The life-threatening diagnosis that changed everything

In this deeply moving episode of UrbanEbb, host Rico Figliolini sits down with Katherine Lafourcade, executive director of the French-American Chamber of Commerce Atlanta, to talk about life, leadership and the power of giving back.

Katherine shares her unexpected journey from Europe to Georgia, her role in connecting French businesses to Atlanta’s thriving innovation scene and a powerful personal story of her son Theo’s battle with leukemia that inspired her mission to promote blood donation.

With candor, insight and heart, this conversation reminds us of the value of community — and how even a small act, like donating blood, can change lives.

Resources:

• French-American Chamber of Commerce – Atlanta: https://www.facc-atlanta.com
• Blood Drive Registration (June 14, 2025): https://www.facc-atlanta.com/events/upcoming-events/e/event/blood-drive-june.html
• American Red Cross: https://www.redcrossblood.org

Takeaways:

• Why the French-American Chamber of Commerce relocated to Curiosity Lab in Peachtree Corners
• How Katherine transitioned from a global business background to nonprofit leadership
• The life-threatening diagnosis that changed everything for her family
• How her son Theo’s recovery from leukemia — and over 50 blood transfusions — inspired her to launch a community blood drive initiative
• Why World Blood Donor Day (June 14, 2025) is a meaningful opportunity for new and returning donors
• What it takes to host a Red Cross blood drive — and how you can help
• How giving blood could save up to three lives in under 15 minutes

Timestamp:

00:01:42 – Why the French-American Chamber relocated to Peachtree Corners
00:02:14 – Katherine’s transatlantic journey from England to France, Switzerland, and Georgia
00:06:02 – The chamber’s mission: helping French businesses land and grow in the U.S.
00:07:38 – Why French, British, and Irish nationals were banned from donating blood until 2023
00:10:01 – Katherine shares her son Theo’s leukemia diagnosis and critical care experience
00:13:03 – The severity of Theo’s condition and the ECMO machine that saved his life
00:16:00 – The frustration of being unable to donate blood as a parent
00:20:19 – The family’s move to the U.S. and continued treatment during COVID
00:21:44 – Theo’s dream of becoming a pediatric oncologist
00:22:21 – Launching local blood drives and how to get involved
00:24:09 – What it’s really like to donate blood: time, process, and tracking where it goes
00:28:05 – Tracking donations via the Red Cross app and building a culture of giving
00:29:19 – Where to sign up and what to expect on June 14, 2025

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb, a podcast that we do here north of Atlanta, smart city of Peachtree Corners. And we are in Curiosity Lab with a special guest today, Katherine Lafourcade, who’s the executive director of the French-American Chamber of Commerce here in Peachtree Corners. Welcome.

00:00:18 – Katherine Lafourcade

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

00:00:21 – Rico Figliolini

No, I appreciate it. This is going to be a great conversation, I’m sure. But before we get into that, I just want to say thank you to our two sponsors, both here located in Peachtree Corners also. Vox Pop Uli is one. Do you have a brand? Do you have a business? Do you have an organization? Do you need that brand to add on something? Whether it’s clothing or vehicle wrap, and you go to a trade show, or you want your logo on that unusual object that you came up with? They can do it. They can almost do anything. So check them out at Vox Pop Uli. Also, EV Remodeling, Inc. Eli is the owner. They’re based here in Peachtree Corners. Eli lives here with his family as well. They have done, I think, over 258 home renovations from design to build, your bathroom, your kitchen. You need an extension on the house. You need to close in your deck. They could do anything. So check them out at evremodelinginc.com. And both of those sponsors are great sponsors. We appreciate them supporting these podcasts and the magazines and the journalism that we do. So thanks there. Now let’s get into the conversation because Katherine has a great story and a challenging story to a degree, right? But let’s start with first that you’re the executive director for the French American Chamber of Commerce, newly located to Peachtree Corners, right?

00:01:42 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, I mean, actually since 2021. So going back a little bit, but before that it was in Buckhead in the consulate building. And there was a decision to bring us out to Peachtree Corners to be located in the heart of Curiosity Lab, which I think was an amazing decision. It makes a lot of sense for us to be here.

00:01:48 – Rico Figliolini

Sure. There’s so many, I mean, we get countries that are coming from Ukraine to visit this place, Israel and startups from all over the world.

00:02:05 – Katherine Lafourcade

There’s a lot of international partnerships, so it made a lot of sense for the Chamber to be here. 

00:02:05 – Rico Figliolini

So how did you get to the Chamber? What brought you there? What brought you here?

00:02:14 – Katherine Lafourcade

So yeah, despite my very British accent, it’s one of the first questions always, but French American, you don’t sound either. The truth is I’m not either, but I have strong links to France. I started learning French as a school kid in England and we all had to learn French, French and German. And I particularly, something about the French language just clicked with me and I was like, this is it. I need to learn French. I wanted to become bilingual. I knew my life was going to be, there was going to be involvement with French on some level. And so I did a bachelor’s degree in England, international business in French. I got to do a year in Paris as an intern, which just confirmed everything. I think I already knew that I definitely wanted to do something with French in my life. And so after graduation, I moved to France, worked a bit in France, and then France became Switzerland. And then we relocated to the US six years ago now. Yeah, yeah. And then I arrived in this role, kind of in a roundabout way. When we moved here, my husband is French and we decided we wanted to connect with the French community in and around Atlanta. And we thought maybe the chamber was a good place to start. And so we joined as members. And then the end of 2021, the past executive director was leaving. And so there was an opening and had a lot of fingers pointed at me. A lot of people saying, this is a job for you. To which my response was a little bit, I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure of what Chambers of Commerce do. It’s a nonprofit organization as well. So there were a lot of questions I had, but I decided to give it a go. And so since January of 2022, I’ve been the leadership role. Thoroughly enjoy it.

00:03:57 – Rico Figliolini

Good. Well, you know, coming from Europe, I mean, I think any American that would look at that and say, oh, you know, in Europe, you’ve got like all those countries, you could go all over the place and not be hindered, really, except for maybe from Britain to Europe.

00:04:12 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, a little bit different since Brexit, unfortunately, yes. But anyway, yes.

00:04:16 – Rico Figliolini

But, you know, very different culture too, very different way of looking at life. How does it feel being here in the States?

00:04:24 – Katherine Lafourcade

This is my first experience of living in the US. So I had no prior experience in anywhere else. We came to Atlanta. This is my benchmark. I didn’t know what to expect, to be perfectly honest. I wasn’t familiar with Georgia, wasn’t familiar with anything to what we were getting into and the proof is six years on we absolutely love it here. There’s something about the people, there’s something just about the the environment here. There’s such a vibrant international community. There’s a, I don’t know there’s just a very welcoming feeling. And we really are surprised I think on some level I think we don’t mind saying that. I think we’ve really felt like this is a new home for us. We came here with kids as well and they’re also doing well. But yeah I think people are a bit like but why would you have moved here from from Switzerland which is actually where we were and the answer is there’s a big wide world out there and sometimes it’s good to see something different and you don’t know until you’ve tried it so.

00:05:24 – Rico Figliolini

And I’m thinking she came to the south, which is good because this is like America light in a way. Because if you went to the northeast where I came from, Brooklyn, New York, or up in New York, you might have a different feel for it.

00:05:37 – Katherine Lafourcade

I think so. Southern hospitality does seem like it’s a thing. I mean, I don’t know. There’s good and bad everywhere. That’s the bottom line. You can choose the bits you want to see, and there’s always going to be things that are less good. But honestly, yeah, you’ve got to make the best of where you’re living, and that’s the way we see it.

00:05:53 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. So you’ve been here six years, working in the chamber and stuff. Do you find working businesses locally? You’re trying to bring business from France to the states.

00:06:02 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, yeah. That’s part of the mission. So we kind of have a twofold mission. It is to bring French companies over. If they’re thinking about starting up business in Georgia, we are very much there to help them with that. We have a wonderful network of members, have all sorts of skills, all sorts of different sectors of activity. So, you know, if somebody just rolls up and says, I want to start my business here. We can help them with every aspect, legally, financially, recruiting, all of those things. So it’s a nice soft landing. We’ve got a lot of people that speak French. That will also help them because most of them might speak English, but sometimes it’s nice to speak your mother tongue language. And then the second fold is those who are already here to help them develop. So they might have already started their activity, but they do want to expand. They want to get a better network. They want to connect with people, partners, collaborators.

00:06:49 – Rico Figliolini

What type of businesses are you seeing wanting to come here?

00:06:52 – Katherine Lafourcade

It’s a bit of everything. It’s not, we don’t have one sector that really dominates. I mean, we have a lot of businesses, we have some manufacturing, all sorts of sectors. I mean, it’s good and it’s difficult because then we can’t say, well, you know, we’re particularly good at this one thing. So we’re kind of a bit of everything. So everyone has a space really.

00:07:15 – Rico Figliolini

So, dealing with businesses but you’re also dealing with the community and outreach and stuff. So you started, I believe a blood drive some time ago. And part of it came out of, I guess during COVID the banning of, we were talking about this before, of blood from any French, UK or Irish person. Tell us a little bit about that because I didn’t even realize that.

00:07:38 – Katherine Lafourcade

And that wasn’t even just because of COVID. That was a blanket exclusion that was in place for many, many years. So anybody that had lived in France, the UK or Ireland during, I think it was the late 90s at the time of what was called the mad cow epidemic. It was an unfortunate time where cattle got sick and there was some question over the fact that it could go into people as well. So by default, people who had been in those countries were not allowed to give blood. So I was excluded in Switzerland. I wasn’t allowed to give blood there. And then arriving in the US, same exclusion. It was not possible just by default to give blood. And those rules changed in 2023. I think they decided maybe there’s a lack of donors, always. And so maybe opening up to another category, they still screen the blood. I mean, there’s no safety issues, but it’s just making it less strict. And the epidemic was over 30 years ago at this point. Anything that was going to happen would have happened, I think, in that time frame. 

00:08:39 – Rico Figliolini

I think so. I remember the craze about that. It’s all about, oh, my God, if you eat the wrong meat, you can catch, you know, mad cow disease.

00:08:46 – Katherine Lafourcade

I don’t know how many people actually ever got infected. I don’t know. I mean, personally, it was something that happened, and then it kind of was no longer a thing. But, you know, for whatever reasons, out of an abundance of precaution, they wanted to keep it under control.

00:09:01 – Rico Figliolini

And most people, I don’t think, know that blood isn’t, when blood’s donated, it’s sort of remanufactured into other, I mean, there’s multiple blood donations within even one pack.

00:09:12 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes, absolutely. So there’s whole blood, which is, you know, just giving the whole blood, you can donate plasma, you can donate platelets as well. Different blood groups are in more or less demand because there’s a universal donor. So if you’re a group O negative, that’s the golden, that’s everyone wants that blood because everyone can receive that blood. They want all the blood groups, obviously. But there’s always a lack of donors, always, because people don’t think about donating. It’s not something that’s in your everyday life, unless you’ve had a personal reason to get involved. Quite often it’s something that, you know, you might know someone who does it, but it’s never necessarily number one on your to-do list.

