Autonomous vehicles are here in Peachtree Corners!
Our latest UrbanEBB podcast explores the game-changing world of May Mobility’s driverless shuttles and their impact on urban transit. Join host Rico Figliolini as he talks with Brandon Branham (Peachtree Corners) and Daisy Wall (May Mobility) about the future of smart transportation.

Key Topics Covered:

• Peachtree Corners’ role as a Smart City and AV testing hub
• How 5G and AI are revolutionizing autonomous vehicle safety
• Situational awareness: How AVs prevent accidents before they happen
• Microtransit’s potential for underserved communities and seniors
• The future of autonomous mobility and expansion plans
• How residents can experience May Mobility’s driverless shuttles today

Resources:
May Mobility Website: https://maymobility.com/
Download the app here on Google Play and Apple

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hey, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEBB here in the city of Peachtree Corners, a little smart city just north of Atlanta. I have some great guests. I’ll introduce them momentarily. I just want to say thank you, though, to two of our sponsors. EV Remodeling, Inc. Eli owns the company, him and his family. They live here in Peachtree Corners. Great people. They do design to build. If you need a room, a whole house rebuilt, they’re the people to go to. Great work. They’ve done up 260 homes. Check them out, evremodelinginc.com and Vox Pop Uli. They’re also local to Peachtree Corners, just on the edge of that city line almost. They do your branding. They will bring your branding to life. So anything that you want to do as a business, whether it’s a trade show, a truck wrap, or simply you want to put your logo or a saying on almost any object. You challenge them, they’ll be able to do it. So check them out at voxpopuli.com. And I welcome and thank them for the support of these podcasts and the magazines. Now, our guests. We’re here in Curiosity Lab in Peachtree Corners. This is Brandon Branham and Daisy Wall. And Brandon here is the Assistant City Manager of Peachtree Corners, as well as the Chief Technology Officer, among other things. So running Curiosity Lab and all that. And Daisy Wall here. works as senior director for May Mobility. So I welcome you guys. Thank you.

00:01:31 – Brandon Branham

And fun fact, Vox was actually who wrapped the autonomous vehicle we’ll be talking about today.

00:01:37 – Rico Figliolini

I didn’t even know that. Cool. And that looks like a great vehicle. And you may see that as part of this interview as an override video. Otherwise, check the show notes and you’ll see a gallery of images. So let’s start. How do we start? You know, this place has been here for how long?

00:01:54 – Brandon Branham

Open September of 2019.

00:01:57 – Rico Figliolini

Right, you’re doing, going on five years. We’re going to be doing that in the magazine and something about that. The autonomous vehicle lane, that’s your living lab. First in the nation, really? When it started?

00:02:11 – Brandon Branham

To do both connected and autonomous, yes.

00:02:14 – Rico Figliolini

And then five?

00:02:15 – Brandon Branham

Yeah, five years later, our journey through AV is what’s led us here today. Kind of that path of understanding the technology with that first real world deployment on public streets in 2019 with the purpose-built autonomous vehicle focusing on that low speed last mile connection. I mean as we as a city are starting to expand the service operations of that area is how we met May Mobility and launched that program in September.

00:02:45 – Rico Figliolini

Has T-mobile’s 5G network really helped getting this off the ground?

00:02:50 – Brandon Branham

Maybe let you answer that one.

00:02:52 – Daisy Wall

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, obviously, as you’re running autonomous vehicles, one of the most important things is making sure the vehicle stays connected, right? Because that’s how everything operates. And so we want to make sure that there’s high performance, it’s always connected, and there’s redundancy. And so really the 5G foundation here at Peachtree Corners has been fantastic. The team has worked really closely with our engineering team to kind of figure out what different SIM cards, what different connectivity levels work best with our vehicles. And so it’s exciting to have that embedded in our vehicles. And hopefully we can scale that, you know, over time.

00:03:29 – Rico Figliolini

That’s great. I mean, I was just thinking about latency. You don’t want to be late. I’m sorry we hit you.

00:03:34 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely.

00:03:39 – Rico Figliolini

So we’ve had other vehicles too. So and for a variety of reasons different ways things are done. What makes May Mobility different than those others? Well maybe you want to start explaining?

00:03:52 – Brandon Branham

Yeah we can start kind of with our evolution through AV space. So there’s two form factors that were out on the market once we had seen originally through Curiosity Lab were purpose-built autonomous shuttle. So it didn’t have all of the features that a vehicle has, right? Because it was built with autonomy as its platform. There wasn’t a steering wheel. There wasn’t rear side mirrors, all those things you see on a traditional car. But they were really focused on that last mile connection. So average speed, 11 to 13 miles an hour. So it served well inside of the campus. And as we learned and got comfortable with the autonomous platforms. But as you need to start moving into other areas of cities, how do you start to create a microtransit scenario for service? So you have to go a little faster. And then what the challenge with the shuttles brings is because they’re not a vehicle, you actually have to get a waiver from the federal government to operate them on the road. So listen we all know that increases your time to deployment so working with May they use what’s called an fmbss standard vehicle so Toyota Sienna which fits perfect in the suburbs with us, I drive a minivan, I can say that. And so they can deploy immediately from day one because that already meets those standards from the vehicle perspective. The speed is a lot higher so now your elevation increases. Because our goal, right, is let’s connect all these hotels to the downtown, continue to feed our economic driver and use that. So we needed to go a little faster.

00:05:30 – Rico Figliolini

So it goes miles an hour now?

00:05:31 – Daisy Wall

It goes up to 35 miles an hour. Yeah. And we’ll be going to 40 miles an hour by end of this year.

00:05:37 – Rico Figliolini

That’s fairly good. That’s good for local streets.

00:05:37 – Daisy Wall

Yeah, absolutely.

00:05:40 – Rico Figliolini

You don’t want to go faster than 40 miles an hour. Especially in Roswell. In some ways it’s Roswell. So, that’s cool. So now we have the vehicle. I was in it a couple of weeks ago. It was a great ride. It was a little strange. Like my oldest son said, he works here in Tech Park. He says, Dad, seeing that car drive with no driver really is strange. And I felt strange too in the car and no driver. We’re sitting in the back. I felt like, where is this going? How is this going to go? But it was fast. I mean, it was easy. There was no problem. Left turns were great. My son, I’ll share this. I don’t know if he’ll like it or not, but he tried to test the vehicle. So he sped up a little bit to see if he would actually try to make that left turn, knowing that it was going to stop or something. But it didn’t do it. And it waited, and then it did its turn. So that was a real-life test on that street.

00:06:37 – Brandon Branham

That’s why we’re here. That’s the whole point of Curiosity Lab. What we want to do to evaluate the technology, make sure it is safe operations on our roadways. They’re not the only one that tests these vehicles. We see all kinds of fun things happening today. 

00:06:57 – Rico Figliolini

Do you get to see live feeds, by the way?

00:07:05 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely.

00:07:07 – Rico Figliolini

Live feeds as it goes to see?

00:06:59 – Brandon Branham

The operators are all sitting behind in May’s place ensuring safety.

