduk

That’s, that’s, you know, one of the things that we love to do. And one of the things that we love about this location and where we’re at and serving the people that we do is we love getting people in here because you get to see what we do. But once you walk around, you see that and you’re like, okay, well, could we do this? Or could I do that? It’s always a lot of fun to walk people through here because they see what we do. Then they start to kind of make it their own and see their logo on things.

00:02:52 – Rico Figliolini

And Daniel, you’re in marketing and you’ve been here about two and a half years with your dad, I think, right?

00:02:57 – Daniel Hajduk

Yeah, about two and a half years. The summer of 2022, after I completed four years in the Navy, I wanted to… I realized I wanted to get back to something like this, something that doesn’t feel like work most of the time, something that you’re growing something constantly and doing something different every single day, like the bats. I mean, that morning, no idea we’d print on bats, but that came up the next day, and we have bats going, and we’re even in the back right now working on the new edition, and it’s really fun.

00:03:26 – Rico Figliolini

You can’t share what that is?

00:03:30 – Andrew Hajduk

Not yet. I don’t want to get in trouble with the city. First dibs.

00:03:34 – Rico Figliolini

I’m just kidding. Did the military background help you a little bit?

00:03:39 – Daniel Hajduk

Yes. One thing I like to, I always ask them and question them on why we do things a certain way. Why do we do it like this? How did you learn how to do this? Now, why is it like this? So it gave me an experience of… One thing the military is really good at is structure with things. And I love mixing that, the strengths of that with our kind of complete customization on everything we can do. And so really just maximizing what we can do for clients, what we can do for ourselves at the best potential.

00:04:10 – Rico Figliolini

A bit of problem solving sometimes when a client comes to you and you’re not sure, they’re not sure maybe, and you have to guide them a little bit.

00:04:18 – Andrew Hajduk

It’s trying to figure out, and we ask a lot of questions, and there’s folks that we work phenomenally well with, and we’ve got some really good long -term relationships. And sometimes it’s tough because in that initial period, we do ask a lot of questions because I’m going to try to help you get to what you’re trying to do. And I’ve got another customer who says, hey, one of the things I like about you guys is you give me what I need, not what I always ask for. But that’s what we’re trying to figure out is, okay, how are you going to use this? Who’s going to be putting it together? How’s it going to be distributed? All of those things to try to maybe get to a better idea. Maybe not. And maybe what we originally started with is the best way, but we try to get there.

00:05:02 – Rico Figliolini

Is there a philosophy that you want to share? I mean, I sense a philosophy in here.

00:05:07 – Andrew Hajduk

We do whatever it takes to make a customer look successful. And that is the greatest reward for us. I mean, I love the project business. We love doing things. We’re not coming in here. Daniel mentioned the bats, different things. We don’t come in here and do the same thing every single day. But there’s no greater reward than when we see our stuff on TV at the Army-Navy game, when we did a bunch of stuff for the Sun Bowl, when we saw that come back and clients are sending us pictures or showing us how things work out. And which ultimately leads to the greatest reward of all is somebody saying, hey, here’s somebody else in my company that you should be working with.

00:05:52 – Rico Figliolini

It’s interesting. I mean, obviously, you’re based here in Peachtree Corners, state of Georgia, but your stuff goes all over the place. Trade shows in Vegas, I’m sure, West Coast and all over the place. What type of clients? I know in sales, you always ask, I guess, what’s your preferred prospect, your lead? Like, who is your client? Who would you say, even if it’s a variety of clients, how would you describe that?

00:06:17 – Andrew Hajduk

So I think, and it sounds kind of funny to say this sometimes, but the best client is first and one that has a similar mindset that we do, that believes that it’s important to brand. It’s important to get your name, your logo, your look out there. There’s a lot of guys out there, and a big portion of our business is we work with a lot of retailers. And we have retail customers that don’t market a ton. They don’t worry about what the appearance of the store is and things like that. And, you know, that ultimately gets reflected. But if you want to convey a certain image, right, and it doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of money, but if your branding is important, if consistent branding is important, if getting the word out there, right, and even for our B2B clients, we’ve got some great B2B clients here in Peachtree Corners right behind us as well. And they care. They want their employees to feel special. They want their associates to look good. It’s important that their people look good in the marketplace. And that’s the best kind of client.