00:09:56 – Rico Figliolini

So let’s go there for a minute.

00:09:58 – Katherine Lafourcade

So yeah, that’s.

00:09:59 – Rico Figliolini

You had a real personal reason.

00:10:01 – Katherine Lafourcade

I did. Absolutely. So after, so even before we moved to the US, my son at the age of 12 and a half got very, very sick. He was diagnosed with leukemia and it came out of the blue. We were in Switzerland at the time. He was a healthy, happy kid. Nothing predisposed this happening. You know, there were no forewarnings. It just was a shock out of the blue. Leukemia starts in the bone marrow. It’s a white blood cell that mutates and becomes cancerous. And that’s kind of it. It then snowballs into a pretty devastating diagnosis. Leukemia is not like a lot of other cancers. There’s no tumor. You can’t have radiotherapy. It’s in the bloodstream, so it’s everywhere. And it’s treated with a very, very, very large number of chemotherapy doses intravenously. So within the first year alone, he had over 100 intravenous injections of chemotherapy.So some days some weeks it was four days out of five at the hospital. Sometimes he was in overnight we had to pre-hydrate and post-hydrate because of toxicity. He had a chest port because they can’t go in regular veins. Yeah it’s too toxic, so you had a chest port that stays in place. I mean it’s brutal. It’s very, very devastating you know you imagine a child a 12 year old not understanding why this is happening, all the horrific side effects from the chemo you know hair loss, nausea. It’s just shocking. He missed a lot of school a lot of time in hospital. And so we plowed through all of that and normally at the end of nine months of treatment we’d get to a different phase of the the protocol which would have been slightly easier, a bit less chemo, a bit less time in hospital called the maintenance phase. And very unfortunately for poor Theo when we were ending the intensive phase and getting towards this part that should be better, everything took a turn for the worse. We didn’t know why again, there was a lot of confusion, a lot of unknown. He had contracted an intestinal parasite.

00:12:00 – Rico Figliolini

At the hospital?

00:12:01 – Katherine Lafourcade

At home or at the hospital, we don’t know where. I mean we weren’t going anywhere or doing anything, so it’s very improbable that would even happen but his immune system which was pretty much non-existent at that point. This thing had obviously got in there and any normal person you’d get rid of it, but his body wasn’t able to do that and it set up a horrible situation. He was losing weight almost by the day. When they found this parasite, they treated it, couldn’t get rid of it, and things just kept going downhill. And we ended up with an absolutely critical situation just before Christmas 2017. It was an emergency situation. Everything was crashing. It turned into septicemia, so septic shock, an infection everywhere in his body, which can kill in a matter of hours so it was a case of emergency surgery. They had to operate on him in his hospital bed, they didn’t even have time to get him to the operating block. And they put him on a machine called ecmo, which was actually used during COVID. COVID patients.

00:13:03 – Rico Figliolini

Was that the ventilation?

00:13:04 – Katherine Lafourcade

So kind of. It’s not actually ventilation it does the job of the heart and lungs outside of the body.

00:13:10 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, that’s right. I think it was misnamed ventilation when it really wasn’t.

00:13:15 – Katherine Lafourcade

And his lungs were what got completely infected. So there was no oxygen exchange between his blood and the lungs that were just not functioning. So they had to put him on this machine which in itself is brutal surgery. It’s open heart surgery. And it’s two big tubes that are fixed onto the body that come out. The machine’s on the floor next to the bed. It takes out the carbon dioxide. It puts back in the oxygen. And he was on dialysis because his kidneys weren’t doing well as well. He was on a ventilator to breathe.

00:13:42 – Rico Figliolini

He was 12 years old at the time?

00:13:44 – Katherine Lafourcade

He was, yes, 12, 13. Sorry, he had turned 13. Yeah.

00:13:46 – Rico Figliolini

How was he?

00:13:50 – Katherine Lafourcade

He was in an artificially induced coma at that point because he just needed to be on life support. He was totally unaware of what was going on. We were watching him, we had no concept of what was happening. It was so beyond the realms of anything you’ve ever seen or take a moment because it was a lot. It was very, very, very difficult.

00:14:11 – Rico Figliolini

And he has siblings too right?

00:14:13 – Katherine Lafourcade

He has an older sister, yeah and she…

00:14:15 – Rico Figliolini

How’d she take that?

00:14:17 – Katherine Lafourcade

She just watched him like we did, you know, in a coma with his body attached to tubes and, you know, with the machine breathing for him. And it was just a case of hoping. And sometimes it was minute by minute. It was very much, you know, there is nothing but what’s happening right now. You know, and you look at the doctors, a bit like the movies, and you just say to them, do everything you can. But you can see that they’re not sure. You know, there was…

00:14:41 – Rico Figliolini

Which, do you mind me asking which hospital this was?

00:14:44 – Katherine Lafourcade

It was in Lausanne. It was near to the, it was the hospital, the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Lausanne, which is the hospital, the University Hospital of Lausanne. Luckily, they’re super well equipped. They have staff that are amazing. And without a shadow of a doubt, those people saved his life. He’s still in contact with some of them. I’m still in contact with some of them. Yes. I mean, there’s a bond there that goes beyond sort of parent, sorry the patient caregiver.

00:15:05 – Rico Figliolini

It’s almost like savior or something.

00:15:12 – Katherine Lafourcade

Oh yeah. I mean, I clearly and we’re still in contact because, so I mean his story was, I mean it’s difficult to do it chronologically. But he was in a very, very bad space. He received a ton of blood transfusions. That surgery in itself he hemorrhaged. There were times when he was on the machine, the machine kind of, it keeps you alive but it also destroys the blood. Blood doesn’t like going into anything sort of machine based. So he was, one time he was lacking so much in volume that they pressed the panic switch. The alarms were blaring and everybody rushed in and they were, they got syringes of blood that were this fat and they were pushing it into his system to try and get the volume of his blood up. I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, it really felt like it was an out of body experience.

00:15:58 – Rico Figliolini

Well, you were learning also quite a bit.

00:16:00 – Katherine Lafourcade

Learning a lot about what happens behind the scenes, you know, most people never get, and I’m glad most people will never see that. But honestly, the perspective, I was just, I was sad at that point because all I wanted to do was give blood, not to my son directly, but my husband and I, we thought, let’s do something to help someone else who might be in this situation. And we couldn’t. So it felt, it felt rough. You’re already helpless. Then the one thing you think that you might be able to do, you can’t just because of these rules that are in place. So it was frustrating. He, by some miracle or other, came through. We stopped treating the leukemia. I mean, we were just kind of getting him through the infection.

00:16:36 – Rico Figliolini

How old was he at that point?

00:16:38 – Katherine Lafourcade

So he was in the coma for, I think, just over a month. He missed Christmas, New Year, woke up in January the next year, had a tracheotomy at that point, so he didn’t have a voice, woke up not knowing what had happened during this whole blacked out period. So I’d taken photos which was weird but then it was actually good to be able to show him what he’d been through. You know that whole blank space. For me also I think I needed to somehow document what was going on, make sense of it. And then he had to start with physical therapy because he was just a skinny body. The muscle wastage is crazy, in a matter of weeks he was just a tiny little frail thing and he could just sit up. And then he had to learn how to stand up again and then he had to learn how to walk again and get some muscle strength and very, very long process, but he came through it. And again, it was down to his willpower because as a parent, the one thing you want to do is take all of that. Even the cancer, I said to him, you know, I want to do, I would do this for you. There’s not a part of me that doesn’t want to swap places right now, but I can’t. Unfortunately, you’ve got to do this and we’re a team and I will help you in any way I can, but the strength has got to come from inside of you. So he’s, he’s.

00:17:48 – Rico Figliolini

So you were there quite a bit of time.

00:17:50 – Katherine Lafourcade

I didn’t leave the hospital for lots and lots of months. I slept upstairs in a consultation room because I just couldn’t bear to not be there. And when they’re in the ICU, there’s no space for a parent to have a bed there. It’s not made for that. So I would just go upstairs, my little suitcase and come back. I used to read to him when he was in the coma, just read because I didn’t know what to do. And apparently people can hear you when they’re in a coma. So I don’t know. Sometimes his blood rate, his heart rate would go up a little bit. And when I would read, it would go back down. And the nurses said, it’s because your voice is calming. He’s heard it from before he was born. And I was like, I don’t know, but I’m going to go with that because I felt like I was doing something, you know, and at that time that was all I could do, so.

00:18:31 – Rico Figliolini

Did you, you had people supporting you too?

00:18:33 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes, I was, yeah. I mean, I didn’t, my family came over from England because all my family was in England, but. We had friends, we had people in the community that helped. And the staff at the hospital are also, you know, they’re the angels because they do this for a living. And I was lucky my employer, even at the time I didn’t lose my employment, they were just more concerned about me and my son. So, and, you know, it just, my husband and I, it just really sort of soldered us together and in an even tighter bond to have to go through something as quite as crazy as that.

00:19:03 – Rico Figliolini

And I would imagine European healthcare is a little different.

00:19:06 – Katherine Lafourcade

It is different, yes. And I think had it have happened here, I’m not quite sure the costs that would have been involved because this healthcare system is quite different. Switzerland’s also private, but a lot of it was taken care of. There were some financial burdens, but there are also charities that try and help with that kind of thing because it’s a lot for families to have to go through.

00:19:24 – Rico Figliolini

So once he came out of the coma, once he came into remission. He’s been in remission for five years?

00:19:29 – Katherine Lafourcade

He’s been in remission for five years, yeah.

00:19:31 – Rico Figliolini

That’s a key mark.

00:19:32 – Katherine Lafourcade

It is. Absolutely. So after he came out of the coma, that was when we were entertaining the coming to the US and we had to make sure that was all going to be okay that the treatment, because the treatment was going to continue. So we did. We went through all the stages. Were the doctors okay with us moving here? The answer was yes. Did the insurance cover the move here? The answer was yes. So then we had the, do we do it or do we not do it? And when we asked both children. Theo was absolutely, yes, I want to go there right now. He needed to kind of turn the page. And I think the move here was so great for all of us, actually. And we didn’t know at the time. It was kind of a leap of faith because we didn’t know what we were getting into. It was a big change at quite a critical time. But we decided to make it happen. And he was still having treatments that when we got here, still having chemotherapy.

00:20:19 – Rico Figliolini

Do you, which, if you don’t mind me asking again, which hospital are you doing?

00:20:22 – Katherine Lafourcade

So it was the Children’s Right. Yeah. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Scottish Right Hospital. Amazing.

00:20:30 – Rico Figliolini

You felt really good with them too?

