A discussion on the new small area plan, seven sub-areas for guiding growth, and the city’s proactive vision for balancing residential and commercial development.

In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, host Rico Figliolini discusses the recently concluded moratorium on residential mixed-use development in Peachtree Corners’ Central Business District with Shaun Adams, the city’s Community Development Director. They explore the creation of a small area plan, which subdivides the district into seven distinct zones, enabling tailored development strategies for each. Shaun highlights the goals of this plan: better aligning future projects with the city’s vision, enhancing placemaking, and ensuring balanced growth. They also discuss updates to the city’s 2045 Comprehensive Plan, public engagement efforts, and upcoming steps, including the December 17th City Council vote. Listen to learn how Peachtree Corners is shaping its future while preserving its unique community character.

Resources:
Peachtree Corners Website
Community Development
Upcoming City Council Meeting Tuesday, December 17

Timestamp:
00:00:00 – Residential Mixed-Use Moratorium and Central Business District Revamp
00:04:40 – Comprehensive Plan Guiding City’s 10-20 Year Vision
00:06:50 – Distinguishing Institutional and Commercial Areas in the Central Business District
00:10:17 – Differentiating Commercial and Residential Zones in City Planning
00:15:56 – Planned Roundabout and Redevelopment Opportunities
00:17:40 – Balancing Town Center Development and Traffic Concerns
00:20:30 – Flexible Zoning for Diverse Housing Options
00:25:06 – Suburban Condo Financing Challenges
00:27:22 – Suburban Density and Apartment Conversions
00:28:49 – Targeted Infill Development to Support Existing Office
00:35:42 – Envisioning Flex Office Redevelopment in Chamblee
00:38:37 – Envisioning a Balanced Suburban Density
00:40:50 – Zoning Changes Headed to City Council

Podcast Transcript

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life. We have a great guest today. We’re going to be discussing a lot of things here regarding residential, mixed use, the moratorium that recently ended on that development. Shaun Adams is with me today. Hey, Shaun. Thanks for being with me.

00:00:48 – Shaun Adams

Hey, how are you?

00:00:49 – Rico Figliolini

Good, good. So we’re going to talk, let’s set the stage a little bit about why, if you could give me a two-minute brief about why the moratorium was put in place and then what you were doing during that moratorium to start developing the ideas that we’re going to be visually showing our guests?

00:01:11 – Shaun Adams

Sure thing. So back in May, we put the moratorium in place on May 3rd. And one of the reasons that led to that is we were starting to see from the marketplace, a lot of properties in our central business district come online for sale. Office was not in great shape. They’re looking to redevelop sites in a way that didn’t necessarily align with what we felt our long-term vision of the central business district was. And when you look at the central business district, it’s a big piece of all of our office parks, including Tech Park and some of our retail nodes. And having one policy, if you will, that covered that whole area, you know, seemed to be a little broader than what we were ultimately looking for. And so we pressed pause, moratorium, and started working on a small area plan, which has now gotten to the point where we heard in planning commission a couple weeks ago, November 12th. And it’s set to go before council on December 17th. And through that process, we’ve held a couple of focus groups with brokers and owners, office owners in the central business district. We had a public engagement meeting. I’ve had some one-on-one conversations with members of the public who have reached out to me as well and provided feedback. And so we’ve taken all of that. And we actually, as a byproduct of that, we had a couple of themes that came out of those engagement sessions that spoke to more placemaking opportunities or amenitizing the Tech Park Central Business District area, taking it from an eight-hour day to a sixteen-hour day type of thought process, more gathering space where we could, a better mix of housing stock within the area. And so we also turned around and did an asset inventory, as I call it, where we put eyes on every commercial building in the Central Business District. We did a market analysis as well to determine how they were from a condition standpoint, what their occupancy rates were, what’s on the market, what’s not, what properties have kind of more underutilized space or parking than others. And as a byproduct of that, we’ve kind of set out these seven sub areas, which is probably the biggest change in the small area plan within the sub-district that allows us to get a little more granular and look at each of these areas and say, okay, what may make sense from a redevelopment standpoint or development standpoint in one area may not make sense in another. So how can we take all this information that the public and the experts have given us and, you know, mix it around and come out with all of that. So I have seven sub areas within the central business district that will be presenting to council.