00:07:21 – Rico Figliolini

I’ve been following you a bit on LinkedIn and commenting and engaging a little bit on some of your posts. I saw one that had a deal, I think it was with truck wraps, which really hit home for me because I totally don’t understand why people can’t get it into their head there. After three years of something, you really do want to refresh it. It’s almost like a restaurant that opens up in another restaurant space and keeps their awnings in sort of the three -year -old, four -year -old decorations outside rather than replacing it all. This way you look like a new place. How do you do that? How do you work with people that, you know, I’m sure you’re doing other things with them, but you may say to them, you know, that awning needs to be replaced or something.

00:08:08 – Andrew Hajduk

I try to bring it up. We probably wrap an average of 600 vehicles a year for our clients. And one of the questions that we often get asked is, how long is it going to last? And my response is, it’s going to last far longer than its useful life, meaning that it’s going to stop disrupting the environment. We have a phrase that I like to use around here. I said, you’ve got to be tastefully obnoxious. Right? You’ve got to get people’s attention because over time, everything starts to blend into the environment. And so, you know, if it’s we don’t think of our vehicles in terms of marketing budget. And quite honestly, it’s the lowest cost per impression that you can get out there. And we should be looking at it and not just rewrapping a vehicle either when we get a new one or when we wreck it.

00:08:56 – Rico Figliolini

I mean, that makes sense. I mean, they drive their vehicles around, they park. Maybe in front of their retail place of their restaurant and catering. I mean, there’s a value for it to look a certain way. You don’t want it to look dingy if you’re providing food. Like, there’s just a real value, I think, in how you present yourself. So when it comes to marketing then, how do you approach companies? How are you getting your business leads?

00:09:24 – Daniel Hajduk

So a lot of our business has come from other clients of ours. So one person works at X company. They either move to that company or have a friend at this company. They use us there. So it’s kind of just a domino effect of people just notice what we can do for them. And it just keeps growing and keeps growing and keeps growing. Beginning of last year, we took a different approach and we really got aggressive, I would say, with trying to really focus here in the Atlanta area to service everyone around us and just really grow with everyone. Like our neighbors next door or someone two miles down the road or anyone here in the city, we know that there’s opportunity because there’s so many great businesses in the area and everyone needs what we’re doing. And we know so many people struggle with something that shouldn’t be a hassle on their end. It should be something they send to us and we take care of and we deliver beyond their expectations.

00:10:18 – Rico Figliolini

I was reading some of your branding in the foyer, in the entrance. And one of the lines was to, something that’s used quite a bit, but it’s interesting, not everyone follows through, turnkey operation. Make it silly stupid for people. Make it so easy for them that when you deliver the job, it’s done, they don’t have to worry about anything.

00:10:43 – Daniel Hajduk

We had a, this is why we see that there’s all this opportunity here and just Peachtree Corners alone. We had a lady come in from a company that’s on the other side of that intersection down there, and she called in and mentioned that she needed help with hats because the hat order she had got canceled on someone online right before the event, and they weren’t going to be able to get it to her in time. She called in and said, hey, come in, let’s take a look, and we’ll figure this out. She came in about 10 minutes later, and within five minutes, we had a hat picked out. We gave her pricing. We had proofs to her that evening. And we had the job two or two days later. So when I tell someone, getting a bucket of hats shouldn’t be difficult for your event. Getting employee apparel shouldn’t be difficult. Having a trade show backdrop shouldn’t be difficult to get. Whatever you need, it should not be hard. You should not have to be worrying about checking every step for approval. We’ll tell you what we’re going to deliver, tell you when. We’re going to ask you questions. We’re going to need answers. That’s just to guide us to the right product and the right timing.

00:11:47 – Rico Figliolini

Cool. When you’re doing this and there’s value to what you do, right, Andrew? I know pricing is always an issue. Well, not always an issue. I mean, the way I work is that I don’t go for the cheapest. I don’t go for the most expensive. I go for the quality, the delivery, somewhere where I trust that. I can be waiting like all of a sudden I have a job and then that stuff doesn’t show up. But some people worry about pricing. And, you know, how do you make sure you hold your value? You know, because there is a value to what you do.