00:20:32 – Katherine Lafourcade

They were phenomenal. They’d read his file that was not a normal file and they knew things that were so, such detail. I was like, these people have read everything. So I trusted them blindly. There were no complications in the last part of his treatment. He did, he was still having treatment though when COVID hit. So that was scary.

00:20:53 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I would imagine infection or something like that.

00:20:54 – Katherine Lafourcade

Exactly. Lungs, I was just, I had visions of the ECMO and the coma and I was like, I just, I don’t know if I can, I don’t know if I can cope going back there. He had the vaccine very early. He caught COVID, but a long time afterwards and it was fine. And so in May of 2020, you were referring to the milestone. So he finished his treatment, May 2020. Had lots of checkups. It’s not something you just finish and you’re good. They still want to make sure that you’re okay. And they get less and less frequent. And then May of 2025, so next month, the biggest milestone yet, five years. Five years after the last chemo, five years of remission, still doing well. Now at college. So he did his high school. He arrived here as a freshman at high school. He did his four years. And now he’s a freshman at college at UGA.

00:21:42 – Rico Figliolini

What does he want to be?

00:21:44 – Katherine Lafourcade

He wants to be a pediatric oncologist.

00:21:47 – Rico Figliolini

Inspiration from the weirdest places.

00:21:49 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes, yeah. I mean, clearly it changed him fundamentally. It changed all of us. I mean, there’s no way that life is the same.

00:21:56 – Rico Figliolini

I can’t even imagine that. I can’t imagine a child. I mean, I have three kids. I cannot imagine what you went through.

00:22:03 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, it was a lot. And it’s still just under the surface, even if it’s five years. And the diagnosis was even before that. But some of it is just so, yeah, it will never not be an emotional subject. And that’s why I want to do things to give back, things to help. And that’s where we get back into the blood drive.

00:22:21 – Rico Figliolini

That’s right. So you started wanting to do that through the chamber.

00:22:25 – Katherine Lafourcade

Exactly. 2023, we realize we can give blood. My husband and I are like, this is amazing. We have wanted to do this since 2017. We finally can. We both give blood. And then I’m like, you know what? I think that most people in the French, also British and Irish, I’m working for the French chamber. I am convinced that most people don’t know the rules have changed. There will be people that have given blood in France or given blood in various parts of their lives, but feel that, well, have been told that they can’t. This is huge. We need to get the message out.

00:22:55 – Rico Figliolini

So that’s what you’re doing.

00:22:56 – Katherine Lafourcade

So I’m like, now I can use my professional role as the executive director of the chamber. I can talk to the French population of Atlanta with the consulate, the consul general of France, with all the other French entities and just get the word out there. You guys can give blood. I think blood donating also dipped during COVID. Obviously it was a very strange world. And I think maybe people that used to give haven’t got back into it. I have seen firsthand blood donating saves lives. My son would not be here today without people, strangers that gave their blood that he got. Now I can’t find them personally, a lot of blood. I mean, I think he had over 50 transfusions. And I’m throwing that number out there a little bit randomly because I can’t remember, but a lot of transfusions. So for me personally, this is huge. And I just want to inspire people to think about it. Think if you’ve never given, give it a go. If you have given and it’s been a long time, revisit it. One blood donation can save up to three lives, which is, you know.

00:24:00 – Rico Figliolini

So tell people, because some people that don’t know what it takes to donate blood. How long does it take? How much are they donating?

00:24:09 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, it’s really not hard. So the blood drives that we do here at the Curiosity Lab, they’re run by the Red Cross, the American Red Cross. So I offered myself up as a blood leader. So I put together the place, the location, we figure out all the logistics and I invite everyone. And then the blood cross come with all of their staff, with the beds, all the material they set up here. I just basically get as many appointments as I can because we have a goal of units that we want to collect during the drive. The regular blood donating is pretty quick. Funny things, it depends on how quickly it drips out. Some people it’s super fast. Some people it’s a bit slower. It’s going to be like 10, 15 minutes around that. Nothing more. It’s not long, no. And it’s no worse than just having the needle stick that you have when you go to the doctor once a year. Realistically, I know the needle stays in there, but it’s the. It’s not worse. You know, you’re just sitting there and then afterwards you get snacks, you get drinks, you get, we get, we have a company that sponsor Werfen give us donuts to eat afterwards. So, and it’s a real sense of community. And I know a lot of people don’t like needles. A lot of people, it’s like a horrible idea to have this thing in your arm and see blood. I would advise just don’t look. I used to hate blood, but honestly, after I went, what I went through with my son. You kind of just get hardened to it. And you know what you think to yourself? I don’t like this, but what if I’m saving someone’s life?

00:25:35 – Rico Figliolini

For sure.

00:25:36 – Katherine Lafourcade

What if it was my child? What if it was my parent? What if it was someone in my family? Wouldn’t I just hope that other people have gone beyond to give it the best shot they can to donate? So this is, you know.

00:25:49 – Rico Figliolini

So for those, I’m bad about it. I mean, I’m just, I can faint after a needle unfortunately. They have to put a butterfly needle, I think it’s called and maybe because it’s just smaller and easier. But you’ve just gotta fast the night before, this is the normal thing the blood test that you have at your normal physical but otherwise you don’t have to fast.

00:26:09 – Katherine Lafourcade

No, no fasting at all. No you need to eat well, drink well. There’s lots of advice that they will give you beforehand to set yourself up for success.

00:26:16 – Rico Figliolini

For the ones that don’t want to roll up their sleeves and donate blood, what can they do?

00:26:21 – Katherine Lafourcade

They can spread the word. They can talk to their colleagues, their family, their neighbors, their communities, their clubs, whatever it is. Spreading the word is the hardest thing. We don’t have big means to go publicly telling everybody about this blood drive, but it’s going to be on World Blood Donor Day, the next one, June 14th, exactly. It’s a Saturday, 11:30 to 4:30. You can book your slot.

00:26:46 – Rico Figliolini

It’s going to be here?

00:26:47 – Katherine Lafourcade

It’s going to be here, in this room, yeah. You can book your appointment. They will take walk-ins, but if you want to be taken at a specific time, better to take that appointment option because then you’ll have more of a chance of knowing when you’re going to be taken. If you don’t know your blood group, you’ll find out.

00:27:01 – Rico Figliolini

Will they tell you on the spot?

00:27:02 – Katherine Lafourcade

Not on the spot. Afterwards, they will tell you what blood group you are, which could be useful.

00:27:06 – Rico Figliolini

It’s kind of funny because most people might not know that. Because when you do your blood test at the hospitals, they don’t do that. Unless you ask them specifically to test for it.

00:27:10 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, exactly. A lot of people won’t ever know their blood group. They will also do screening for pre-diabetes at the moment for free. So that’s also an additional thing, which is kind of cool. You know, you can figure out if you’re maybe heading towards something a bit less healthy and you can maybe take, you know the steps to correct it.And they have an app, you will know which hospital your blood was used at. Yes, they track it and you get a little alert and then you get a little heart. And I have a map where all the, and I, so I tend to give platelets but that’s a, we’re not going to get into. That it’s a bit more, it’s longer, a bit more complicated but similar process. My platelets have gone to Savannah. They’ve gone down to Mobile, Alabama, to Birmingham, to all kinds of places. And you can track that on a map.

00:28:05 – Rico Figliolini

It’s almost like you’re gamifying the whole thing.

00:28:07 – Katherine Lafourcade

Well, I mean, a little bit, but isn’t it nice to know that someone in that hospital has received something that I gave? You know, that’s the whole point. It makes it more real.

00:28:16 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, it does.

00:28:16 – Katherine Lafourcade

I know where it’s gone. Yeah. Exactly. It’s just gone into the ether and you don’t know. Whereas I think to have that follow up and then there’s points and they’ve kind of really, sometimes they give you t-shirts. I should have been wearing a t-shirt today. I didn’t think about it. I went with the French shirt, the French logo. But no, there’s little giveaways and it’s just about community. And it’s about, you know, what you can do on a very personal, small level to help somebody that’s in need. Because if you’re getting a blood transfusion. There’s something not great. Surgery, childbirth, accidents, cancer patients. You know, there’s a whole host of people that need blood. And honestly, if they need blood, they’re not in a great way. So we all rely on other people, strangers, to help in that scenario.

00:29:01 – Rico Figliolini

And there’s not enough blood out there.

00:29:02 – Katherine Lafourcade

Never enough. No, there’s always a shortage. Bad weather can affect it. You know, environments, holidays, all sorts of things can really affect the supply. And they need a, you know, a flow of donors and people to give regularly.

00:29:17 – Rico Figliolini

So where can they go to?

00:29:19 – Katherine Lafourcade

They can basically, I’m trying to think the easiest way would be to look on the events page of our website.

00:29:25 – Rico Figliolini

Of the chamber website?

00:29:27 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes. So our website is FACC. So French American Chamber of Commerce. The letters FACC-Atlanta.com. And then there’s an events section. And in that event section, there is a link to the blood drive.

00:29:41 – Rico Figliolini

Excellent. And we’ll have the link in the podcast notes as well. So they should do it as soon as possible.

00:29:47 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes. Yes. Enrollment is from now. I’m just going to be pushing it out. And, you know, yeah, just spread the word. That’s my ask.

00:29:53 – Rico Figliolini

And I almost don’t want to say this, but there’s also another date a little further away.

00:29:57 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yes, in September.

00:29:58 – Rico Figliolini

In September. So if you’re on vacation. You could do the September date.

00:29:59 – Katherine Lafourcade

We’re doing three this year. We set the target of three drives this year. We might do it quarterly next year. But yeah, that’s the aim is just to keep spreading the word.

00:30:09 – Rico Figliolini

Right. And it’s going to be done here at Curiosity Lab. And the 14th is what? What day is it?

00:30:15 – Katherine Lafourcade

Saturday.

00:30:15 – Rico Figliolini

It’s Saturday. There’s no excuse.

00:30:15 – Katherine Lafourcade

Exactly. Yes.

00:30:18 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Eat your fill. Eat a good breakfast. Come on down and give some blood.

00:30:22 – Katherine Lafourcade

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Make a difference.

00:30:24 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, for sure. So we’ve been here talking with Katherine Lafourcade, if I’m pronouncing that. Thanks. My last name’s Figliolini, and I mess that up sometimes. But I appreciate you spending time with me and talking about your son, Theo, and the experience that you went through.

00:30:41 – Katherine Lafourcade

You’re welcome.

00:30:41 – Rico Figliolini

Thank you, guys.

00:30:42 – Katherine Lafourcade

Thanks for having me.

00:30:43 – Rico Figliolini

No, no. Thanks, Katherine. Thank you, everyone.

In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, host Rico Figliolini spotlights three remarkable student artists featured in this year’s Wesleyan Artist Market. Eighth graders Kimberly Wang and Nika Jensen, along with sixth grader Carter Jensen, share their creative journeys—ranging from edible art like fruit jellies and peppermint bark to handmade jewelry and custom-designed bags.