00:03:50 – Rico Figliolini

And the moratorium was placed on the central business district area. So no one could apply for rezoning within that six month period that ended November 3rd, right? So during that time, you guys did what you needed to do as far as research and the inventory assets and developing these ideas. Because like you said before, from someone walking in that doesn’t know anything about this, the central business district area was governed by or ruled by one broad regulation, if you will. And now by subdividing these into seven districts, each of them will be uniquely managed, if you will, right? About what can go there or how it can be developed. So now that it ended November 3rd and city council is going to be seeing this December 17th as the last public hearing, if you will, before it’s voted on. When would it take effect?

00:04:46 – Shaun Adams

So and remember, this small area plan is essentially going to be an addendum to the 2045 comp plan. So it’ll be baked up under that. And, you know, once they vote on it in December, it’s being voted on to be adopted as a part of our comp plan. So it’ll essentially take effect right away. It is a policy document. It’s not a law document. And so it’s one of the things that we try to help people know is that the comprehensive plan is meant to guide our 10 to 20 year vision of how we see the city progressing. And, you know, some of that is, you know, proactive in nature and some of it is obviously defensive in nature. But this will plug right into that and allow us as staff when projects come through right away, we’ll be able to point to this. If it’s a project that comes in a central business district, we will immediately be able to point to this once council votes on it and says, hey, you know, this is kind of how we view this area in this property.

00:05:48 – Rico Figliolini

Right. And the comp plan gets reviewed every, was it every five years, I guess?

00:05:53 – Shaun Adams

It’s every five years from that day. The reality of the process for us is it feels like every three to four we get started on it.

00:05:59 – Rico Figliolini

Right, right. That’s true. Because by the time you finish public hearings and all that, I mean, it takes a while. So like you said, I mean, this is a guide, right? So what may be on there at least allows the city and developers to know exactly what’s expected, what’s going on. But it does give you that leeway to be able to adjust as you go. City council votes on it, planning commission votes on it. So it’s a process, right? Public hearings are done. So it’s not like all of a sudden something shows up that might be different from what would be on there all of a sudden, because it has to still go through the process of public hearings and all that. We were talking before we started this. I mean, it was interesting to me that a certain, maybe you want to pull up the map and we can start with that. Because one of the sections that is in the Central Business District, I didn’t even realize, was the G section that we talked about, the intersection of Peachtree Corner Circle and West Jones Bridge Road and Crooked Creek, where the elementary school is as well. I didn’t even realize that was in the Central Business District area. But you all have been proactive when you went through this process to make sure about a few things. So let’s start there a little bit. So what we’re seeing on here is the seven subdivided areas to our central business district. And the G, which is the green area, so the top one is the intersection of where the YMCA is, Peachtree Corners Baptist Church, and Cornerstone Christian Academy. And the one on the left side on this top map is the Crooked Creek and Peachtree Elementary School area. Correct? Yeah. So explain to us why that was pulled out separate.

00:07:56 – Shaun Adams

So, you know, as you kind of look at that area, you see they kind of stick out anyway from the core central business district. I think the reason why they are probably originally included in is because they are mostly institutional uses, which tend to lean on the commercial side versus everything around it being residential. But when, when you have a broad policy guide or policy statements like we have in the central business district before this, where, you know, the central business district in most places is where your highest intensity of development shall occur both mix of uses you know things like you see at town center and the forum you know that’s also common central business district. And so when you just say that broadly across the whole character area well that means everywhere that you see on this map right now, which includes those two sections. But we identified and understood that what may be appropriate along 141 and sub-area A probably isn’t appropriate in G. And so we wanted to try to carve that out for a couple reasons. And one is for the community to understand that we recognize there’s a difference in what might be able to go there, but also for developers to know that while it’s in the central business district, the athletic fields and parking lot of PCVC probably isn’t the place for an intense development. And so what this is called the suburban transition sub area is what G is. And the way we articulate it is that it’s the idea is that it will maintain its existing institutional character with the schools and the churches and the YMCA there. To the extent that if it were to be redeveloped in the future, it needs to take on the low intensity residential character of all the residential around it. And so if anything, it should act more like the Amberfield and Peachtree Station and everything that’s right by it and less like Central Business District. And so it kind of gives us that buffer and then now gives staff the ability if somebody were to come in and try to buy one of those pieces, we would be looking at this and saying, your development is inconsistent with our small area plan and surrounding uses. And that would give us some of the ammunition we need to be able to make a recommendation of denial in that case.

00:10:14 – Rico Figliolini

Which wasn’t in the original plan. I mean, anyone could have probably come in and bought that parking lot, if you will, across from PCBA and decided, or the YMCA, if that was ever to be sold or whatever, that someone could come in and say, well, you know, it’s a transition point. We could put townhouses there, which, you know, in a reasonable way, you might say that that could be like type of thing, type of development. But this eliminates sort of that.