00:07:04 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely. So the way it works is that when we run in a fully autonomous vehicle, meaning no driver. You know, you have the vehicle running, but there is someone watching the whole time. And so we do have a tele-assist person, if you will, watching the vehicles live in real time to make sure the vehicle is doing what it’s doing. And also if, you know, if they run into situations or, you know, situations, for example, you have an emergency management vehicle, right? If there’s unexpected construction. If there’s things like that where, you know, someone actually needs to keep an eye on the vehicle and help the vehicle kind of make decisions.

00:07:46 – Rico Figliolini

So the way it works almost, it’s almost Uber-ish to me, right? So I download an app and say, I want to, I need the car. Right now there’s eight points of pickup, right? Eventually the whole idea is that there shouldn’t be any points of pickup except where I want to be picked up, right? At a hotel, a restaurant, whatever. So we get in the car, if I remember correctly. The scan, the system actually scans a barcode or something off the app. And accepts you as the ride. And it’s running the AC. It’s doing its thing. What else can I do in that? Can I listen to music? Can I, you know, what else is the possibilities?

00:08:24 – Daisy Wall

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, first, you know, obviously, first and foremost, we want to make sure the experience getting on and off the ride is safe. It’s easy, right? Because like you mentioned before, you know, for a first time rider, sometimes we’re like, oh, this is a little weird. And but once you’re in the vehicle, you know, the QR code is very specific. We want to make sure the right person is in the vehicle.

00:08:47 – Rico Figliolini

Right.

00:08:47 – Daisy Wall

Right? And the vehicle won’t move if it’s not the right person. It’ll just literally just sit there. And so  what we call, what you were talking about is the in cabin, you know, features and functionalities. When you enter the vehicle, you will see a big, you know, screen, a large tablet. And it allows you to really just be with the vehicle and track kind of where the vehicle is going. It allows you to see pedestrians and trucks and cars and all the things that, you know, that you would normally see as a driver, right? And need to maneuver around if you needed to. But then there’s also other features and functionalities we’re exploring, things like air conditioning, things like music, other things that we could add to make it a really great experience. But at the end of the day, it’s really odd to say it this way, we really want the experience to be boring because that’s probably the best. I mean, initially you’re like, oh, wow, this is kind of cool. And then after a while, you just start looking at your phone, you chat with your fellow rider, and then it’s kind of normalized.

00:09:47 – Rico Figliolini

I wonder how that would be, this comedy show, It’s comedians in cars or something looking for a coffee shop.

00:09:53 – Daisy Wall

There you go.

00:09:53 – Rico Figliolini

They don’t need to drive. They’re just going through the thing.

00:09:57 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely.

00:09:59 – Rico Figliolini

So, you know, I can see the future a little bit. If I could be a futurist a little bit. And this is an Uber type car. Uber Eats isn’t too far behind that. You know, drop the food in there. It’s coming by a house. You go in, you can just take it off the seat and get your food. But there’s other things I’m thinking about, too. So I’ve changed my mind now. I want to go somewhere else. Well, I need to pick up a friend. So it’s a ride share almost. These are possibilities, I imagine.

00:10:26 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely. Yeah, and we’re looking at all of these. Right now, there’s single passengers or what you call group passengers. So you can have multiple people in your own group. But we would love to do a ride share type of model where multiple people can get in and that’s actually what we do in all of our other locations. It is, yeah. We’ve, you know we’ve launched in 15 different locations we’re in nine that are active right now. And we have multiple variants of this. We have rideshare where multiple people can come in. But then also we have wheelchair accessible vehicles as well, you know, for people with disabilities. And so what we’d like to do is how do we create the same user experience as an able-bodied passenger for a person with a disability? And then also how do we do it in a way where if someone was to come in, what would that look like, right? You know, is that okay? And as I mentioned before, the good news is that we’re still kind of watching you. There are cameras in the vehicle. And we have a call button there as well. So if anyone ever needs help or needs to talk to someone, they can call the button. There’s someone who can look in the vehicle. So you’re not really quite alone, if you will.

00:11:35 – Rico Figliolini

So not a chatbot, but an actual person.

00:11:38 – Daisy Wall

An actual person, yes, yes.

00:11:40 – Rico Figliolini

What has May Mobility learned from this experience from being here? What do you expect to learn? And then what are you going to use it for?

00:11:48 – Daisy Wall

Right. Well, first, we’re really proud that this is the first driverless commercial autonomous deployment, I guess. I know that’s kind of a mouthful there, you know, in the state of Georgia. And we’re really excited about that. And we’re really appreciative that Georgia happens to be a very AV-friendly state. So that’s kind of part one. You know, part two is that, as Brandon was saying, we really want to make sure that the technology and the innovation that we’re developing is being applied and we learn from those applications. So, for example, we operate on public roads in mixed traffic conditions, pedestrians, different weather conditions. You know, in the snow and very, very hot weather. And here in Peachtree Corners, it’s kind of odd because we’re going a little reverse. It is a dedicated AV lane. And so that’s a little different than what we’ve been operating. But the beauty of that is that we’re also very cognizant that airports, you know, universities, other employment centers have a lot of need for this particular, you know, type of service. And so we’re really learning about, okay, what would a fixed route service look like? You know, there’s a lot of hills and sharp turns here, you know, that we are learning from as well. And because we’re picking up, you know, visitors from the Marriott, for example, you know, over to other office locations and City Hall, then it’s giving us an idea of, okay, well, are there any differences in terms of how people interact with a vehicle at a hotel, you know, location? So even those small things are very useful to us.

00:13:27 – Rico Figliolini

As you were saying that, I was thinking of the ability of the HOV lanes, for example. Because that’s what this is almost, right?

00:13:38 – Daisy Wall

Yeah.

00:13:39 – Rico Figliolini

And you mentioned, I think, once before on the ride that I took, that there are unique things besides the hills and stuff. The fact that it is an HOV type lane. You have to make a right or left differently in that type of environment. So it’s learning more than it would almost in the real world.

00:13:56 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely. And the other thing that’s interesting is we’re learning how other vehicles also react to us as well. So, you know, not every vehicle might notice that that’s an AV lane and they want to decide to cut across an AV. Like, how do you manage that particular situation? What do you need to do to make sure other folks on the road know that this is an AV? Or you know, how to interact with that. And it’s just good, you know, roadside safety.

00:14:24 – Rico Figliolini

It’s interesting because it’s, I mean, it could be used as an ingress, egress where that traffic goes into that lane to make that right turn maybe into the driveway.

00:14:31 – Daisy Wall

Exactly.

00:14:34 – Rico Figliolini

Brandon, as far as the vehicle and everything else, I mean, it’s been almost five years in September. This type of expansion and the type of vehicle and the type of work that you’re doing, how does this help Curiosity Lab to expand and get into other? Can you piggyback off this, can you use this?