Kimberly talks about her love for food art and balancing sweetness with fruity freshness, while Nika and Carter discuss building a jewelry business that also gives back—donating proceeds to families in the Philippines. This isn’t just an artist market; it’s a showcase of purpose-driven, globally inspired young talent. The event runs April 25–26 at Wesleyan School and is open to the public.

Podcast Takeaways:

• Kimberly Wang creates handmade edible treats, balancing flavor and freshness for the show.
• Nika and Carter Jensen co-run a jewelry and fashion accessory business, inspired by global travel and cultural experiences.
• Nika donates part of her proceeds to support families in the Philippines.
• All three students are deeply involved in extracurriculars—from musicals, marching band, math club, and academic bowl.
• The Wesleyan Artist Market features 24 student artists and over 70 professionals—open to the public April 25–26.

Timestamp: 

00:02:19 – Student intros and extracurriculars 
00:03:06 – First-time participants and motivations for joining 
00:04:13 – Kimberly’s edible art and recipe testing process 
00:05:16 – Nika and Carter’s jewelry and bag design business 
00:07:06 – The reward of watching people enjoy your creations 
00:08:20 – Donating art profits to support families in the Philippines 
00:10:39 – Future aspirations in medicine and law, with art as a passion 
00:12:06 – Behind-the-scenes logistics of preparing for the market 
00:13:25 – Global travel inspiration: 73 countries and counting
00:17:19 – Where the students draw artistic inspiration 
00:20:04 – Custom requests: From peppermint bark to Lego earrings 
00:21:16 – Anticipation and excitement for this year’s market 

00:22:29 – Reflections on Wesleyan and the artist experience 

Transcript: 

00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini 

Hey, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. We have a great set of guests today. Because of the upcoming Wesleyan Artist Market, we thought we’d do some interviews with student artists. Three of the 24 that are going to be at Wesleyan Artist Market. So they’re with me here today. So we’re going to get right into that shortly. I just want to say thank you to our corporate sponsors. So I want to say thank you to EV Remodeling, Inc., based here in Peachtree Corners. The owner is Eli. Him and his family live here. They’re great. They do a lot of design work, design your space. Essentially, any home remodeling you need from whether it’s your kitchen, your bathroom, or a whole house remodel, or even an addition to your home, think about it, whatever you need, Eli can handle. So check them out. Go to evremodelinginc.com and find out how they can design your space and your life. Our next sponsor just came on, and they’re Vox Pop Uli. I want to thank them for joining us as well. They deal with all sorts of things you can imagine putting your logo on, similar to a little bit about what these kids do, right? They’re creating artwork. They’re creating a brand for themselves. And so this is what Vox Pop Uli does, right? They’ll take your brand and bring it to life. Essentially, anything that you can think of that would go on apparel, whether it’s sweaters or T-shirts or wherever you want to put your brand engraving, your logo, what object you want to put it on, even vehicle wraps. So if you’ve got a truck, you want to put a whole wrap around it, check them out because they can do that. They’re here in Peachtree Corners and they’re called Vox Pop Uli. So visit their website. I’ll have the links in the show notes as well. So thank you guys. I appreciate your support. So now let’s get right into it. Let me introduce our three artists, great Wesleyan students. Can’t wait to start talking to them. We have Kimberly Wang first on your left, on my left, and Nika and her brother Carter Jensen, who work together creating the artwork they do. So I’m going to ask you guys just to, you know, give me a little background. Tell me who you are, your grade, what you do, extracurricular, stuff like that. This way our audience can get to know a little bit more about you. So let’s start with Kimberly Wang. Hey, Kimberly. 

00:02:19 – Kimberly Wang 

My name is Kimberly Wang. I’m in eighth grade this year, and outside of Artist Market, I do marching band, and I also do the musical production this year, which is Matilda. 

00:02:31 – Rico Figliolini 

Excellent. What about Nika? How about you? 

00:02:34 – Nika Jensen 

I’m also in eighth grade. My name is Nika Jensen, and apart from doing the Artist Market, I do cross country. I’m also in Matilda this year, and I also do math counts, which is a math club.

00:02:47 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay, cool. And Carter? 

00:02:49 – Carter Jensen 

Hello, my name is Carter Jensen. I’m in the sixth grade. And outside of the artist market, I do academic pool and I also do basketball. 

00:03:00 – Rico Figliolini 

Excellent. Alright, cool. So have you guys ever done the artist market before? Is this the first time? 

00:03:06 – Kimberly Wang 

This is my second year doing it this year. 

00:03:08 – Rico Figliolini 

Second? 

00:03:10 – Nika Jensen 

Yeah, this is our first year because we’re new students this year. 

00:03:13 – Rico Figliolini 

Alright, cool. What inspired you to get into it, Nika? 

00:03:17 – Kimberly Wang 

Well, I had my own business before we came to Wesleyan and so I thought that the artist market is a good way to like show my business to other people in our community. So yeah. 

00:03:30 – Rico Figliolini 

And you brought in your brother Carter to help you with? 

00:03:35 – Nika Jensen 

Yes, sir. He’s also part of the business. 

00:03:39 – Rico Figliolini 

Alright cool. Okay so, Kimberly. Food. Food is art, right? I’m sure your mom would probably say, it’s food, just eat it. But you’re playing with your food, essentially. What they used to tell you not to do, right? So when you create your food art, what do you think about? How do you go through this? How do you choose what you do and what do you exactly do? 

00:04:13 – Kimberly Wang 

So this year, I am making fruit jellies and peppermint bark. And when I think about what creations I want to make for the artist market, I go online and I look through like, what are some popular desserts that a lot of people like? And once I like choose my items, then I go through

the recipe and then I do a lot of trial and errors to make sure that like the products are like healthy and they taste well. 

00:04:42 – Rico Figliolini 

So they have to be edible, right? Because this is edible art? 

00:04:45 – Kimberly Wang 

Definitely, yes. 

00:04:46 – Rico Figliolini 

So are you eating a lot of the edible art before you get to what you need? 

00:04:50 – Kimberly Wang 

Not really. I don’t usually taste a lot of the food. I let my family taste it. 

00:04:56 – Rico Figliolini 

Ah, good. I like that. Yes. Get them to participate. Cool. So edible art, that’s one way of doing it. Jewelry, that’s something else, right? Wearable. How do you guys, Nika, Carter, how do you get to the place of what you do? 

00:05:16 – Nika Jensen 

So I started my business when I was 11 years old and it started like I got my first jewelry making kit and I kind of just expanded from there. So like I usually use Amazon to search and find like the prettiest designs like of earrings and pendants and get opinions from other people like my mom and my family to see like if they think it’s like wearable and if they like it. So I browse on Amazon for a while and I find like the best and high quality products and then I hand make them at home usually like every day after I come home from school so and my brother he does something else and he can tell you about that. 

00:06:01 – Carter Jensen 

I, my sister, she got a Cricut machine for, like, her 12th birthday, I think. And started making these, like, iron-on bags with the Cricut machine and, like, making them based on, like, Georgia and, like, Wesleyan and designing it based on fashion. 

00:06:19 – Rico Figliolini 

Alright. Cool. So let’s get back to Kimberly. The food that you do. Do you have particular flavors you like? Do you have particular areas that you stay in? 

00:06:33 – Kimberly Wang 

So this year I’m trying out like something more sweet with chocolate. But last year I definitely went for more of like the fruity side. And I think I like to keep it like a balance. So that way one is not overpowering the other. My personal favorite will probably be fruit because it’s healthy. And I mean, it just tastes good in general.

00:06:56 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Alright cool. What’s the most rewarding part that you can think of, of making edible art? 

00:07:06 – Kimberly Wang 

Well, I mean definitely like you said before you get to eat a lot of food. I mean, I did say before that I don’t eat a lot of the creations I make, but sometimes I still do eat it. And so I think it’s also really rewarding to see like people try out your creations and see like their reactions to what they think of it. 

00:07:27 – Rico Figliolini 

So when, I know I’ve spoken to other artists when they sell their artwork like paintings or stuff like that they get a chance to see it sometimes when the fan that bought it if you will, would send them a picture of where they hung it right? Yours disappears right? 

00:07:45 – Kimberly Wang 

Yeah, exactly. 

00:07:47 – Rico Figliolini 

Yeah I guess, there’s no way to, short of doing a selfie with it or taking pictures of it, there’s no there’s no permanency to it so how does that feel? 

00:07:57 – Kimberly Wang 

I mean well as long as the people enjoy it that’s good. And I mean I think mainly it’s about like the memory that you have of having the food and if you like it then it stays as a good memory for you and if you don’t then I mean you can always try out different things. 

00:08:20 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Nika, Carter, as far as the jewelry goes the, you’ve used it to raise money to support children in the philippines? yes 

00:08:29 – Nika Jensen 

Yes sir. 

00:08:31 – Rico Figliolini 

Is that, is that how you started this when you were 11? Is that the reason? 

00:08:35 – Kimberly Wang 

No, so I was like 11 during the pandemic. So I was always looking for a way to express my creativity. And so that’s how I started my own business. And so I was selling at my uncle’s pharmacy and I was saving up the money to use for like college or for like other events later on in my life. But this last year and a half before this school year, we were living in the Philippines. And so I was really touched by all of the families there. And we even did something similar where we gave out food and canned goods over Christmas to poor families there. So that just

really touched me. And so ever since we got back to America, I’ve been donating part of my profits to other families in the Philippines. 

00:09:24 – Rico Figliolini 

Carter, did you end up going on that trip as well? 

00:09:28 – Carter Jensen 

Yeah, I was with her. We stayed there for about a year and a half. We also did schooling there. 

00:09:36 – Rico Figliolini 

It’s interesting brothers and sisters, I have three kids and you know growing up brothers and sisters always there could be dynamics there. So how do you get along? Do you ever say to your sister, I don’t know about that. You know that might not look as good, that might not sell. Do you give good feedback? I mean how do you praise her or how do you work together? 

00:09:58 – Carter Jensen 

She’s more of the leader of the business so like I usually just like try to like agree with her and like yeah. 

00:10:12 – Rico Figliolini 

Alright that’s cool well you need a leader of the pack sometimes right? So Nika the artwork that you do, you know this is part of what you do you’ve mentioned other things you do right? I know you’re young, you all are, you know you’re not old enough to really think well maybe you are to really think what you want to do with your life right? Is art something that you want to keep as part of what you’re doing in your life? 

00:10:39 – Nika Jensen 

It’s definitely something that’s of great value to me, but I kind of want to pursue the medical field, but art is also really important to me. 

00:10:49 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Sounds good. Same question to Kimberly. What about you? How do you feel about the work you do? 

00:10:57 – Kimberly Wang 

I definitely enjoy making food, but like Nika said, I was also really interested in the medical field. And so like I’m not really sure if I’m going to continue pursuing this. But I mean it’s definitely brought me a lot of joy while doing food art. 