00:12:25 – Andrew Hajduk

So, you know, I always tell people we should always be in line. You know, are there times we’re going to be more expensive? And if you shop hard enough, you’re going to find something cheaper. We like to tell people we give them back the greatest thing that we can, which is time. You were talking earlier about managing things and going through it and stuff like that. And you shouldn’t have to. It should be straightforward. It should be easy. You shouldn’t have to worry if your colors are correct or is there an instruction sheet with putting the hardware together or am I violating any brand guidelines? We work with a lot of national companies where brand guidelines are important. So we try to do that and we try to be very fair. Quite honestly, you asked about philosophies and things like that and call any of my long-term clients and they’ll tell you that they’ve heard me say this line a thousand times. Here’s the way I look at it. In every relationship, you have a bucket of money. The more I can give you for that, the better we all are. You grow your business, that bucket continues to grow. There’s more opportunity for us to win and we try to have very long-term relationships based on that.

00:13:33 – Rico Figliolini

Going back to what you said, Daniel, referral business because that’s what you were talking about before, right? You’re doing a good job. People refer you. They go to another place. They know the experience with you. You’re going to be the person in that door, in that new company. When you’re dealing with a new business that’s coming in, whether it’s a retail place, restaurant, let’s say that type of business, storefront, let’s say. They’re brand new. They’re not a franchise even because you know, they want to do their own thing. How do you approach a business like that when they come to you? Are there certain staples that you think they should be doing? How does that work?

00:14:15 – Andrew Hajduk

100%. Over the, I had to figure this out for something a couple years ago. And with all the rebrands that we’ve done, all the acquisitions and all the stores we’ve opened over the years, from Wolf Cameras to Aaron’s to Mattress Firms and so forth. We’ve opened over 7,000 stores. And all the way from guys that they’re opening their first unit to their 2,000th, whatever it is. Especially in retail, and I think it’s more important than ever, there’s two things that you have to do. One, you have to create omnipresence, right? So whether that’s being on Facebook, on social media platforms, but also in print and out in the community. We see all the time, right? You’re driving down the road and you drive past a shopping center and you’re like, huh, when did they get there, right? How long have they been there? And maybe they just opened, but they didn’t do a good job of disrupting the environment. I believe big time in guerrilla marketing, getting out there with the businesses. If I was a local restaurant here, I would be going and knocking on doors, especially as people are returning to work, giving them lunch specials, trying to get people out of the office just to drive that traffic. Too many times, and I tell all of my clients this, is we can’t just sit back and wait for people to come. We’ve got to get out there and let the community know we’re there.

00:15:38 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. I can see what you mean by that. I mean, they’ll be doing the magazine business, for example, right? Which is print, digital, and everything else that comes in there. So we talk to a lot of people, and everyone has their philosophy. And certain businesses work a certain way. Maybe social media works better for them than print. There’s a variety of different things, right? So we tried to produce content as well. But the interesting part to me is this. There’ll be a business in business for six to seven months. They’re all in on social media. And then all of a sudden, six, seven months, eight months later, they’re realizing that’s not working. And they’re not doing anything else but social media. Maybe they’re not going to the festivals. Maybe they’re not going out into the community, which they would need branding to be able to do that. You can’t just show up naked, right? You need that stuff to be able to be out there. I mean, when I participated in Peachtree Corners Festival, you all did my table drape and attire and stuff. I can’t tell you how many people stopped at the booth or passed the booth to say, wow, look, yeah, we get that magazine or we get the sister publication or we listen to their podcast or something. So it was a good, visible place to be.

00:16:56 – Andrew Hajduk

But think about the, you know, you’re older like me. So think about when we used to go to the mall when we were kids and stuff like that. How did the restaurants, how did the Chinese restaurant or the pretzel place or any of those places drum up business? They had people come out from behind the counter and go up and hand people samples and things like that. And that’s the kind of stuff that businesses have lost. Social media has to be a part of it. It absolutely does. But you have to have other things as well. I mean, I see so many businesses that just rely on a single channel of marketing and don’t worry about getting the word out. And we’re all super busy. We drive the same route every single day, stuff like that. And you don’t notice stuff. It’s our job as marketers to disrupt the environment so that when you’re driving by the shopping center, you’re sitting there in the light, you’re going, holy cow, I didn’t realize that that was there. They must be new. I’m going to stop in and try them.