00:14:53 – Brandon Branham

Right, yeah. And we’ve started that process a little bit with the infrastructure right? Growing it out of Tech Park into 141 as we’ve seen you know the evolution of the technology really needs those more dense volume, higher residential area. And so this right, we’ve kind of figured out the office park environment dedicated lane. But what happens like our public concerts, that’s a great use of this type of technology. All of our neighbors that are coming to the concert, they’re all driving in. We know we don’t have enough parking on site and we start to use the shuttle to do that. So we know that expansion of the technology is already here. Some of the deployments May’s doing. So how do we start to incorporate it into the city?

00:15:37 – Rico Figliolini

I was thinking about what Mayor Mike Mason said to me once. He says, you know, it’d be great for a vehicle of that sort to come into Amberfield or Fox Hill, pick us up at the house, take us to the concert, and then take us back home and not have to worry about walking, to driving, finding parking, and all that stuff. Yeah, now I could see the city really, a little smart city, North of Atlanta, being more of that technology and using more. I mean, we’re getting more LDR cameras. All the security cameras, all these other cameras. God knows how many cameras are in the car you know just by itself. Great number of cameras. But and all this data that you’re accumulating just will help grow. Now I’m assuming even the data you get from other cities is going to inform what this one does as well.

00:16:32 – Brandon Branham

Yeah, it learns from all of its environments because some things are similar. Some things are different. I mean, the deployment in Grand Rapids. Hugely different than what we’re doing here, but there’s still trees, still fire hydrants, all those roadside markers that the vehicle continues to learn from.

00:16:49 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely. And you want to be able to kind of get as much data as possible in diverse learning environments, right? Because the way the technology works, you know, from, there’s two parts of it, right? Like you said before, it’s the cameras, the sensors, all the hardware. Then you’ve got the software component, which is the brains of everything. And that’s, we call it multi-policy decision-making. So think of it like you’ve got to be making thousands and thousands and thousands of decisions in a millisecond. And so how do you make those decisions? You have to combine both what you’ve already accumulated from a knowledge perspective, but then also, you know, kind of the intelligence and the AI decision-making of like, okay, here are all the different scenarios. What’s the best one? What’s the safest one? What’s the best in terms of customer, you know, experience and smoothness, all those things.

00:17:36 – Rico Figliolini

It’s funny as you’re saying that I’m thinking, a particular event that happened where I saw this woman, woman or guy, it doesn’t matter, I’ve seen it often enough, where they’re pulling out, ready to like, they’re creeping out into the street, deciding whether they should go or not go. And I’m saying out loud to myself, don’t go because I’m coming.

00:17:50 – Daisy Wall

Right.

00:17:54 – Rico Figliolini

And they’re like playing chicken. And this happens.

00:17:56 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely.

00:17:58 – Rico Figliolini

You know, when people are exiting sometimes out of, on Peachtree Circle. Some people think they can make that left.

00:18:07 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely. It’s really interesting from a safety perspective. And I know that’s something that the city and Curiosity Lab has been really, really keen on is we get anecdotal comments all the time from our clients in other areas. So, for example, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. You know, they say, oh, you know, the vehicle’s going over there and then all of a sudden it stops. It’s what’s happening and a deer comes out, right? And so it saw the deer and so that could have, you know, avoided, you know, an accident there. And then I know that we have another location where they said that they were at a four-way intersection and then, you know, the light turned green, but the vehicle didn’t go. And everybody was honking behind the vehicle. And they’re like, why aren’t we going? And immediately a couple seconds later, there was a car that ran really fast past a red light. And so if you think about that, you know, that car, if it had gone, it would have gotten T-boned. So things of that nature. And then, you know, if it was us in the vehicle, we would be like stressed out. Someone’s honking, you know, we’re like, we better go. And we could have gone, you know, even, you know, with that, right? But the vehicle just kind of doesn’t want to break the law and just does what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t get stressed. It doesn’t get sleepy.

00:19:23 – Brandon Branham

Not on the cell phone.

00:19:24 – Daisy Wall

It’s not on the cell phone. It hasn’t had a couple glasses of wine.

00:19:36 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, because I know that feeling. I’ve seen that in front of me. So I usually wait a beat or two before I go for it.

00:19:44 – Daisy Wall

Right. You never know.

00:19:47 – Rico Figliolini

This maybe a tough question to ask, but how has the accident rate been? Has there been any?

00:19:55 – Daisy Wall

Well, there’s been accidents, absolutely. We’ve been operating since 2017 in 15 cities, and we operate 60 hours a week. So if you look at it from a public transit perspective, there’s going to be some. However, what we are really, really proud of, we’re proud of our safety record. Autonomous vehicles are actually very highly regulated by NHTSA. And so we are required, and not just us, any autonomous vehicle company is required to report any incident in. And when I say incident, it’s even like a mirror clip. You know, or a curb, you know, a curb cut if, you know, the system has been in autonomy for a particular, you know, amount of time. And so anyone can go in and look. And I think we have a, you know, we’re very proud of our safety record.

00:20:42 – Rico Figliolini

I’m sure. It probably is way better than a normal person. So your insurance should be a lot cheaper. So as far as the other cities you’re in, you’re all on local streets now. Wherever you are. It’s not highway driving?

00:20:59 – Daisy Wall

No, we don’t do highway driving. Yeah, because of the speeds at this point.

00:21:03 – Rico Figliolini

But do you have a plan a year out from now, what you plan to do?

00:21:06 – Daisy Wall

Yeah, we have a roadmap. And so every year we make modifications. Speed is one of the big ones, right? To get to those milestones from our roadmap. And then it’s combined with the progression or the maturity of the technology itself. You know, the LIDARs, for example, on top of the vehicles, how far they can see, for example. And then also, you know, the progression of our technology as well. But for the most part, everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve always found locations to operate in because, you know, 40 miles an hour, that’s decent. You know, there’s always areas, downtown areas, residential areas.

00:21:45 – Rico Figliolini

Speed limits are 35.

00:21:46 – Daisy Wall

35.

00:21:49 – Rico Figliolini

As far as the information, the data, so everyone’s sensitive about that to some degree. And I know data is collected in a fashion that it doesn’t tie to a specific list.

00:22:02 – Daisy Wall

Yes, yes.

00:22:03 – Rico Figliolini

But obviously, I have an app calling for a car. Does it pick up any, like, which would be interesting, I think, to know for you all as well. Will it eventually pick up the data, like demographics and such, the age of the person, where it’s being used? Will that eventually be important to how the company expands its business or how it does its business?

00:22:28 – Daisy Wall

Yeah, from our perspective, you know, there are two pieces of data that are really important to us. The fleet, what we call the fleet API data or the autonomy data, right? Because safety is most important. Whether or not data is collected, we contract directly with cities and public transit agencies. And so most cities and public transit agencies are very sensitive to this and also are required by law in some circumstances that you don’t collect the personally identifiable information. So we actually don’t.

00:23:00 – Rico Figliolini

So not even demographics like that?

00:23:02 – Daisy Wall

None of that. Yeah. Now, in the future, we don’t know. Like you said, we don’t know what the evolution could look like. But for the most part, from a government perspective, that’s something that it’s very important to government right, to protect personally identifiable information so we don’t collect that.