00:11:15 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Medical field both of you, that’s cool. What about Carter? How about you? 00:11:19 – Carter Jensen

I kind of like, I like doing art it’s one way to like express your creativity as my sister said. But I also kind of, I’m not really sure what I want to do when I grow up, maybe be a lawyer. 

00:11:33 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. Well, artwork gives you a chance, right, to play a little bit, to be able to also see how people, like Kimberly, like you said about how when people see your food or taste your food and your food art, if you will, and it gives you a chance to see how people appreciate what you’re doing, I think, right? The challenges of making food art and keeping it fresh and making sure you’re going to deliver it on the right way I guess at the Wesleyan artist market, how do you how do you handle that part of it? 

00:12:06 – Kimberly Wang 

So for me the night before each day of the selling I would stay up really late and I make all my products so they’re all fresh and they’re all new. Because I want the best for the people that are eating the food because I don’t want anything to go bad overnight and so I make sure that it’s always new products and I make it, yeah. 

00:12:32 – Rico Figliolini 

We don’t have the same issue with the jewelry that you do, Nika. So that could last forever, right? But putting it together, sourcing the supplies, right, of what you do, the logistics of it, I guess. How do you handle that? Like getting all the materials together? Do you order it all on Amazon? 

00:12:52 – Nika Jensen 

Yeah, I order like 99% of all of my things from Amazon. And then since I already have the materials shipped to me, then all I have to do is just create them from my house. So it’s easier for me than having to go out and buy supplies at stores. 

00:13:11 – Rico Figliolini 

Sounds good. What inspires you as far as jewelry goes? I know that you said you look online to see other things and what the trend is. So where do you find most of your trends? Is it just on Amazon or is it social media, other places? 

00:13:25 – Nika Jensen 

I kind of observe other people and like what they wear and also social media. And I get a lot of inspiration also from like nature and from like my travels. We’ve been to a lot of countries in the past five years, 173 countries. 

00:13:44 – Rico Figliolini 

How many? 

00:13:45 – Nika Jensen 

I’m sorry, not 173, 73 countries.

00:13:49 – Rico Figliolini 

73 countries? 

00:13:50 – Nika Jensen 

Yes, sir. 

00:13:51 – Rico Figliolini 

That you’ve been to in how many years? I can’t even wrap my head around that. How did you even do that? Teleport? I mean, how did you do that? Wow. What is your heritage, if you don’t mind me asking? 

00:14:12 – Nika Jensen 

I’m half Filipino. My brother and I are half Filipino. And then my father is part Danish and then also American. 

00:14:21 – Rico Figliolini 

Do you speak any languages? 

00:14:23 – Nika Jensen 

I speak the language of the Philippines called Tagalog and then English. And I’m learning Spanish. 

00:14:30 – Rico Figliolini 

Really? Okay. Kimberly, how about you? 

00:14:33 – Kimberly Wang 

So my mom is Taiwanese and my dad is Chinese. So I speak Chinese, English. I’m learning French and I’m learning Korean. 

00:14:43 – Rico Figliolini 

Really? Wow. Okay. Speak Mandarin, is it? Okay. My son was learning that for a year and he was, it’s a tough language to learn. But I’m sure being able to travel for example Nika, to be able to see other other countries and inspiration from those countries. What of the 73, 75 countries you visited what would you say the top five would be for that type of inspiration? Can you pick that up? 

00:15:16 – Nika Jensen 

I think so. I really like Argentina just because it’s so unique and the culture is just so strong there. Like you really feel so immersed just when you like step into the country. I like Italy, not only because of the food, but that’s also where I got a lot of inspiration for my jewelry. Just like the glass in Venice, like the Murano glass, like that’s also a really big inspiration. In Turkey, that’s when I first like found my interest in jewelry because there was, we went to this bead store and there was like thousands of different beads and I got to like choose different charms and like experiment with creating jewelry. So Turkey, Argentina, Italy, and then I have to give it to the

Philippines, obviously, because we lived there for so long. And then that’s hard. What do you think, Carter? 

00:16:12 – Carter Jensen 

I like India because I really like butter chicken. Also like Italy because I like pizza and pasta. 

00:16:27 – Rico Figliolini 

Yes, can’t get any better pizza than Italy, that’s for sure. 

00:16:30 – Carter Jensen 

Yeah, it’s really good there. And I also like Japan because it’s very futuristic and it’s like… 

00:16:38 – Rico Figliolini 

Is it? 

00:16:39 – Carter Jensen 

Yeah, it’s like a new environment and it’s like… 

00:16:45 – Rico Figliolini 

Yeah, cool. I can’t wait I think where, I think we may be heading there in July so that would be fun. I’ve never been so that would be interesting. Cool so with the artwork, with the inspiration, with the journey that you guys have been on, do you think that, are there any artists it’s hard and food maybe unless it’s Gordon Ramsay or something, but do you draw any inspiration? Who do you draw inspiration from for the work for what you do? Let’s start with Kimberly. 

00:17:19 – Kimberly Wang 

I don’t really have a specific artist that I look up to but I do watch some cooking shows and some like dessert making shows and they always really inspire me so I feel like that’s what really led me into like starting food art. And so I was like, whoa, this is really cool. And so I was like, okay, let me try this. And so now I’m here and then I’m like, this is pretty fun. 

00:17:49 – Rico Figliolini 

Oh, okay. Carter, I know you’re not the main person doing the artwork, but what do you see when you’re working with your sister? How does that feel working with her, doing the stuff with her, the artwork? Whatever you’re doing with her, how you know what’s that journey feel like for a brother and his sister? 

00:18:13 – Carter Jensen 

It’s kind of relaxing doing artwork and like peeling off like the stickers on the bags 

00:18:26 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay, alright, that’s cool. Sister, how do you feel? 

00:18:30 – Nika Jensen

Yeah I just enjoy anytime I’m like I get to make jewelry because I feel like it’s such like an important thing to me. And it also like my brother said it’s really relaxing and just like sitting in our home and just like making jewelry it’s like, it’s really fun for me. 

00:18:48 – Rico Figliolini 

Do you wear? I’m assuming you wear some of the stuff you make? 

00:18:51 – Nika Jensen 

No actually I don’t have my ears pierced. And so I just like making it and seeing my creations on other people. 

00:19:00 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay, cool. Kimberly, do you ever decide, I’ve got to make something, I want to eat something, do you ever decide to do that, or is it always just for the art? 

00:19:10 – Kimberly Wang 

I think mainly just for the art. Because, I mean, I do piano outside of school, and so most of my time is sucked into that. But, I mean, sometimes if I do want to make something, yeah, I’ll go for it. And I’ll try my best, but it might not be successful. 

00:19:31 – Rico Figliolini 

Have you ever been, have you ever designed anything custom design? Because someone requested it from you? Like has anyone ever asked Kimberly, has any anyone ever asked yeah can you make that for me? Like aside from the artwork you sell. 

00:19:50 – Kimberly Wang 

I don’t think so. I did get one request by a high schooler to make peppermint bark for him for his art and science class. But like other than that, no. 

00:20:00 – Rico Figliolini 

Okay. How about Nika? Have you ever had a request for jewelry? 

00:20:04 – Nika Jensen 

Yes, I have. So my mom was posting some of my creations on social media and someone reached out to me and she wanted lego earrings like so little like lego figurines as earrings. So I used some of my own legos and then we also bought some but I drilled a hole on top of their head and I had to stick a screw inside. I had to mail it to them. And then they sent me a picture of them wearing it. 

00:20:42 – Rico Figliolini 

It’s just the way you were describing it, drilling the hole in the head. It’s like, all right, well, that’s good. So there’s the art. You do anything for art, I guess. That’s good. Great. We’ve been showcasing and talking a lot about art here and food and stuff. What are you looking forward to this year’s Wesleyan Artist Market? What is it that’s looking forward? I mean, you have there’s

three of you out of 24 other students. Have you seen or talked to other students and what they’re doing for the show, for the market? What are you looking forward to? 

00:21:16 – Nika Jensen 

To me? 

00:21:17 – Rico Figliolini 

Yeah, sure. Let’s go with it. 

00:21:18 – Nika Jensen 

Okay. Yes. Kimberly and I are actually really good friends so we’ve been like talking with our other friends that are doing the artist market and we’re like you know what they’re selling and yeah. I’m just really excited because we’ve never my brother and I have never done something like this before so I think it’ll be a really good opportunity and it’ll be fun so. 

00:21:39 – Rico Figliolini 

Something wholly new. That’s good, a good experience. How about you Kimberly? 

00:21:45 – Kimberly Wang 

Ever since last year, I was really astonished by everything I saw, even if it was like the adult artists, but like the student artists, they were all so talented. I know like a few other people are making food art and people like Nika are making jewelry. And so I’m honestly really inspired and just really blown away by all the effort that everyone puts in. 

00:22:13 – Rico Figliolini 

Cool. Anything that I’ve not touched on, guys, that you want to share about, individually about what it takes to do what you’re doing or your experience at Wesleyan? Why don’t we start with Kimberly? 

00:22:29 – Kimberly Wang 

I don’t really have much. I feel like this was a really nice opportunity to be able to share what Wesleyan Artist Market is about and how students have been able to participate in it. 

00:22:42 – Rico Figliolini 

Cool. Nika? 

00:22:43 – Nika Jensen 

Yeah so my mom printed out pictures of our time in the philippines so this first one it’s all the bags of food that my old school donated to families in the philippines. 

00:23:01 – Rico Figliolini 

Excellent. Glad you printed those out. 

00:23:03 – Nika Jensen

This is my old class. This was this year when I sent my profits back to the Philippines. And those are all the boxes of food and clothes that they get with that money. 

00:23:16 – Rico Figliolini 

Wow, you really did make a lot of money. 

00:23:18 – Nika Jensen 

Yes, sir. 

00:23:19 – Rico Figliolini 

That’s good. That’s great. And maybe at some point I’ll ask Camille on this, getting some pictures from you all of some of the artwork that you’ve done. I’d love to include that when we post the podcast as well. And if you have any social media where you post your artwork on, if it’s public, feel free. We’re going to be sharing this and we’ll be taking you all as well. I think we got everything covered. I mean, you’re all just unbelievable kids. You’re just doing great work. And I’m just like, it’s always great to talk to you, to Wesleyan students, just like, or to students that are motivated, put it that way, to do things. So glad to see that you’re doing all sorts of things and I still can’t wrap my head around 75 countries, I’m just still trying to think that just like in five years, I can’t even see doing that. But I want to thank you all for for joining me so this is Wesleyan Artist Market you all will be at and that’s April Friday the 25th from 10:00 – 7:00 pm and Saturday April 26 from 10:00 to 3:00 pm. We’ve been talking with Kimberly Wang, who does food art, edible food art, and Nika and her brother Carter Jensen, who do jewelry. Appreciate you guys being with me and being so talkative and just being good guests. So thank you all. Hang in there with me for a second. Everyone else, I want to say thank you again for joining us. You can find out more about Wesleyan Artist Market from just going to wesleyanschool.org or just Googling Wesleyan Artist Market it’ll pop up for you. And it’s open to the public, Friday and Saturday in April. So check them out. Visit the 24 students that are displaying their artwork as well, along with the over, I think it’s over 70 professional artists there. And thank you all from, I guess you’re in Wesleyan Wolf TV station too. So appreciate you doing that with me. So thank you everyone. Stay well.