00:17:54 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no, perfect. I love that. You’re right. I remember reading, I think it was some ones, the franchise manual for people that started the franchise, right? And this was some years back. I don’t even know if they do it now. But one of the things they did say in there was go check out all the commercial businesses within a two-mile radius. and then within one mile, and go bring them free lunch. Every one of them, free lunch. And, you know, someone may look at that and say, well, that costs money. And it’s just like, think about it. When you’re home and you cook for your guests, and they say, this is wonderful. Don’t you want the same thing? So, yeah, people are afraid, I think, sometimes to spend the money in, but they’ll spend the money in ridiculous ways, but not in other ways.

00:18:41 – Andrew Hajduk

To me, it’s a commitment thing, right? If we want people to make a commitment to us, we have to make a commitment to them. Somebody’s going to have to go first.

00:18:50 – Rico Figliolini

And you started this in 96, you said? 96. So that was, I moved here in 95, actually. That was the year of the Olympics. Olympics is kind of funny that way. I remember back then I used to sell commercial sheet-fed printing. You could be a lousy salesperson and still make good money. And after things stopped around, I forget what year it was now. Things just got a little bad. And salespeople, you could see the tree shake and all the bad ones fell out. Did you feel that way sometimes?

00:19:25 – Andrew Hajduk

We’ve gone through a couple different challenges, right? So we didn’t start because of the Olympics. We had some Olympic work and things like that. But because of when we started, we were a little bit behind the curve there. So a lot of that stuff was already going on. We were fortunate and we had two clients that pushed us to really get the company going and get it off the ground that, you know, so we weren’t kind of in that survival mode from day one. But then you had the dot-com crash, right? In 99, 2000. And there were so many people that were printing just a bunch of stupid stuff. And, you know, you had to get through that. So that was kind of, I always say it’s a flush that we need, but it’s painful to go through.

00:20:09 – Rico Figliolini

Did you see the same thing in 2008?

00:20:11 – Andrew Hajduk

Absolutely. That’s the next one I was going to go to. You know, we were, my two biggest clients in 2008 were Aaron’s Sales and Lease and Mattress Firm. And both Ken Butler and Steve Stagner that ran those companies respectively, they were very much forward thinking. And I remember Steve saying, we’ve got to dial up the advertising. We have to work harder today to get the customer’s dollar than when it was easy. And so, you know, for us, it was good there. But we saw a lot of guys, and especially as digital printing’s gone on, we’ve been on the cutting edge of that since day one. And you’ll see different people jump in, right? Every sign shop comes in and they’re going to buy this. Every T-shirt shop comes in and they’re going to buy this. And it goes on and on. And those are the things that, you know, create some price pressure because everybody wants to give it away. But then during those times, it becomes real tough and you see people start to fall out.

00:21:03 – Rico Figliolini

Printing was that way too. Yeah. And I remember I used to tell the owner of the print shop I was at, commercial printer, $3 million in sales and stuff. Business cards are loss leaders. I’d give them away to be able to walk into a company with 600 employees. Because the minute you got into that hallway, you’re like, everyone’s coming out and saying, do you do this? Do you do that? You don’t even, you’re not bidding anymore at that point. You’re just getting the work.

00:21:29 – Andrew Hajduk

Yeah It was, it’s a, you know, again, when we used to go out more and more, but it was, you could just walk around and pick up back in the day before email and stuff like that. You just walk around and pick up jobs.

00:21:44 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. It’s not like that anymore. So I think, you know, 2008 was a bad one, but I think things have gotten progressively better. Maybe we’re heading into something. Who knows? You know, I mean, people talk about like another real estate, except commercial real estate this time versus residential bubble or something. But when you’re hiring salespeople, what do you look for in them?