00:23:18 – Brandon Branham

I think that’s been the unique approach how May has entered the market versus what you see when you think of like the robo taxis where that is a shared ride first approach. Whereas May has taken the leap into the city to offset solutions in the public transportation space.

00:23:39 – Daisy Wall

And at the end of the day, it’s about filling transportation gaps, right? Because we do have two models, you know, the model that we’ve grown up with and the model that we have here is, you know, contracting directly with cities and public transit systems. What that allows us to do is really tailor our services you know, to the way that the city or the public transit system wants it tailored to, to really complement and fill in those gaps. And we have, you know, also signed a partnership with Lyft as well, which will be launching service here in Atlanta, you know, this calendar year. So we’re excited about that. But that’s another model. And we know that that’s also a needed model.

00:24:19 – Rico Figliolini

That’s going to be in the city?

00:24:22 – Daisy Wall

Yes, in the city. And if you think about all the things that Atlanta brings, you know, and the economic development of the city and the overflow that that comes into Peachtree Corners, too. I mean, we have FIFA coming. We have the Super Bowl coming. We have Dragon Con every year. Right? So those are all big events where we can see the vehicles really providing meaningful service.

00:24:48 – Rico Figliolini

You all also did just a recent agreement with a, what’s the name of the company? It’s a… 

00:24:53 – Brandon Branham

TechnoBus?

00:24:55 – Daisy Wall

TechnoBus. Yes, yes.

00:24:57 – Rico Figliolini

That’s also doing disability, accessibility, but being used in cities where I think it’s 20 passengers.

00:25:05 – Daisy Wall

Yeah, no, great. So obviously, again, the use case is the most important, right? We want to match the right vehicle with the right use case. So if you need to, for example, you know, service an airport, you know a bus of that size, which is, you know, up to 30 standing, 16, you know, sitting, for example, is a great use case. And also there’s other benefits too. You know, it’s got the accessibility component. This particular bus actually is running in Europe already with public transit agencies in, you know, 40, 50 different cities. So what we like, we love about that, we say it’s a workhorse. Very similar to what Brandon was saying. We know it’s running in public cities. It has done its job. So now we just need to autonomize it, if you will, and make it run without a driver.

00:25:57 – Rico Figliolini

I don’t want to stereotype, but European drivers are crazy. Especially if you go to Italy, where my heritage is.

00:26:05 – Daisy Wall

And it is, believe it or not, actually, TechnoBus is an Italian company.

00:26:12 – Rico Figliolini

That makes sense. But everyone in an autonomous vehicle gets less accidents.

00:26:15 – Daisy Wall

Yeah, but we are very grateful. I mean, they’re wonderful partners. And we actually are very fortunate to have a lot of wonderful partners in Toyota, you know, in State Farm, in, you know, a whole bunch of NTT, a whole bunch of other, you know, investors and partners.

00:26:28 – Rico Figliolini

And I can see that as better use in Atlanta than the trolley system they just put out recently, right? It’s a lot less infrastructure, right, to put. You can just run these things and set around, it goes. Yeah, way more efficient than that. What else can Curiosity Lab learn from this partnership that you think that, because you’ve been to the CES show, you’ve been to Israel, to other countries, trying to bring business here. So how can you use this to work?

00:27:01 – Brandon Branham

Yeah, as we think of not just us, but all of our cities that we work with across the U.S., how are these new technologies going to shape the future of our cities? They’re going to play a role. So why is, why does the city not stand in the front of that and support it. So learning how they operate what are some of our limitations? It is still new technology relatively speaking so there are going to be some limits on what you can do with it and how do we overcome them which we’re seeing here and then we translate that to our partners that we work with in Texas and Colorado and Arizona hey let’s share in this.

00:27:38 – Rico Figliolini

Do you share?

00:27:40 – Brandon Branham

We do yeah. We all said it’s a very awesome group that we get together and we share what’s going on, share the ideas. Hey this worked, this didn’t, I saw this, what are you seeing here? Because in the end we all want a better service for the resident. Whether that’s here in Peachtree Corners, in Atlanta, in Colorado, in Texas. So and all of these technologies help us do that. So for us, you know councilman Wright, he’s a big proponent of AV. So we have to be looking forward on how these start to service the residents because you don’t take public transportation now because it’s not convenient.

00:28:12 – Rico Figliolini

No, it’s not.

00:28:13 – Brandon Branham

Right? So can we supplement with these types of technologies to start to make that convenient and maybe take a few cars off the roadway when we’re going shopping or going to downtown? This is our chance.

00:28:24 – Rico Figliolini

And I think, like, Gwinnett County is talking to get into microtransit, which is pretty much your vehicles can be used.

00:28:33 – Daisy Wall

It’s exactly what it is, yeah. It’s a, you know, there’s different models, right, to Brandon’s point. You know, public transit, like we have here in, you know, Peachtree Corners and in Gwinnett County, we have a, you know, a fantastic partner, you know, on the public transit side. But, you know, it’s normal as cities grow. And as, you know, there’s more economic development, what ends up happening is that you want to make sure that those pockets are filled and those gaps are filled. And sometimes, you know, public transit may not get there fast enough or may need help, you know, where we can supplement and connect into public transit. And that’s where microtransit is. That’s the beauty of it is that you get to your point. Like a rideshare TNC type of service where you can pull up an app and ask to go wherever you know so you can get really shorter wait times and more convenient service.

00:29:22 – Rico Figliolini

The future’s almost here. 

00:29:26 – Brandon Branham

I’d say it’s here.

00:29:27 – Daisy Wall

It’s here. It’s here.

00:29:30 – Rico Figliolini

And thinking about that, too, and thinking about COVID, what that did to people. Because I know quite a few people that some of them still wear masks, some of them still don’t like crowds, and these types of micro transits would be beneficial to them. 

00:29:45 – Daisy Wall

Absolutely.

00:29:45 – Rico Figliolini

Or even seniors that can’t get around. If it gets there.

00:29:48 – Daisy Wall

A lot of our locations, you know, seniors are our heaviest riders in a lot of ways, which is quite interesting. A lot of people think, oh, well, seniors really take it. But if you think about it, seniors in a lot of ways need it the most, you know, because there’s sometimes mobility challenges. And, you know, instead of having to rely on loved ones all the time, this is a great opportunity to provide more, you know, independence for them.

00:30:11 – Rico Figliolini

I think there’s a stereotype out there that they don’t do that, but they’re probably on iPads way more than their kids.

00:30:15 – Brandon Branham

Yes, they are.

00:30:17 – Daisy Wall

Oh, yeah. And they give us great feedback.

00:30:23 – Rico Figliolini

Anything that we forgot, we’re getting towards the end of our conversation. So anything that you want to share?

00:30:29 – Brandon Branham

I would just encourage our residents to come out, take a ride, experience it, get comfortable with the technology.

00:30:36 – Rico Figliolini

Cool. Where can they download the app?