In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, host Rico Figliolini speaks with City Manager Brian Johnson about several key developments happening around the city. From proposed traffic improvements near the Forum to the shift toward more equity-based residential housing, Brian provides updates on what’s being considered and how the city is approaching growth and redevelopment.

The conversation covers changes in Tech Park, details about the new Curiosity Corner mobility hub, updates on zoning and land use policy and the city’s efforts to manage potential data center projects.

If you live, work, or invest in Peachtree Corners, this episode offers a clear and timely overview of where things stand and what’s on the horizon.

Downloadable Content

• Peachtree Corners Memorandum Roundabout Assessment (PDF)
• Final PTC Circle Roundabout Feasibility Study 03-01-2023 (PDF)
• Final PTC Circle Roundabout Feasibility Study APPENDICES 03-01-2023 (PDF)

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🔍 Key Takeaways

• New Roundabout proposed at Peachtree Corners Circle near the Forum to address traffic safety.
• Multiple equity-based residential projects replacing outdated office spaces, including at 20-22 Tech Park, the Day Building, and 333 Research Court.
• Curiosity Corner Mobility Hub coming to Tech Park, featuring EV stations, food trucks and drone test areas.
• Autonomous vehicles like May Mobility already operating with zero drivers on Peachtree Corners streets.
• City’s proactive zoning changes include special-use permits for data centers and new infill residential zoning.
• Merger of Planning Commission and Zoning Board of Appeals to streamline decisions and reduce redundancy.

Timestamps of Major Topics

• 00:01 – Introductions & Sponsors
• 02:00 – New Roundabout Near the Forum: Safety & Traffic Study
• 09:45 – 20/22 Tech Park Development: Downsized, Equity Apartments
• 13:30 – Day Building Townhome Settlement & Safety Upgrades
• 17:00 – 333 Research Court: Office-to-Townhome Conversion
• 20:00 – Curiosity Corner: Tech Park’s New Mobility Hub
• 23:45 – May Mobility Driverless Car Stories
• 26:45 – Why Peachtree Corners is Restricting Data Center Development
• 31:30 – Merging Zoning Boards: Efficiency & Transparency
• 34:00 – New Infill Residential Zoning for Smaller Sites

38:00 – Wrap-up and Magazine Plug

Podcast Transcript:

Transcript:

00:00:03 – Rico Figliolini

Right. Hi, this is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. Appreciate you guys joining us. This is me with Brian Johnson, the city manager. Hey, Brian.

00:00:09 – Brian Johnson

Hey, Rico. How are you? 

00:00:15 – Rico Figliolini

Good. Good to have you. We haven’t done this in a while, but before we get into this, let me just say thank you to two of our sponsors, EV Remodeling Inc. and Eli, the owner, based here in Peachtree Corners. They’re a great company, great family. They do design to build. So from everything from rebuilding your house to adding a deck or an extension or just redoing your kitchen. They’ve done over 260 family homes and stuff. So check them out. They just will do great work for you. Our second sponsor is Vox Pop Uli, also here based in Peachtree Corners. If you have a company and you’re doing either trade shows or you have a company and you’re trying to get your brand name out, they’re the company to do it with because they deal with everything from vehicle wraps, wrapping that whole truck or that car, to trade show booths, to garments for your business, or to if you’re doing a Peachtree Corners Festival and you need the tent and you need branding, they’ll take care of that. So anything you need, your logo imprinted onto almost any object, they’ll figure it out for you. So check them out Vox Pop Uli is the company. Tell them we sent you, so thanks for supporting us. So Brian it’s been a while, I think we got a few things to touch on to talk about. Lots happening this year as one city councilman told me, it’s going to be an exciting year of stuff going on. But things going on right now. So let’s start off with I guess one of the biggest things, we just had an informational meeting about. So we had a lot of comments on our social posts about this. And this is about installing possibly another roundabout. This was an informational meeting, right? And the roundabout, similar to the one that’s on Peachtree Corners Circle and Medlock Bridge Road, right? But this one’s going to be located between the Forum and Creme de la Creme on also Peachtree Corners Circle. So can you give us the, you know the the details on that or eye level?

00:02:20 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, so it boiled down it really comes to this if anybody’s ever left the Forum on the south end by Trader Joe’s and wanted to turn on the Peachtree Corner Circle, really any direction but certainly if you’re trying to make a left out of there, it’s kind of a dangerous you know intersection. It’s unsignalized there, you know Peachtree Corner Circle coming from the west or the right side if you were, you know leaving the Forum is coming over down a hill around a corner. You’re crossing over, I believe what at that point you’re at least five lanes of traffic are at two lanes each way in a middle turning lane. And it’s a dangerous intersection. And as the activity at the Forum increases, the property right across the street, right next to Creme de la Creme is zoned for condos. So that could get developed. And then we’re going to talk here shortly about just up the road, the Day Building properly, which is actually the next property over that just got approved. And so traffic is going to even increase even more. We cannot put a signal, another traffic signal at that intersection because it’s too close to the Peachtree Corner Circle, Peachtree Parkway intersection. So we either have to leave it the way it is or a roundabout allows people, especially the most dangerous turning movement is leaving the Forum turning left.

00:03:54 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, for sure.

00:03:57 – Brian Johnson

And that, there’s no way to resolve that with, I guess unless you did a four-way stop, which I’m not, I mean, that’s, again, not just two lanes of traffic each direction. It can’t put a signal. So a roundabout allows people who want to turn left to actually turn right first into the roundabout and then just stay in the roundabout as you can go around to the left. So it’s almost like making a turning right to ultimately make a left. But you would turn right and enter the roundabout and then just follow the roundabout around until you’re now facing Peachtree Parkway and then you head straight. So we did a big traffic analysis, the city did along with Gwinnett County DOT and Georgia DOT, and a roundabout fits at that location. And so right now where we’re at is council, the city had an open house recently to solicit public comment on it. We’re sharing with you, have some, and we’re sharing the remainder of the information with you, Rico, so people can get on your social media posts and see, you know, but ultimately, you know, a lot of this detail will be hosted on our website, but they can see everything from the traffic analysis, the accident reports, the design concepts. But we’re doing that so that council can ultimately decide if this is you know a good to go project, and so that’s where we’re at with that project.

00:05:37 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. And we’ll have links we have an article being written about it but we’ll have links to the website, to the resources that you talked about, we’ll have that in the show notes. And this video I think a 3D video also that we’ll be sharing.

00:05:52 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, it’s an actual traffic model. So we took real traffic data from that intersection and then applied it at different times of the day on how this new roundabout would address that traffic count, that real traffic count. So that is not like, oh, let’s just throw a number of cars going through it. It is actually from the traffic counts.

00:06:16 – Rico Figliolini

And I remember the consultant telling me that I asked him, I said, it looks like an awful lot of cars. And he says, well, this is based on what the traffic is.

00:06:25 – Brian Johnson

Well, yeah, at the worst time, like, say, at 5:30.

00:06:30 – Rico Figliolini

Right.

00:06:31 – Brian Johnson

You know, how would it handle that? I mean, it’s easy to handle traffic there if it’s, you know, two in the afternoon, you know, nine in the morning, but we want to know what it’s like, you know, especially in the evening and rush hour, because the Forum’s not open in the early morning, so the morning rush hour traffic isn’t so bad. Evening is definitely, afternoon into the evening.

00:06:50 – Rico Figliolini

When you have people leaving the Forum, when you have people coming through wanting to go into the Forum, you have people leaving Creme de la C reme, you have people going left out of the QT station. Which once this is put, if I understand correctly, it’ll be a right in, right out only. Because there’ll be a median across the way. Correct.

00:07:13 – Brian Johnson

Correct. And you won’t be able to make a left out of the J. Alexander’s curb cut that’s closest to Peachtree Parkway.

00:07:21 – Rico Figliolini

You won’t be able to do that.

00:07:22 – Brian Johnson

Because that’s also, that’s actually going across.

00:07:25 – Rico Figliolini

That’s actually worse.

00:07:26 – Brian Johnson

Seven lanes of traffic with the turning lanes included.

00:07:29 – Rico Figliolini

I can’t even see how someone wants to make a left out of there. That’s dangerous right there.

00:07:32 – Brian Johnson

But people do.

00:07:33 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. It’s crazy. And making a right out of, or coming out of the Forum by the Trader Joe’s, that driveway. I mean, I’ve personally seen anecdotally, if you will, one or two accidents roughly a year every months or so. And that’s what I’ve seen there. And I’ve seen people in the median stacked two, three, four cars. And if the first car doesn’t do their turn. The car behind them wants to play chicken and wants to come through sometimes. It’s like, you know, so I’m looking as I’m coming towards Peachtree Corners Baptist Church with the QT behind me. I’d have to be looking at the right side to see the Forum people, either people coming out to make a right or cutting straight across or wanting to go from that median going into the Forum. And even sometimes the Creme de la Creme people wanting to make a left out of there as well. Cutting across and who’s going to go?

00:08:30 –  Brian Johnson

At the same time, somebody may want to make a left out of the Forum and Creme de la Creme.

00:08:35 – Rico Figliolini

Yes.

00:08:35 – Brian Johnson

And then there, you know. Yeah. So the only two options we have really, again, GDOT won’t let us put a traffic signal there because it’s too close to their signal on Peachtree Parkway.

00:08:49 – Rico Figliolini

Right.

00:08:50 – Brian Johnson

You can’t really put a four way stop where you have that many lanes. So we either leave it alone and just hope. Keep hoping for the best, or we do something that allows anybody who wants to make a left to technically do it by making a right into the traffic circle and then coming back around.

00:09:08 – Rico Figliolini

And I think there’ll be some improvements based on what we learned, what was learned from the roundabout at the other place that there’ll be some, what’s called brambles, I guess, stopping people cutting across from one lane to the other as they’re coming around. So there’ll be areas where they can feed into naturally into the lane. But yeah, so I thought that was good. So if you guys want to check out the links, you’ll be able to see that information and stuff. So that’s cool. So let’s talk about also 2022 Technology Parkway. That was the, that was originally had an old developer that came in. That was actually approved, I think, for just almost 300 units, apartments.

00:09:54 – Brian Johnson

A little more than 300, yeah.