00:10:58 – Shaun Adams

And townhomes are lower to medium intensity but the bigger thing is you can take that YMCA property and it’s big enough that could try and come in with a mix of uses, and even more intense. And while we can certainly from a staff standpoint leverage the fact that all the surrounding uses are lower intensity and try to use that to drive a staff report of denial, it will be harder for us to say it’s inconsistent with the comp plan when the comp plan is calling for the higher intensity use in that character area. But now this sub-area allows us to be able to point to both and say, no, that type of intense use in that area would not be appropriate.

00:11:23 – Rico Figliolini

And was this, I don’t remember now, but obviously the city’s thirteen years old. And we adopted Gwinnett County’s plans, right? I mean, when we became a city, essentially. And now that’s slowly been amended and changed over time. But would that have been allowed? I wonder if that would have been allowed during that time before we became a city.

00:11:50 – Shaun Adams

I’m not, well, I mean Gwinnett County would have had larger character areas since it was county-wide they would have certainly looked at this area along 141 and had more of a commercial node for it would be my guess. So we would have done our own comp plan before this to kind of have character specific to the city but a lot of times what happens as you see here is this is the core of our commercial and retail district and so that and then everything above it is residential and but now as we start to grow and develop you know and you start to see some of these properties in the market kind of change from what it was in the 80s and 90s, then, you know, now that becomes more at risk today than 20 years ago and mixed use wasn’t really a thing.

00:12:36 – Rico Figliolini

So city’s being proactive by doing this, obviously, and subdividing this makes sense to me too as well, as we were discussing before we started. Tell everyone what the darkened areas are. They should know from map but like the Forum, Town Center, I guess Dick’s Sporting Goods is on the south end, along with where the Chick-fil-A is, those areas. And they’re darkened because why?

00:13:04 – Shaun Adams

So they’re darkened for a couple of reasons. One, that’s really our retail entertainment sections right there, which, you know, from my perspective, really isn’t the same as the rest of the central business district, which is office focused. But also, you know, as we kind of talked before, the comp plan gets updated about every, you know, four to five years. These two areas here, our town center and the forum, they’re pretty much, from a redevelopment standpoint, they are what they are. They’re either in process or already built out. There’s not a lot of potential for change. Really, I’d say the only property grayed out would be the Ingles. But whether that’s something that would ever change in five years or not we don’t know I mean it’s a stable shopping center that’s leased up right now and so you know there hasn’t been anything of a recent note to indicate that it would be different but it is probably the only property in that area that doesn’t have that post 2000 design to it and the same thing at the bottom with Target, Dick’s Sporting Goods, LA Fitness Plaza, that’s a retail node that’s not likely to change in the next five years. And so what I would posit to you is that the next comp plan update, if anything, I could see those becoming a different character area potentially in the central business district. But in order to kind of fully flesh that out now, it would have taken another full-blown update. And so we wanted to focus on the areas that were ripe for potential redevelopment within the next four to five years, like what’s likely to change. And so that’s why you’ll notice the E section as well, where even though a lot of times that area around Peachtree Corner Circle with the Lidl DaVinci Court hexagon is often part of that downtown focus, that is an area that one has attempted redevelopment recently and probably has the potential for redevelopment in the next five years at some point in time. And so we included that and made it its own sub-area as a town center gateway because we wanted feedback from the community on that since we felt like it would likely be sought for some sort of transition over the next five years.

00:15:20 – Rico Figliolini

In that area, I know that, for example, the E part, the west side of 141 there, that’s where the day building is. I know that they applied for rezoning there. They’d like to put mixed use, a residential, I think. And then you have the E. Let’s start there. Let’s talk about that.

00:15:40 – Shaun Adams

Actually, so yeah, the west side here, my cursor is the curve that you see is the Cowart Parcel that’s not developed yet, but that’s where he has the entitlements for the 56 condos. The day building is actually over here in our commercial 4. So since it’s a little further down Peachtree Corner Circle, it kind of fell out of the gateway. Based off of our review.

00:16:05 – Rico Figliolini

So is the 50-unit condo still, that’s the one that I think butts up to the intuitive properties maybe or neither?

00:16:16 – Shaun Adams

It does. So it’s kind of the one that’s tucked in behind the QT and the creme de la creme. And then part of the intuitive campus is on the other side of it.

00:16:25 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. By the way, is that, I think the roundabout that was being planned has that been approved and going into that part with the creme de la creme and the exit from the forum is, is that, has that been approved?