00:30:38 – Daisy Wall

Yep. So you just go online and you can pull up a May Mobility app and then you find it and then just download it and you’ll see, you know, Peachtree Corners in there. Wherever you are, if you’re in the area, you can pretty much, you know, call up a vehicle to any of our eight stop locations.

00:30:54 – Rico Figliolini

Technology Parkway.

00:30:56 – Daisy Wall

Yeah. Yes.

00:30:58 – Rico Figliolini

Which runs from the, what used to be Anderby’s, which is close to the…

00:31:08 – Brandon Branham

Spalding Drive.

00:31:10 – Rico Figliolini

Spalding Drive. Thank you. Norcross High School, Wesleyan is right on that corner. All the way down to the Marriott. So check that out. Guys, I appreciate you being with us. This was a great conversation. Thank you. I love being here at Curiosity Lab. Just more to come, right?

00:31:19 – Daisy Wall

Yeah, thanks so much.

00:31:21 – Rico Figliolini

And thank you to our sponsors again, EV Remodeling, Inc. and Vox Pop Uli. I appreciate you guys supporting us. Thank you so much.

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

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

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

Podcast Timestamps:

⏳ [00:00] – Introduction

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

⏳ [04:10] – Simpsonwood Park Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast Transcript:

00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:00:08 – Eric Christ

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

00:00:20 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:01:35 – Eric Christ

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

00:01:42 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:02:10 – Eric Christ

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

00:02:55 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:03:00 – Eric Christ

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

00:04:14 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:04:21 – Eric Christ

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

00:04:55 – Rico Figliolini

How many acres are there? 

00:05:06 – Eric Christ

227 acres.

00:05:08 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:05:18 – Eric Christ

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

00:06:09 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:06:15 – Eric Christ

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

00:08:16 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:08:23 – Eric Christ

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

00:08:59 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:09:02 – Eric Christ

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

00:09:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:09:56 – Eric Christ

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

00:10:52 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:11:01 – Eric Christ

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

00:12:37 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:12:43 – Eric Christ

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

00:14:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:14:50 – Eric Christ

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

00:16:01 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:16:16 – Eric Christ

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

00:18:17 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:18:32 – Eric Christ

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

00:19:12 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:19:29 – Eric Christ

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

00:20:06 – Rico Figliolini

Impervious?

00:20:08 – Eric Christ

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

00:20:39 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. And that sounds reasonable. Are they still?

00:20:43 – Eric Christ

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

00:20:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:20:58 – Eric Christ

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

00:21:40 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:21:51 – Eric Christ

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

00:22:22 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:22:27 – Eric Christ

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

00:23:38 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:23:54 – Eric Christ

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

00:24:32 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:24:36 – Eric Christ

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

00:25:23 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:25:31 – Eric Christ

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

00:25:50 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:26:18 – Eric Christ

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

00:27:51 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:27:53 – Eric Christ

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

00:30:16 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:30:25 – Eric Christ

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

00:31:04 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:31:18 – Eric Christ

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

00:31:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:31:51 – Eric Christ

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

00:32:14 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:32:52 – Eric Christ

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

00:37:31 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:38:22 – Eric Christ

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

00:39:17 – Rico Figliolini

That’s right.

00:39:18 – Eric Christ

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

00:39:38 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:40:22 – Eric Christ

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

00:40:33 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:44:55 – Rico Figliolini

How many precincts are in the city of Peachtree Corners?

00:44:56 – Eric Christ

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

00:45:40 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:45:45 – Eric Christ

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

00:46:43 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:47:00 – Eric Christ

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

00:47:18 – Rico Figliolini

There you go. Okay.

00:47:20 – Eric Christ

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

00:47:32 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:48:22 – Eric Christ

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

00:51:56 –  Rico Figliolini

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

00:52:04 – Eric Christ

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

00:52:20 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:52:26 – Eric Christ

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

00:54:26 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:54:47 – Eric Christ

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

00:55:03 – Rico Figliolini

Because it’s a nonpartisan race.

00:55:05 – Eric Christ

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

00:55:21 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:55:45 – Eric Christ

Sure. I’m always happy to do it.

00:55:47 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:56:56 – Eric Christ

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

00:57:13 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:57:17 – Eric Christ

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

00:57:24 – Rico Figliolini

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

Join UrbanEBB host Rico Figliolini for a conversation with Gabrielle Mills, co-founder and CEO of Sourced, a full-service back-office firm supporting small to mid-market businesses. She shares how she and her mother built a company that provides accounting, marketing, HR, staffing, and administrative support—all under one brand.

Learn about the challenges entrepreneurs face with business operations and how outsourcing can provide the help they need. Gabrielle also discusses:

• A $12M business that never checked its financials
• The importance of trust in outsourcing key business functions
• The balance between people, technology, and business success
• Sourced’s commitment to giving back to local charities

Resources:
Sourced Website: https://getsourced.com/
Social Media: @SourcedATLGabrielle Mills
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriellejmills/

Timestamp:
00:02:20 – Sourcing Solutions for Entrepreneurs
00:07:26 – Building Trust and Expertise to Serve Clients
00:14:53 – Fixing Broken Books for Business Owners
00:18:18 – Encouraging Diversity in Talent Acquisition
00:19:57 – Embracing Mistakes and Developing Processes
00:23:12 – Giving Back to Local Charities
00:25:34 – Leveraging Technology to Enhance People-Centric Services

Podcast Transcript:

00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini

Hey, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb here based in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. I appreciate you joining us. We’re a little smart city just north of Atlanta. I have a great guest here, Gabrielle Mills. She’s the founder and CEO of Sourced. Hey, Gabrielle. Thanks for joining us.

00:00:20 – Gabrielle Mills

Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me.

00:00:22 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no, I appreciate you being here. We’re going to learn a lot from you, I’m sure, this morning. And this is one of those freezing mornings here in Georgia that really never happens, like down to 20.

00:00:32 – Gabrielle Mills

It is so cold. I’m very cranky about it.

00:00:36 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, it’s amazing. But it’ll warm up in a week. But before we get to our interview, I just want to say thank you to two sponsors we have that have been with us. Appreciate the support of our journalism, these podcasts, of the magazines as well. One of them is EV Remodeling, Inc. They’re a company that has done work from design to build. whole house renovation, as well as just redoing your kitchen, your bathrooms and such. They’ve worked with over 260 families. They’re based in Peachtree Corners. Eli, the owner of the company, is a really great guy. I think you should check out their website. You could do a virtual consultation with them as well and check out their portfolio. So go to evremodelinginc.com and find out a little bit more about them. Also, our second sponsor is Vox Pop Uli, also based here at Peachtree Corners. They’re a company that takes your brand and brings it to life, essentially. They’re a family business, father, son, other family members in there, another daughter in there handling marketing. And even members of their employees are considered part of the family. It’s just a great, well-run company. We just did a podcast with them recently. You should check that out. But they try to bring your brand awareness out there. They can do anything from truck wraps to print on any object, just come to them, give them a challenge, and they will actually step up to that challenge. You might think they can’t print on it, but God knows they’ll find a way to do what you need to bring to that trade show and to make your business stand out as a retail operation or whatever. So check them out, vox-pop-uli.com, and it’s V-O-X-P-O-P-U-L-I.com. So now that we’ve gotten our sponsorships out of the way, Gabrielle, appreciate you staying with me like that. So tell us a little bit about how you started the business, why you chose the word sourced, and what the business is.