00:09:55 – Rico Figliolini

More than 300, right? So now a new developer came in. And so tell us a bit about that, because now it’s moving towards equity property, I think, or?

00:10:06 – Brian Johnson

Well, no, that one isn’t. So the original application that was approved for rezoning was to combine 20 and 22 Tech Park South, which is at the corner of PIB and Technology Parkway South. And to combine the properties and then put, you know, around 350-ish apartment units on two different, I don’t know if you want to call them towers, but, you know, I would say six-story properties there built on top of where the existing buildings had been demoed. And the original owner, you know, ends up selling it. And so when the new developers come in, we work with them. And the ultimate product that they ask to be developed is reducing it by, I don’t know, somewhere near 100. So there’s like about 100 less units going in as tall. But it is still a multifamily development right there at the corner, all being built on existing parking lot or foundation of existing building. Anybody’s driven there recently that’s an old building that had structured parking there, it’s derelict people are breaking into it and and so it’s a code enforcement you know kind of challenge right now but the developers were approved for this less dense product than was previously approved so in that vein that’s a good thing. And again tech park and the businesses in tech park need, you know, it’s healthy to have a mix of housing units in amongst these buildings because employees like to be able to work close to or live close to where they work. So this is a good node right there, right there at PIB. So, yeah, we’re excited about the project and, you know, have every reason to believe the developer is going to jump right on it.

00:12:08 – Rico Figliolini

It’s amazing how we, how is its transition, Tech Park, 500 acres of office, all office, to slowly being more residential in there as well.

00:12:19 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, the mix.

00:12:20 – Rico Figliolini

The mix of it. Because you know the world has changed there’s still a lot of people working remote still a lot of you know office buildings, just you know going the way of this if you will.

00:12:32 – Brian Johnson

And we did part of that small area plan that council just approved recently was a office inventory in which we graded the quality of the remaining office And we identified the offices that are, you know, and it’s a lesser percentage, but there are some that are almost at a point where you’re not going to ever see somebody fill it with, you know, commercial tenants anymore because the building requires too many upgrades for it to be competitive. So those are ones that council will be, you know, more amenable to consider transitioning it to residential. Some of the office product, if an application came in and they wanted to demo or repurpose an office, council would say no, because we do want to also protect our office product. It’s still a very important part of our, you know, local economy. So we’re being very, you know, selective in which ones we might allow for this to happen, which ones we won’t.

00:13:34 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Talking about another one, also the Day building, which is on Peachtree Corner Circle. People might be familiar with that building. It’s just, it’s before the Creme de la Creme on the right-hand side going up a hill. So they’ve originally came in, wanted to do 225 units or somewhere about there, retail, townhomes, so mixed use. That was denied, I think, at some point. And then they filed suit, trying to figure out, you know, we want to use this land, let us use this land. And then they went into a settlement with you, with the city. So tell us a bit about that. And they resubmitted, I think, right?

00:14:13 – Brian Johnson

Yes. And that is all true. And so they came back as part of settlement discussions and changed it from a mixed use product that had 225-ish or so apartments to an all equity development of around 60, maybe a little bit more than 60 townhomes on that product or on that property. That property has two entrances, one on Peachtree Corner Circle and then the back side also has ingress egress onto what’s Data Drive. Then if you take Data Drive up it goes into Triangle Parkway near Cornerstone Christian. So this development will have two entrances so it won’t have to dump everything out on Peachtree Corner Circle all the time. But it does allow us, as part of this settlement agreement we mandated, if you are on Peachtree Corner Circle, say, heading from Spalding towards Peachtree Parkway, and you start coming around that, you know, down the hill around the corner, getting close to the Forum, Creme de la Creme, the current entrance doesn’t have a deceleration length. So people don’t realize there’s an entrance there and all of a sudden when you’re on this corner where you would think there’s no entrances anywhere we’re at a higher rate of speed people turning into it all of a sudden slow down and people behind are like why are you slowing down. So we required a deceleration lane so now they can get out of the you know normal, you know travel lane and decelerate outside of it that will help. But yeah, this product goes from, again, 200 plus apartment units down to 60-ish equity townhomes, and that’s it. No commercial, no retail, just residential. And it’s an office product that probably would remain vacant if we didn’t allow this because the office is so old, it would require more money than they could make by keeping it office just because office product, like you said, is just not at a premium right now.

00:16:29 – Rico Figliolini

No, no. Changing environment out there and more density, you know, I mean, even multi-use, right? Multi-use is changing also. There’s not, right? There’s not as much, unless you go up to Johns Creek, I guess. They just approved some big multi-use retail density apartment.

00:16:50 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, but that’s part of their new town center, though.

00:16:52 – Rico Figliolini

Right. so that’s a whole different thing. So to, okay so there’s quite a few you know things going on there as far as residential development and stuff the other thing that I noticed.

00:17:04 – Brian Johnson

Real quick, we have one more at our last council meeting we’re talking about that’s 333 Research Court.

00:17:11 – Rico Figliolini

Right, okay I was going to save that for later but let’s go into that.

00:17:13 – Brian Johnson

Oh, okay. Well I mean it was all kind of in the whole genre of having selected office buildings that were of poor enough quality that the occupancy or call it the vacancy was so high. And the property owners had come in and said, we’re not, we can’t keep it as an office. We’re never going to be able to get tenants without pouring a lot of money. And right now the demand isn’t high. So it was another one. It’s at the end of Research Court. Probably the best way to know is if you’re looking at Norcross High School, right of their main building is a bunch of classroom trailers, then into the woods, there’s a buffer there. You would come into the back parking lot of somewhere that the only way to drive through it is you got to go into Tech Park, onto Technology Parkway Research Court at the very back. Anyway, this is converting that property into their original attempt was to put about, I don’t know, 100, just maybe under a hundred stack flats. Was an equity product, but it was stacked flats. They were not able to make the numbers quite work on that. And so they’ve, they decreased the density of the equity and that’s going to be around 60-ish or so townhome product as well. So that’s where that is at. And again, a carefully selected node within Technology Parkway where we feel like having a small cluster of residential will meld well with the existing higher quality office to create the mixed use that Tech Park is becoming.

00:18:57 – Rico Figliolini

You know, I like the fact that we go from I mean there’s a reason for multi-use and the reason for multi-family development actually. But I like the fact that we’re moving towards equity like the these equity properties. I think that more stabilizes the community also a bit. That’s a lot of development decisions that have been made. There’s been some also first reads of some other stuff that will be in the next city council meeting. So we’ll have links to these things that you all can visit because the city set up on their website a special page showing development applications. So you all can actually go there and you can actually look through the applications and see the you know, the maps and stuff and what’s coming up over the next month or two. There’s somewhere else also in Technology Park, things going on there. I saw some clear cutting just recently. So something’s happening. Something’s beginning. I remember seeing a check, a federal, I think it was Congressman Bordeaux at the time, gave a check for over a half a million dollars back in 2022 for this. And it’s a mobility hub in Technology Park. It’s called Curiosity Corner now. So tell us a little bit about that and what’s coming there, Brian.

00:20:15 – Brian Johnson

So it’s at the corner of Scientific Drive and Technology Parkway. And, you know, really most across the street from Global Aviation, you know, that area. It is, you know, what, a three plus acre parcel. And it’s going to be everything. It’s a mobility hub. So all things mobility can come together there. Everything from the Gwinnett County Transit bus has their route there to EV charging so that you could have electric vehicles, e-bikes, e-scooters, all things mobility can come together there. Testing around that with the Curiosity Lab ecosystem can happen there. There’s also drone, location for drone, both testing and as well as if we have interested companies that are starting to get into the drone delivery space, a number of companies like Amazon, Google, that have arms that are doing, you know, point to point, you know, it’s like, I guess, retail to customer direct delivery of things like medicine and other things, but they need locations and cities to make this work. This could be one of those. We’re also turning it into an amenity to make the employees within businesses here in Technology Park have a place, an amenity to go to, to kind of create the sense of place within the entirety of Tech Park. Here, we’re going to have food truck stalls with, you know, plugins right there, covered seating with fans underneath it and public 5G Wi-Fi. Our hope is that it creates an opportunity for employees in Tech Park businesses to be able to go to maybe for lunch and not have to get on that river of cars that’s either Peachtree Parkway or PIV. To get together, to socialize. There’s some open space there that there could even be some you know, organized events, maybe in the evening, you know, something, you know.

00:22:31 – Rico Figliolini

You’re going to have some green space.

00:22:33 – Brian Johnson

Green space there, yes. So it’s a mix of a lot of stuff. It is a mobility hub, but it’s going to be both for practical, you know, purposes and testing as well, which is what this ecosystem of Curiosity Lab has become.

00:22:49 – Rico Figliolini

It’s amazing. We did a podcast about May Mobility. and people that have gone through Tech Park probably have seen this car, has a wrap and stuff like that. It drives like 35 miles an hour at least and it’s going through and people will see no driver.

00:23:08 – Brian Johnson

There’s not even a person in the car.

00:23:09 – Rico Figliolini

Not a person in the car, right. So it looks really strange when you see it. When I drove in it, getting into that middle seat with some people and seeing this car drive by itself it’s kind of weird too because it takes you a little while to like, damn, look at that. It’s just moving.

00:23:27 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, there’s nobody there in case something happened for them to grab the wheel.

00:23:31 – Rico Figliolini

That’s right. Yes.

00:23:36 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, we’ve had safety stewards in some of the other autonomous vehicles. So they’ve been autonomous, but you always had that person that was sitting there and they weren’t driving, but they were there. This one doesn’t even have that. So it is a little bit of a unique experience.

00:23:49 – Rico Figliolini

So the interesting part is too that it goes, so it’ll go up and down Technology Parkway and it goes through City Hall parking, you know City Hall area and then comes out it goes to with the former Anderby, jug turn if you want to call it that where it comes out and make a left back out onto the street to come on back. So we’re doing a photoshoot.

00:24:11 – Brian Johnson

It also goes through the Marriott parking lot.

00:24:16 – Rico Figliolini

Right, the Marriott, yep. So we’re doing a photo shoot in front of City Hall. We have the marshals there and we’re doing this photo shoot. The cars are parked right literally in front of City Hall. And we’re doing the shoot. And all of a sudden I noticed there’s a car waiting to get through. And I’m like, it turned and it’s the May Mobility car. And it’s like, it stopped and it’s just waiting. I’m like, is that supposed to be staging from here? What is going on? No, the damn thing, it’s just waiting. It’s waiting. And it’s like, I think we need to let it go through. So we step off the parking lot a bit. Now, mind you, these marshal cars are pointing towards us away from the building. They were like, we had three of them there like that. And so we stepped off. We’re still near the edge. And it’s not moving. So I was like, maybe it’s the cars or maybe it’s us. What if we take a couple more steps back? We did that. All of a sudden, after a second or two it decides okay maybe I’ll slowly start moving so it slowly starts moving, weaves its way up and then picks up speed and then goes. And I was like, it was actually waiting for us look at that. It actually worked the way it’s supposed to.