00:22:11 – Andrew Hajduk

The number one thing we look for in anybody we hire is attitude. I want to hire people that want to grow. I’ve never had anybody not come to work here because of the money, and I’ve never had anyone leave here because of the money. Does that mean we’re the highest paying people out there? No, I think we’re fair. But we’re also tough on the front end with trying to find people. But I really want people that want to grow. It’s one of our, you had mentioned our boards, our vision boards out in the lobby. That’s one of the things that we look for, right? One of the things that we tell people, we’re into personal development because I think it’s important that for the company to achieve its goals, for the company to go to where it needs to go, you need to achieve your goals concurrently with that. You need to be on that right path. It can’t just be about working harder, working harder, and working harder. You’ve got a vision of where you want to get to. Daniel’s got a vision of where he wants to get to. Everybody here has got a vision of where they want to get to. And they’ve got one, three, and five-year goals. When we can marry those together, that’s when the magic happens.

00:23:20 – Rico Figliolini

So when you’re doing that, and there’s a cross-section of people that you’re dealing with, right? Age groups, diverse people and such. And hiring not just salespeople, but employees, right? You want to be able to hire an employee and know that they’re going to do the right job, even if it’s a part-time job, even if it’s a summer job. Do you put the same type of philosophy into that?

00:23:42 – Andrew Hajduk

100% for every single person here.

00:23:45 – Rico Figliolini

You expect them to show up on time, hopefully, and do the work that they’re supposed to do?

00:23:50 – Andrew Hajduk

We do. And so the back one of that happens first, right? And look, nobody’s sitting here watching door swipes and things like that to sit there and go, oh, Daniel got here at 8:05 today. I better go talk to him or, you know, whatever. I want to hire people that understand we have a job to do. Some days we have to stay late. We had a client that was in a jam the other night. A lot of us were here till about eight o’clock trying to help them out, right? Am I looking? No. We just, we want that mindset of people that want to grow, that want to be better and continue on. And I think, you know, are we a hundred percent at the hiring on that? No, absolutely not. But we continue to get better and better in that, and especially making sure that we’re good on that on the front end. And it’s worked pretty well for us.

00:24:38 – Rico Figliolini

We were talking a little bit about social media before. I’m assuming that’s your ball of wax, if you will.

00:24:44 – Daniel Hajduk

Somewhat. Megan, my sister as well, she’s the main one who manages all that, but we’re trying to come up with some plans to, because ourselves, we have to put ourselves out on social media because there’s nothing you can’t get out there. You have to have social. So you can’t just do print. You can’t just do social, you have to do both because you’re missing one audience. You can’t just do a direct mailer because not everyone’s going to react to a mailer. You can’t just do a TikTok. Not everyone’s going to be on TikTok. No one’s going to be on TikTok soon.

00:25:07 – Rico Figliolini

If that goes through.

00:25:11 – Daniel Hajduk

But the impact of what you can do with the mix of both. So if you start seeing those trucks around and your vehicles around and the signage and the sponsorships around, but you also see their TikTok that’s funny or their Instagram reel or whatever, their Facebook posts. It gets your attention. They’re in your mind. So we’re really trying to dial that in with ourselves because we do a lot of cool stuff here. And like we said, when we bring people in to show them something, no one usually leaves here underwhelmed. Everyone’s like, wow. I had a guy that I saw again for the first time a couple nights ago for the first time since he was here. He was telling people, you guys have to go there and check it out. It’s impressive. People think, I got people who give it nicknames and everything because they think it’s just some amazing place where all the things come to life. And they say, hey, I’m looking for this. Like you said, the bats. Even if it’s just a banner, it’s just so cool to see it in action. And that’s what we’re trying to put out there.

00:26:10 – Rico Figliolini

It’s funny because when I walked in the back, I’m thinking, this is big, but it’s not huge. But you have so much packed in there that you’re doing. Every square foot has a usable, there’s a reason for something to be there. And yeah, I felt the same way. I felt like my mind was going, what can I use this for? What can I, what can I bring here? Who do I know that I want to market to that I could do their marketing and then, and use what you’re doing here.

00:26:39 – Daniel Hajduk

That’s the fun thing is literally you said, how do we, when we start working with someone, how do, what do we start with? Usually we don’t have to dig too deep. Someone needs something, whether it is just some signage, whether it is apparel, whether it is a marketing piece to use at an event or a promotional item. We start somewhere, then we can grow into the rest. So you don’t have to be able to, let’s do everything in a box. No, just come in and do one thing, and with time naturally, it’ll take over.