00:02:39 – Gabrielle Mills

Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. So I can’t tell you the answer to that question without acknowledging my business partner, Chrissy Strohmeyer, who is also my mother. So we are a mom and daughter team. We have just enjoyed the heck out of building this company together, but really my stories are her stories and vice versa. We started the business because we wanted to be entrepreneurs and we wanted to help other businesses grow and be successful. We think entrepreneurs are the salt of the earth people. They’re the reason for our economy. They create jobs. They’ve got so many great ideas. And they are the last people that get a helping hand because they don’t always have enough cash, right? That’s why we started Sourced. We actually went to business owners and asked them, because we didn’t have this idea. We asked business owners what they need, where they were underserved and how, if they were to do it all over again, kind of what they would do. And we put all of their answers up on a whiteboard that’s currently in our office. In fact, you saw it when you came over to our office the other day. If that whiteboard could talk, man. And we looked at all of their problems, all of their suggestions, all of the things they were struggling with. And our services came out of that. So Sourced is a back office services company serving small to mid-market companies. And the easiest way to describe what it is that we do is we basically have five businesses under one brand name. So on the fractional side of our business, we are a full accounting firm, full service accounting firm, a full service marketing agency, outsourced HR, administrative support. And then not fractionally, we do direct hire full time placement. So all of those ideas came from entrepreneurs that we spoke to that they needed help. And we said, we’ll do it.

00:04:38 – Rico Figliolini

It’s amazing. All under one roof.

00:04:42 – Gabrielle Mills

Well, we didn’t mean exactly to create five businesses at the same time. That was more of God’s plan. But, you know, here we are.

00:04:51 – Rico Figliolini

No, no, I can appreciate that. I’ve come across a lot of people in different businesses doing different things. So you do look at where your services can expand into. So it makes sense for where you guys are coming from.

00:05:04 – Gabrielle Mills

So you asked me where the name comes from. And I don’t get that question a lot. And it’s actually a really funny story. When I was working my big girl corporate job at IHG, Intercontinental Hotels Group, I had a relative that worked in the company. And she was the only person that knew that I was thinking about leaving and starting my own thing. So I floated the concept to her. And she loved the concept. At this time, we didn’t have talent acquisition. We only had a fractional client or fractional services. And our name was the Atlanta Assistance Group. And we were going to go by TAAG, T-A-A-G. And she was in branding for IHG. And she goes, I have to tell you, that name isn’t scalable. It’s easily forgettable. And you also have TAG, the Technology Association.

00:05:57 – Rico Figliolini

That’s right.

00:05:58 – Gabrielle Mills

And she’s like, I really think that you need to rethink your name. This was seven days before I was going to quit my job and do this and tell them I was going out. In which case they would want to know what the company is, what our name is, all the things. And so the next seven days, Chrissy and I were just on fire trying to think of everything. The amount of hours we spent digging through the thesaurus was crazy. And one day we were, I was driving and I was playing around with the word outsourced, resource, I was trying to come up with a play on words there and Sourced just came about and I called her and I was like, what do you think of this? And she’s like, I love it. And I think we came up with it two days before I quit.

00:06:48 – Rico Figliolini

Wow. And I love the website name though, getsourced.com. I mean, it just like makes sense to be able to do that. So, you know, you’ve been dealing with a lot of businesses, helping them and stuff. Sourcing is an issue sometimes, especially if you’re doing financial fractional work like that. And small business owners, maybe the larger ones like 10 million plus different, or even let’s say 5 million plus different, right? And I’m not sure what your sweet spot is, but the trust process to get a business to trust you to do their work because they’re sourcing it out to you. You’re not in the office. How do you do that? How do you gain traction with that? How do you gain their confidence to be able to provide the services that will make their business better?

00:07:37 – Gabrielle Mills

I think there’s a lot of ways that we do that naturally. First and most importantly, we have an amazing, amazing team of people and they really do the selling for us. Most of our business comes from word of mouth and referral because the people that work with us have such a great experience with our team and our people that that trust is kind of transferred already over because the referrer has had a great experience. That helps. Chrissy and I are involved in every single sale at this point before we pass it off to our team. We obviously have been through the entrepreneurial journey. We’re in our ninth year. We’ve done all the bumps and bruises, made all the mistakes. We’ve seen a lot of other people’s mistakes. We can kind of provide a lot of guidance during the sales process. So I think that builds trust. And not to be understated, the processes and the standards that we’ve built over time, we know how to fall back to the level of our training, regardless of the situation at hand. So we really lean into that when we’re talking to clients or prospects because they want to know how things are going to go. You can have a really good person who’s really friendly, but they may not know what they’re doing. That’s where the processes and our training comes in. We don’t have to do a lot of training because our people are already very experienced. But the way that we do things, we want that to be standardized. So we train on how the Sourced way is. So the client is experiencing something consistent.

00:09:14 – Rico Figliolini

So when you’re training, obviously, that’s an internal thing that you’re doing. There’s always industry trends, right? I mean, taxes is one thing where there’s always an update every year, different things going on. God knows probably this year will be a lot of things going on, accounting and stuff. But how do you keep ahead of some of the trends then or adapting to the needs of the entrepreneurs that you’re reaching out to? Because I’m sure that changes and evolves too.

00:09:42 – Gabrielle Mills

It does. I mean, you keep up with current events. We listen to our clients. Our clients know a lot. Our clients are very, very smart and we’re industry agnostic. So we get the benefit of seeing lots of different things from lots of different people and lots of different industries. So we just kind of like by osmosis learn things. But I think any good leader, regardless of if you own the business or you’re just working in the business or you have some kind of your stakeholder somewhere, I think anybody that is worth their salt is kind of always keeping up with. What’s going on and how does the business need to adapt and how does my department need to adapt and how do we grow and how do we improve? And I think just by having a regular practice like that, where you’re always kind of investigating it and looking at ways of improving, it’s more natural than it is forced to grow and change as the world changes.

00:10:37 – Rico Figliolini

Do you find going through the things you’re going through that, I mean, obviously, The day-to-day work is never-ending, right? It’s a process. Some days, some weeks, it’ll be the same as other weeks. But every once in a while, you get a challenge. You find something that you have to overcome within a business maybe, within your own business. Do you have any success stories that you can share that relates to that?