00:16:40 – Shaun Adams

I believe that kind of falls more on my public work side. I believe it’s in design, but I’m going to leave that for Brian and Greg to speak more clearly to it. I believe it is still in play, but it would be aligned with the creme access where that has been discussed to be slated.

00:17:01 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Do you foresee, I know in the E part on the south, on the east side or south side, there’s a couple of other buildings there that are being looked at, right? Is Regis one of those buildings?

00:17:14 – Shaun Adams

Regis Hexagon is one where I think half of it’s vacant right now. The Hexagon has moved out. Regis still has their side. So, you know, that’s a building, again, 50% or less occupancy, a lot of parking. So, you know, in my mind, that’s one where you could see somebody coming in and kicking tires at any point. And so it was important to make sure that was included as a part of this conversation.

00:17:44 – Rico Figliolini

Sure. Why don’t we, why don’t you start, I guess from there, I mean, that’s the town center gateway it’s called, right? And let’s work our way around to tell us a little bit about why each of these have been adjusted the way they are.

00:17:58 – Shaun Adams

Certainly. So, I mean, I guess the town center gateway, you know, what we point out here is that it is kind of a wrapping around as a part of that downtown and, you know, could provide opportunity to connect directly into the town center area to amenitize. And, you know, not only those office buildings there, but there is enough excess parking there to provide some additional body heat and residential units to further support town center and the forum. And so that’s kind of been looked at as an area, you know, for meeting the high bill for equity product. There was discussion at planning commission, you know, that I’d say the one, one concern that some of the community has expressed is with regards to our recommendation of medium to high density in the E area, largely over traffic concerns in terms of, you know, if you put a few more hundred units in that area, what will that do from a traffic standpoint? We are, you know, continuing to work to look at that and provide, you know, analysis for it in advance of council. But, you know, what I have kind of spoken to is the reason again this being a guide right, is the importance of having somewhat of a range and saying medium to high intensity is you know I’ll use da vinci as an example just because they kind of made this reference in their public hearing but they talked about the fact that they currently of the twelve plus acres they have about nine acres of it is asphalt. Four acres of I believe it, is what they said in a public is hearing, is excess. So they can maintain their four to one parking ratio that they need for their tenants and get rid of four acres. And so if they were to come back in with a proposal with residential units so that, you know, were what city and the community wanted. People generally were like, that’s a good proposal. And we’ll just, you know, for the sake of easy math, you know, it’s four acres that they came in with, you know, eighty units of townhomes and, but they did it as a whole twelve acre property. That’s less than eight units an acre, right? That’s like low end of medium, if anything, you know, in terms of density. So everybody be like, that’s great. That’s awesome. Great job. You know, it looks good. Everybody’s happy. Well, if they sold off the four acres of parking and a different, whoever bought the four acres or was contracted to buy the four acres comes in to zone eighty townhomes. Now that density is being accounted for off of four acres, not twelve. And so what was a less than seven acre, seven unit per acre project now looks like a twenty unit per acre project. And now it sounds like high density. And so the reason for having the range is saying, look, all of these properties within that gateway, in order to put one residential unit on it, they’d have to come to us for a rezoning. So we get to look at it on a case-by-case basis and say, you know what? If it’s eighty townhomes there on four acres, whether it’s all twelve acres is zoned as a mud or four acres of it is zoned, you know, residential infill or some other zoning opportunity there. The idea is that it’s eighty units for the core of that site that’s meant to serve the property. So we might look at that differently okay more supportive than 350 units on say the hexagon building or the synergy building or something right? You know so that’s still high but it’s a lot more units and so by baking in a range it allows us to contemplate those scenarios where you might have parcel carve-outs and that person comes in because maybe the office owner doesn’t want to wrap everything into a mixed use for whatever reason, but he’s okay giving a piece of the parking to add something to it. And so from a planning standpoint, we have to look at what’s the total number of units going on the ground in an area. And that’s really what’s going to come down from a traffic standpoint anyway from support. But if we just said medium and that same project came in, I mean, technically, council could look at it case by case and still say, I understand based off of the four acres, it looks like higher intensity. But, you know, totality of the circumstances, if you will, it really is more like medium and therefore we would support it they still have that ability to do it but I think it’s from a legal standpoint from a policy standpoint to have the range in there it’s easier for us to kind of defend and support on a case-by-case basis. And so that’s something that we’re looking at and trying to help articulate why the importance of the range is there.