00:27:07 – Rico Figliolini

You do design work in-house also, I think, right? And you’re setting expectations for people because a lot of businesses are busy themselves and all of a sudden their deadlines become your rush deadlines. And, you know, they’re waiting until the last minute and then like, we need it tomorrow. And you guys are stuck like delivering. Setting expectations the right way, I guess.

00:27:32 – Andrew Hajduk

That’s one of the biggest challenges. Like we always joke around here, you know, I mean, the CFP is here on Monday night. I am sure that, you know, tomorrow we’re going to hear something about, well, we just about got it ready. Right? And it’s like, they’re not going to move the day to the football game, but we still have to get the stuff done.

00:27:49 – Rico Figliolini

Right, right. You mentioned, we talked a little bit about community involvement. So I just want to go back there for a little bit. You’re on the, I think it was the Development Authority?

00:27:59 – Andrew Hajduk

Yeah, the DDA, the Downtown Development Authority.

00:28:01 – Rico Figliolini

In the city of Peachtree Corners.

00:28:02 – Andrew Hajduk

Yes, sir.

00:28:04 – Rico Figliolini

You’re seeing a lot of things. You know, obviously, some of it is, it’s all development work, not redevelopment per se. Although some things could be considered redevelopment. So do you look at that and does that give you a different perspective when you come walking into your business?

00:28:21 – Andrew Hajduk

Yeah, it does. It all kind of plays together because you see one of the things that we’ve been going through and I think that you’re going to see a ton of this. We’re seeing it with our customers in and outside of Peachtree Corners, but you see it in Tech Park and different things, is the return to work mandate, which is huge.

00:28:40 – Rico Figliolini

Are you seeing that?

00:28:41 – Andrew Hajduk

We have several Fortune 50 clients that have gone five days in office beginning January 6th. So I think you’re going to continue to see that trickle down, right? As the new administration takes hold, you know, in the next week or so, that’s one of their big things and stuff. And personally, look, I believe that there needs to be way more return to work, right? There are some jobs that can be done, but not every job. You see what we do here. I can’t put printers in people’s house. So we have to come in. But I think that that’s important. So as you see those trends involved in the city, right, and the kind of businesses that are coming in, then we start thinking, okay, how does that impact our business? How does that impact our marketing efforts? Right? What opportunities does that give us and things like that? But I also like seeing from a community perspective, having the right mix. This city has done a really good job of balanced growth with the kind of retail they have, the kind of business that they’re bringing in. And it’s just a really nice balance to drive around and see. I’ve seen other cities where every single shopping center has a vape store, a nail salon, and a massage parlor. And there’s seven of them within a mile, but they don’t have any of the big national retailers. They don’t have the tech companies and all of that other stuff to come in and you’ve got to have that balance in a community for it to survive.

00:30:15 – Rico Figliolini

And it’s a bit different. We were talking just before we started about Johns Creek, Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, Chamblee, Brookhaven. I mean, all very different from each other. I mean, when you look at it and compare it to here, different types of stores, even different people.

00:30:32 – Andrew Hajduk

Absolutely. And so, you know, not to pick on them, but, you know, Johns Creek was home for us. It’s where all three of my kids grew up and where my wife and I lived for 28 years. And they were super strict on the signs. And a lot of national retailers didn’t want to come to Johns Creek. It was tougher for them. And the way then every shopping center got developed. Literally within our house, you know, when we moved, because I would go out and run, I could run past seven vape shops and not even be at a mile. Not that there’s that, you know, again, you’ve got to have that right balance and stuff like that, but it can’t all be that because we are going to see a lot of empty retail if that’s the only places that we can go in.

00:31:16 – Rico Figliolini

I mean, eventually, I mean, so if we talk about the Forum, for example, they had 17 stores empty, storefronts empty. I would drive through and I would literally count how many stores were empty. Now, I don’t think there’s, I think there’s maybe one or two that still doesn’t have a sign lease to that I’m aware of. Not that they share their information with me, but it’s almost completely filled. And there’s more density coming, right? So the apartment Solus, I think, is going to be opening as soon as they finish. Broadstone down the block is like 95% at least. And they were leasing really fast. I mean, faster than they thought, ahead of schedule. So that just tells you that people do want to be here because it’s a straight shot down to into Atlanta from Peachtree Parkway. So if you’re going to go into work, this would be a good place.