00:11:06 – Gabrielle Mills

Yes, I’ll tell you my favorite one. And it’s one of the more recent ones too. In our nine years of business, we have seen a lot come through our doors. We always tell people, especially those coming in for accounting. Accounting and talent acquisition are our two most popular services. And we started in accounting. That’s kind of our bread and butter. And people are always very vulnerable about like, oh, my books are bad. I had a bad accountant. I don’t know what I’m doing. We always tell them we’re like doctors. We just want to, give us the real, real, we’ll fix it. Like accounting is not a human body. So like we can actually fix it because it’s just numbers. But we’ve seen a lot of horror stories. You cannot scare us. You cannot surprise us. We’ve seen a lot in nine years. Recently, I think this client came on board early last year. And it was a $12 million construction client. And they have been in business for like 20 years or something. And when we were working on, we got referred into this client and we went and we talked to them and they were having an issue with their accountant that was internal. And they wanted to let that person go, but she knew way too much in the business. So they were like, we need somebody that can fix the craziness that’s happening in the books. And you can imagine they’re large books, $12 million company. We need to create some kind of redundancy in a situation where we need to let somebody go and we can’t, we’re beholden to them. And we just don’t know anything about our books. We’ve never seen them. And the best part of that meeting was that Chrissy asked, or she was talking about the financials, the financial reports. And the client stops her and she goes, wait, why do I need to look at my financial reports? And our jaws just dropped because this is a $12 million company. They’ve been in business for like 20 years. They have done a phenomenal job building their company. They had no idea the importance of their numbers. They didn’t know what their, like how their money was transacting. They, I don’t know how they were running it. And so that was a lot to overcome. It was probably one of our longer onboarding processes, but we got that client off of QuickBooks desktop and onto QuickBooks online so they could see their numbers, right. Their books were done and I’m not blaming this person that ended up leaving. There was reasons why this was, but the books were entirely backwards. So where there were things that should have been a positive, they were showing a negative and a negative should have been a positive. So all their numbers were backwards and then nothing was set up properly. So we had to do a whole setup. We had to clean the whole thing and we just had a meeting with them yesterday just talking about our usual check-in, how things are going. We’re constantly looking at improving this account. And they were just saying they have never felt more secure in an accounting firm. They said, regardless of how our team changes, you guys are our people. You’ve taught us, you’ve changed everything, you’ve done everything. And we just, they were showering us with lovely things and it just warmed our hearts so much because this was one heck of a undertaking. But I also, give them a lot of credit too, because that one, it was not a cheap project. And two, that took a lot of trust in them too, to be like, I don’t know you guys and you have to fix all of these problems at once. And it was a lot of work that they had to do and we had to do. And so they put a lot into the relationship as well. And it was, they’re probably one of my favorite clients now. And it’s, will probably be my biggest success story for a while, just from the scale.

00:15:01 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I have a friend, Karl Barham, who owns Transworld Business. He consults, he buys and sells business for people. And it’s constantly amazing how many, not just half a million dollar companies, but $10 million companies, sometimes their books are so bad that they have to like step away and say, you know what, let’s fix this up. You may have to wait a year before you can sell this business just because the books are so bad. You know, it’s just like, there’s that.

00:15:31 – Gabrielle Mills

We don’t like to see it. Obviously it breaks our hearts and we can, we can fix it. We have the, we can fix anything at this point. But it’s unfortunate because they didn’t get bad because of that person. They got bad because that person didn’t have the support that they needed. Likely that the entrepreneur was not an accountant. They shouldn’t be. They should be building their business, doing whatever it is that they’re doing. Accounting is important, but this is why we went into businesses. You need to go do your dream. We’ve got the stuff that, yes, you need to keep up with, but you don’t need to know how to do it. We can show you, but you don’t need to know how to do this. You just need to know what your numbers look like.

00:16:19 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I’m surprised that when their accountant did their work at the end of the year, I can’t imagine it was the same person doing it. It had to be someone else doing it. And no one figured it out.

00:16:33 – Gabrielle Mills

Well, with this particular client, there was a couple migrations in systems that caused that reversal. So they started on one system and moved to QuickBooks Desktop. which reversed everything. And then the person that was working in the office, she would do a lot of things right. But there’s a lot of different ways to do accounting right, quote unquote. But she continued the backwardness because that’s how it had to be done. It was very complicated.

00:17:02 – Rico Figliolini

And I’m sure. And sometimes you’re down a path and you don’t want to leave that path. You just keep going and just figure it’ll work itself out at some point.

00:17:11 – Gabrielle Mills

That happens in accounting of like, we just start fresh. Like right now we’re getting a lot of clients that need cleanups and we only have to go back a month and a half because it’s the 21st today. When we’re in July, we’re like, okay, how far back do you want to go? Or not July, but more like October. They’re like, we can clean up from January or we can just hold off and start fresh in the next January.

00:17:36 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s a tough decision. You said before you’re agnostic business-wise a little bit, but are there types of businesses that may benefit most from what you all do or that you target or that you’d prefer working with? Or have strength in those industries.

00:17:53 – Gabrielle Mills

We have developed patterns of clients that tend to come to us. So on the accounting side, we do a lot of construction. That’s the example that I gave. We have a couple of YouTube clients, which is kind of neat. We do a lot of work for attorneys. Accounting for law is very specialized. So we do that. On the marketing side, they’re completely across the board. There is no consistency whatsoever. Same with administrative support. HR gets thrown into any monthly recurring service that we have. So again, there’s no consistency. On the talent acquisition side, we have quite a bit of consistency. Although there’s randomness throughout. We do a lot in, we still do a lot in law. We get a lot of financial roles. So we do anything from accountants, tax managers, tax seniors. We do a lot in IT, particularly in the cybersecurity market. A lot in finance, some in construction, not really all that much. Did I say finance? Property management in talent acquisition. Yeah, those are about the consistent ones in talent acquisition. But again, we kind of see it all. At this point in our business, we actually get really excited when we see a business or an industry that we’ve never worked in before. So for marketing, I was just pitching a client yesterday who’s opening a shooting sports facility and gun range. I have never done that before. And I was like, oh, this is different. This is unique. We’ve got research. Same with anything in our talent acquisition department. If it’s different, we’re like, okay, this is exciting. Because usually, I mean, we just see a lot of businesses come through here.

00:19:48 – Rico Figliolini

Well, that’s cool. Yeah, especially when you see a lot of different businesses like that. We talked about success stories. As a business person, I think any business person, if they’re honest with themselves, will say, yes, we make mistakes every once in a while. New situations arise that they’ve never seen before and it’s a problem that they have to overcome. Have there been any mistakes in your business journey or that you’ve seen in other businesses besides, obviously, the accounting issue? But anything that you’ve overcome as an entrepreneur, as a business person?

00:20:27 – Gabrielle Mills

No, Rico, we’re absolutely perfect. We’ve never made a mistake.

00:20:30 – Rico Figliolini

I could see that.