00:25:23 – Brian Johnson

Yeah, it does although you know it’s interesting without people there you know normally if somebody was there and you didn’t want to move you know you could like motion them to like go around or something.

00:25:30 – Rico Figliolini

Really? Oh, you know what yes.

00:25:31 – Brian Johnson

You know, because if you were driving up there and I’m like, Rico, we’re doing something. Can you go around? You’d be like, okay.

00:25:35 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, right. But that car won’t do it.

00:25:38 – Brian Johnson

It’s like, look, this is the direction of travel I’m supposed to be driving, you’re in my way. My, you know, A .I. and my, you know, all our sensors say I can’t go until you get out of the way. But once you do, it’s like, alright, it looks clear. Alright. And then it goes. I mean, so it works.

00:25:59 – Rico Figliolini

No. And it made the right choice because there were three cars that were pointing at it pretty much as it was going and but it was waiting for us to get off and then it made that decision that those three cars are parked that even though they weren’t in parking spaces so it had to make that intelligent choice to say it’s not going to move they’re just pointing that way it’s stable for the last five minutes. Yeah it was just an interesting thing to see. Alright. So we’ve got just a few more quick things, that we talked about a little bit about a special use permit that’s being, this is a bit proactive decision the city council is making and the city’s making about data centers and creating special use permit for that. Walk us through why that as a proactive thing, why that makes sense.

00:26:51 – Brian Johnson

Yeah. So also at this last council meeting we had, we had a couple of preemptive moves. This one is just merely for us to require anybody wanting to construct a data center and by data center I’m essentially saying these are large buildings that are constructed to house server farms. And this is when somebody says, oh you know I’m saving something to the cloud, well there’s not anything actually in the cloud, it’s still going to a server. But the cloud is really server farms and these can be hundreds of thousands of square feet of just servers that require a lot of electricity and a lot of water to oftentimes cool the space. And they serve a purpose. But if you’re not careful and somebody’s got the current zoning allow for it, you could find property chewed up with very large buildings that don’t really provide value to the city because you could have hundreds of thousands of square feet of these servers and five employees that are managing it and it’s not generating retail transactions for us to get sales tax. And it’s not the headquarters of a company that would pay us a business license, so we essentially could have large you know very valuable property chewed up with this but it’s not a value add to us as a city. We feel like there might be exceptions where we could have a modest size one, maybe. Maybe in conjunction with something else with a Google or whatever, Amazon, whatever. But oftentimes these big ones are better left for more rural areas. You know, we’ve become more of a redevelopment city because we don’t have a lot of undeveloped property left. So our property is a premium. And so there’s, Metro Atlanta has a lot of tire kicking going on with developers wanting to do it because the demand for cloud storage just keeps going up and up. We want to be very careful. So we made it to where each specific instance has to get in front of council and has to have a public hearing. And so that’s what this is to do.

00:29:11 – Rico Figliolini

So you, at the beginning, before we started the podcast, you were saying there were a lot of tire kickings going on, I guess. Was it from that or was it also from trends that you saw other cities having some of the same issues had that this sort of, you know, get on your list of that we need to take care of this?

00:29:30 – Brian Johnson

Well, reading some of the recent, I think even the AJC had not to, but a couple of weeks ago, recent article about the demand in Georgia as a whole or Metro Atlanta specifically. And so that got it kind of got already on our screen. We did have specific tire kicking going on here by a developer who was actually, you know, my community development director, Sean Adams will get calls with people asking, hey, I’m, you know, representing a property owner or whatever. And I wanted to know, is this an eligible use? And he was getting a little bit of those. So then he did look, you know, he did look out nationally to see what our city’s doing, what are best practices. He took that and crafted his own language, made it ours, and then presented it to me, and I put it on the agenda for council to consider. So all of what you said is added together is kind of how it ultimately got on an agenda, but it is a preemptive move. So we now do have this protection. So if somebody want to do it, council’s got to approve it and there’s got to be a public hearing so the community gets a chance to weigh in on it as well.

00:30:48 – Rico Figliolini

It’s good to see the function of city. Of the city mechanics if you will. How things come about, why you look at certain things and stuff. So it’s good I think for the public to see this, that it’s not just pulled out of nowhere. It’s like why this? Why data centers? Well, because these trends that you all even went out to look at the competitive field, what was being done, best practices, it’s all great. Rezoning Board of Appeals, rezoning board, I guess, and the Planning Commission. There were recently, and I’ve noticed there on the, I guess, is it the rezoning or the zoning board of appeals, I guess. There were a lot of canceled meetings at certain points. Wasn’t being probably needed, but you all decided to merge, I guess, both of those.

00:31:39 – Brian Johnson

Yes. So Zoning Board of Appeals hears cases of, you know, where somebody has, you know, a hardship due to a zoning or a code compliance, you know. And so they don’t have a lot of cases every year. In fact, two years ago, we went the entire year and there was no case for them to hear. No hardship case for them to weigh in on. So it started to get to where it, you know, you ask somebody or somebody is interested in being civically active. You put them on a, you know, the ZBA and they don’t have a meeting for a year or they’re canceled. That’s one, too training. You know, you like to these board members oftentimes go to training and, you know, we want them to be trained up. And so we just thought that, you know what, we’ll, you know support and provide even additional training to one group. And we combine the planning commission and the ZBA together. So now planning commissioners will also hear, you know, appeal cases on city code that the ZBA would have heard. And so we’re combining it, we’re adding, because it’s a more, call it a body that hearing two types of cases, we decided to add two additional spots. So the planning commission grew, but now we won’t have a ZBA. The planning commission will serve in that capacity.

00:33:08 – Rico Figliolini

And for people that may not be aware, planning commission, these are volunteer positions of appointed people, citizens from our community. The zoning board of appeals would look at not only commercial, but residential appeals, right? So if someone wanted a little leniency on the easement on their property, maybe, or they needed.

00:33:28 – Brian Johnson

Or they wanted to park an RV. A common one is park an RV in their driveway permanently if they’re not using it for a long period, you know, where that’s not allowed per code. And they make a hardship case. And, you know, the ZBA would say, yeah, you know, you do have a hardship case. We’re going to allow it on that particular property. So it’s an important role.

00:33:52 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, for sure. Okay, cool. So that’s cool. So I think the next one was the new zoning district for the infill residential development. So what does that mean to most people, Brian?

00:34:08 – Brian Johnson

Well, you know, if people knew anything about Peachtree Corners, again, they’re going to look at the city and be like, you know, there’s not a lot of undeveloped property left. So, you know, we are more of redevelopment. So now new projects are oftentimes, they involve the tearing down of a use that’s run its cycle. You know, maybe it was an office building for 50 years, but now it’s time for there to be a new office or something else or maybe a combination. But when that happens, there are oftentimes pockets of smaller properties that maybe things have changed and we could put them to good use. A good example of that would be commercial office buildings used to have a higher parking spot per square foot ratio than we need now. There used to be, you know, the big sea of parking in front of a big, you know, box store is no longer the case. So we oftentimes have office product is a good, you know, again, a good example where there could be twice the amount of parking that they need, but they’d like to do something with it. Well, maybe there’s an opportunity for infill. And so there are pockets, and there’s not a lot of them, but we have pockets where we were kind of like, what are we going to do with these? We don’t have a zoning classification that allows for certain smaller, you know, you could almost argue shoehorn things. But yet, if you don’t do anything, it’s kind of a waste of a property. And so we want to maximize our property and be as flexible as we can. So again, the community development director looked at best practices and came up with the infill residential. So this could be to where you could put smaller, you know, pockets of residential and oftentimes maybe it doesn’t have the same buffer requirement that you would normally have or some of those other things. And so it’s just a way for us to be flexible. Again, there’s not a lot of, cases but there are some cases where we think there could be a use here so it’s just providing us, it’s adding to our you know, our bag of tricks if you will when it comes to trying to maximize what is not. We’re not getting any more property right now, so we’ve got to make that, make the best of what we have.

00:36:36 – Rico Figliolini

So, it’s good to see the city being proactive So not just reactive to everything that’s coming along, right? You want to plan things out. I mean, that’s why the comprehensive plan is there that just got revised and stuff. We’ve hit on quite a few things. So there’s a lot of stuff going on in the city, more things coming. Anything that we’ve left out, Brian, that you just want to mention for the time being?

00:37:01 – Brian Johnson

No, not really. I mean, you know, encourage people to go. I think you put a link on there, the latest edition of Peachtree Corners Life has a, the mayor has a column in there.

00:37:14 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. On our website about deer population.

00:37:15 – Brian Johnson

Yes. And, you know, deer. So for those who want to know what we’re doing and we’ve, we’re actively getting to a point where we will have a deer management plan, but if anybody’s curious as to what we’re doing there, I encourage them to read that. But, you know, right now that was, you know, our last council meeting was a lot of land use stuff. Good things. Essentially all but one project was equity. And, you know, and all of it was city negotiated a less dense product taken into consideration, traffic and other things. So, you know, I think these are going to be, it’s going to be new injection of life into property that right now is stagnated. So good things. And we’ll continue to drive forward.

00:38:05 – Rico Figliolini

Sounds good. We’ve been spending our time with Brian Johnson, City Manager. Always appreciate his willingness to come on and talk about things. Southwest Gwinnett Magazine, let me just show you. This just is probably hitting your mailbox this week. Wesleyan Artist Market, that’s happening at the end of April. So check this out. Some decently good stories in here about summer camps. And local author, Great Atlantic Christian and their expansion and some other things. Even a former Beatles tribute drummer who just opened a coffee shop here on Peachtree Industrial Boulevard. Well, Peachtree Boulevard, actually. I need to start saying that.

00:38:46 – Brian Johnson

There’s still a section that’s PIB.

00:38:49 – Rico Figliolini

Is it?

00:38:50 – Brian Johnson

I mean, technically, it’s Peachtree Boulevard if you’re heading north from 285 until the split. At the split, if you stay on the right heading north, it’s still PIB. It’s only Peachtree Boulevard while it’s a state route.

00:39:08 – Rico Figliolini

Gotcha. Thanks for explaining.

00:39:08 – Brian Johnson

There is still a section of PIB as it heads up into Gwinnett. Yeah. You got to be a government junkie to know all this stuff.

00:39:17 – Rico Figliolini

No, I appreciate that. And I’m more of a political junkie than government junkies.

00:39:23 – Brian Johnson

I’m paid to be a government junkie.

00:39:25 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. Thank you Brian, everyone else yeah no, hang with me for a second. But everyone else thank you. You’ll find the important links below and if this is on YouTube or Facebook, just check out our website and you’ll for this post, this podcast post and you’ll see all the links in there leading back to pictures and all sorts of things that you need. Alright thank you guys, appreciate you being with us, bye.