00:32:09 – Andrew Hajduk

And you have a Town Center. I mean, let’s not, you know, and as we moved, the business moved here in 2005, and that was before Peachtree Corners existed, we were still in Norcross. And then in 2012, when the city became a city, so that’s why I say we’ve been here since that time. But we were just down the road in Northwoods. I didn’t see it when they developed Town Center. I was over there maybe a year or so ago for a Peachtree Corners Business Association breakfast. Eight o’clock in the morning, I was amazed. There was people out there doing yoga on the grass and things like that. And if you go by there on a Friday night when they’re doing something and you’re trying to pick up pizza or something like that, it is absolutely jam-packed. So they have that center that everybody comes in and these things to help gather around, which is just really a part of the smart development of it.

00:33:10 – Rico Figliolini

I can’t wait until Paulitan Row opens. That’s going to be great. And I think it’s Millie’s Pizza, a new pizza place in the jewel box right up front there. Alright, just to sort of wrap up a little bit. I mean, father, son, sister. How many other members of the family?

00:33:18 – Daniel Hajduk

And my wife works here, too

00:33:22 – Rico Figliolini

Family affair. You all work. This is cool. How many employees does Vox Pop Uli have?

00:33:33 – Daniel Hajduk

27.

00:33:34 – Rico Figliolini

Wow.

00:33:35 – Daniel Hajduk

A good chunk of those employees are family members of each other, too.

00:33:38 – Rico Figliolini

Really?

00:33:39 – Andrew Hajduk

Yeah. We have another husband and wife working here. We have a father and a stepson. So, yes.

00:33:41 – Rico Figliolini

That’s cool. Everyone’s committed. There’s a reason to be committed also to it. Life balance because of that? Is there a good life balance that you guys try to keep? Work-life balance is what I mean.

00:33:58 – Andrew Hajduk

Yes, there is. So I had the great joy of working with my dad. He came to work here about four years after I started the company, which was a really tough dynamic with the father coming to work for the son’s company. And that created some interesting family dynamics. But in the end, I knew that I wanted my family to be part of my business. When the kids got older and Cindy had been a stay-at-home mom while the kids were all growing up. My youngest went into eighth grade. She came to work here. And then my daughter graduated college, went to work for another agency, and then after a year wanted to come to work here. Kind of Daniel. So it’s been, and again, I’m going to be the, I will never tell you that it’s been 100% easy. The dynamic between all of us sometimes gets tough and things like that. At least from my perspective, it’s been a great joy for me, and it’s also helped address part of what happens to this when I’m done. I’m at the age where I start talking to people and everybody’s starting to think what their exit strategy is and things like that, and they don’t know. I feel truly blessed to know that my kids will be here to take this to the next level and stuff like that. But, you know, we have to work at it.

00:35:32 – Rico Figliolini

It’s cool that you have that, that you have a succession plan and stuff. Because lots of families don’t. And they end up closing shop for one reason or another. So it’s kind of cool. The legacy lives on, right? So we’ve been talking to Andrew and Daniel, Vox Pop Uli. Great business here in Peachtree Corners. And, to be transparent, a sponsor of ours as well. So we appreciate you guys sponsoring our journalism, the podcasts, and the magazines that we do. I appreciate that. And the podcast, actually, that we do as well. So thank you.

00:36:05 – Daniel Hajduk

Thank you for having us.

00:36:07 – Andrew Hajduk

 Yeah, thank you for having us. We love doing stuff like this. And we are really committed to this community. And selfishly, I want to become the place for everybody to come put their logo on something in Peachtree Corners. And if I can help your business, we all win, I believe.

00:36:28 – Daniel Hajduk

Just send us an email. Come by, whatever it is. We can help you out.

00:36:30 – Rico Figliolini

In the show notes, we’ll have the website address, social media and stuff. So pick up on it, ask them questions. They’re always open. So just for any new ideas. Thank you guys.

00:36:40 – Andrew Hajduk

Thank you.

00:36:41 – Rico Figliolini

Thank you all. And leave a comment if you have questions and check the show notes for all the other information you need.