00:20:34 – Gabrielle Mills

Oh gosh no. I tell people, people ask me about our journey a lot. They’re just curious about our story and how we came to be. And we love telling it. I always tell people, Chrissy and I didn’t have experience in any of these things before we started. We just had a dream and wanted to be, help businesses and build a business ourselves. All of this we have learned from the ground up, having no experience with the exception of like general business acumen and general sales acumen. But we’re not accountants. We are not recruiters. I did start in marketing, but not tactically. So I always say that I went to the school of hard knocks, got a couple of degrees from there. And that’s how I got to where I’m at because we’ve made every mistake in the book. We’ve had clients that have trusted us and loved us through some mistakes that we’ve made to get us to where we are. I would say the biggest piece of advice or mistake that I made that I learned from was Chrissy came into the business from day one. And she was telling me and our director of account management, Maureen, she was like, we’ve got to focus on our processes. We’ve got to focus on our processes. Maureen and I were focused on the people and just serving the people. And in year three, which was our hardest year yet, we got so many different challenges and scenarios that were really, really difficult. And what Chrissy was telling us from day one finally got through to Maureen and I of like, oh, this is why we need processes and standards. This makes sense now. So it took a lot of heartache to really understand why those are important. But now it has been the secret sauce to our business because we know how to hire off of them. So if people aren’t already operating or have experience with that certain frame of mind, we know that they’re likely not a fit or they have to be at least willing to be coached into that direction. We’ve developed consistency because our process is our standard. We’re always making our processes better. We’re always looking to make them beefier. We never would have gotten there if we didn’t learn that lesson.

00:22:53 – Rico Figliolini

And sometimes you do. I mean, you have to learn your lesson. It’s like bringing up kids. They want to do their own mistakes. They don’t want to be told to watch out for that step. And they’ll do their own mistakes.

00:23:04 – Gabrielle Mills

She was a broken record there for a few years. And then the light bulb finally went off. And Maureen and I were like, oh, okay. Now it took us some tears to learn it. But we got there. Now we’re on there.

00:23:19 – Rico Figliolini

I’m sure. So you’re a local business. Obviously, coming out to meet with you and your mom and the rest of the team was nice to take a tour and find out what you’re doing there. You do give back. I know you’re good people. You’re giving back to the community. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about some of the local charities that you’ve given back to?

00:23:45 – Gabrielle Mills

So early in our business, we decided that we’re not in business, we’re in business for the joy of being in business. We’re not in business to make a gazillion dollars and cash out. While that would be lovely, we would totally not turn our noses up at that. We wanted to at least serve our clients and then serve people that never really came into contact with Sourced and use the business as an opportunity to give back because we believe that if we’re successful, we have been giving blessings and so we should be giving blessings out. So we committed from day one that we were going to donate 10% of our monthly profits to charity. And those charities would be selected by our team of people. So every year, in December, we put out a survey to our team. And our team can nominate a charity that is important to them. And we decided in January, up to three charities that we’re going to give to that year, and every quarter we look at each month that we’ve made profit, take that pool of money, cut it by, divide it out equally across however many charities we have that year and give them out. We have served, some of those have been large organizations, but our favorite ones are the ones that are smaller and local. We started the first couple of years working with an organization called Connections Homes, which is out of Suwanee. They help kids who are aging out of foster care really like with support to become adults, but also they’re not really adults. They’re 17, 18, 19, and they still don’t know how to do the world. That’s an organization that we’ve supported. We’ve supported an organization called Ignite Hope, which is another foster care association. We’ve done neighborhood cooperative ministries, which is a, for those who are local, you guys know that it’s a very large nominal nonprofit here in Norcross. And this year we’re partnering with an organization called Because One Matters, which ironically is another foster care organization. I just realized that there seems to be a pattern. So we tend to give to the kids.

00:26:08 – Rico Figliolini

No, I like that. I like the fact that you’re giving locally and it’s 10% of your profit each month is what you split up, which is great. It’s almost like tithing in a way.

00:26:18 – Gabrielle Mills

Yeah. And that’s how it came about. We wanted to tithe using the business. We give once a quarter based on the months because what we didn’t want to do is we would have one month go to one charity and that was a particularly good month. But then the next month maybe wasn’t that good of a month. So we wanted to balance it out. So we look at all the profits that come in from the quarter and then equally disperse it.

00:26:39 – Rico Figliolini

That is cool. Alright. We’ve gotten sort of to the end of our interview time, but I’m sure that there’s things that we could talk a lot more about. Is there anything that I’ve left out? Anything you’d like to share? Maybe services that you may be looking at expanding into the coming year or anything along those lines?

00:27:00 – Gabrielle Mills

So we’re likely not expanding into other services because we have five already and that’s enough. We are finding that there’s a lot of growth to be had in our talent acquisition department. So we’re eager to see what that ends up looking like through the year. What we really want to focus on in terms of like diversification or innovation, which I think is really where your question comes from, is how we utilize technology to make our services more streamlined and more advanced. We will never not have the support of our people. We are a people business. We will go under before computers take over our jobs. However, there’s a lot of really great technology that if you use it right and smartly, we can make profit margins better, save our clients money, be able to reach more people. So we’re going to try to figure out how we can lean into that a little bit.

00:28:02 – Rico Figliolini

So that’s a great path to go down for a quick minute, maybe. Because AI technology is something that everyone, every business is tackling and using in a variety of ways, right? ChatGPT, Grok3, there’s a bunch of them. Claude, I mean, there’s a whole bunch. DeepSeek, I mean, you could just go on and on with these things. And every business, every industry is trying to figure out how they can use that, right? And some use it badly and others use it better. Sometimes it’s used for support or for research versus making decisions. So are you finding that you have to also look at that to augment or to add a complexity to the service you provide? 

00:28:52 – Gabrielle Mills

So what stands out in your question to me is the have to. I think that nobody really has to, but I’m in an industry that if I don’t look at it, my industry will die because it is based on people. And if you don’t lean into the technology, you run the risk of the world thinking they don’t need people anymore. And then you’re obsolete. So we don’t have to do anything. But if we want to stay in business, we should be looking at how to utilize it better. The beauty of our business is these are things that people are always going to need. And computers can’t replace entirely. You always need a person overseeing or creating or some version of managing what the computer does. So we always have a people element to it. What we’re looking at with technology is how do we make ourselves and our processes and how we do things better and faster using technology and use the human brain where the human brain needs to interject.

00:30:01 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. Okay. Great explanation. Well, we’ve reached the end of our time together. Where can people find out more about your company? Of course, we’ll have it in the show notes as well, but how can they reach out to you?

00:30:14 – Gabrielle Mills

Yeah. So if you’re local, just come and see us. We are off of Scientific Drive in Technology Park, down by the Forum. If you want to check us out online, we are at getsourced.com. We’re on all the socials under SourcedATL, or you can always just look at my name, Gabrielle Mills. Unfortunately, very easy to find out on the web.

00:30:39 – Rico Figliolini

I’m sure. Check her out on LinkedIn. It’d be easy to find her there. I want to say thank you again to EV Remodeling and to Vox Pop Uli for supporting us. Everyone else, you have comments, leave them in the comment section below, depending where you’re watching this, whether it’s Facebook, YouTube. If you’re listening to this on Apple or any of the audio podcast places, Spotify, leave a review, like, share. We’d love if you would support us that way. Gabrielle, thank you for being with us. Appreciate it.

00:31:13 – Gabrielle Mills

Thank you for having me.