00:22:51 – Rico Figliolini

So when equity is talked about, I mean, the only equity that I hear all the time is either homes or townhomes. I don’t hear anything about condos. So it transitions right to apartments. Like if someone came in and decided they wanted to apply for, I don’t know 180, 200 units, it’s always looked at as multifamily apartments versus an equity property like condos would be. Is that even in the plans? Does that allow for that? Or is that one of those expanded uses that could be but it’s not explicit in there?

00:23:32 – Shaun Adams

So one of the changes we made as well is instead of trying to speak to known housing product types, we spoke to intensity of the residential use. So low to medium, medium to high density. And the reason why is, we are, I think we are at a point where the residential housing community is trying to shift to find more creative housing product types to help address, you know, the fact that we have less land to develop on, the need for more attainable price points for housing. People, not everybody wants five, four in a door and there’s not opportunity to build it. And in most places anymore. And so where do our empty nesters want to go if they want to own, but downsize. And so, you know, we’re starting to see stack townhome options where it looks like a townhome, but it’s two units stacked on top of each other. They each have a garage. They still have that indoor parking, but they have flat level living once they get there. We’re seeing courtyard style homes are coming out, smaller cottages, kind of going back to that 900 to 1500 square foot single family detached on small lots. And so, you know, as what I don’t know 10 years from now, if I did, you know, I’d probably be in the construction side is what are those types of uses? You know, what does that mix a housing product type? And so what we want to be able to do is say, look, it really matters the intensity of the use. And then we’ll know when we see it, what comes in, if it’s the type of housing product type that makes sense in the area and kind of assimilates into the surrounding environment. So rather than boxing us in and saying no single family detached or no townhome, let’s do it that way. But to your point on the condo front, most people forget that a mid-rise stacked flat building can be equity or rental, right? Condos and ownership type, not a structure. But we are, I think suburban condos, if you will. Like a mid-rise condominium project doesn’t finance or pay for it in suburbia right now. And that’s why you don’t see it like you see inside the perimeter. But what does are we’re starting to see kind of like what you know waterside they have that condo component where there’s three levels with the parking deck you know that type of product works and the reason why is because if you know for condos you have to pre-sell 50 percent before you can get the financing you need to go vertical on the building. So if you take a 50 unit mid-rise, you got to sell 25 units before you start going unless you’re self-funding. And the problem with that is you’re asking people to put money down where they won’t be able to benefit from it for potentially two to three years. But if you have an eight unit kind of stacked townhome building or something like that, one, that building is a lot cheaper to build than a mid-rise. But two, you have to pre-sell four units and then you get the aggregate of the pre-sales moving forward. So once you get four units sold, you build one, you put a couple models in there. And as you sell that out, you can now build the next one. And so that tends to work better in suburbia. And we’re starting to see some of those products come in and kick around.

00:26:50 – Rico Figliolini

Right. And I can appreciate that and understand that. And they look nicer that way, too. There’s better quality of living, maybe. But I’ve also seen, and maybe this is more urban, I guess, where apartments come in, let’s say, multi-unit apartments, but they’re pre-wired, they’re set. They could be condo products. And eventually some of them do turn into that, right? Seven years later, they become condo equity property. That’s actually an easy way of doing it, right? Build the apartment, finance it that way, and then the conversion can happen later. So that’s been done before. But you’re right. Maybe the suburban area we live in right now doesn’t need to be quite that dense with those types of developments.

00:27:41 – Shaun Adams

Well, I will say on that end though, the apartment projects that are coming in, even the ones, I know a couple of them have been denied, but the proposals and Tucson Court as well, Broadstone, they are sub-metered, they are pre-wired in a way to where they could be converted. And I know that’s the difficulty. The irony is like, well, then why can’t it finance as a rental product but not an ownership product? And we can go into the legal weeds on that one. But they are being built now to have that conversion. If we ever find that people are going back towards wanting to buy like that, I could see that happening.

00:28:18 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. And it’s mainly a financial issue, right? It’s mainly the banks and what they’re willing to finance. And I’m glad that actually the city, I think it was a few years ago, started doing that, conditioning developments to be sub-wide and all that. Because that made sense. I mean, to be able to look to the future and all that. Plus, energy-wise and everything else, it just makes sense to have it done that way. Alright, let’s go into the Ds and the C area. Let’s go into the C area and why is that? And describe what business is actually there at that point.

00:28:56 – Shaun Adams

Certainly. So the C is what we’re calling targeted infill. These are typically slightly smaller lots in general, but you still have businesses and buildings where there’s some underutilized space, maybe over development, or in some cases you might have a smaller office building on a smaller site that isn’t doing so great, but you have better office around it. And so there’s the potential for maybe one property might change so that it betters the ones around it. And so with the targeted infill, you know, what we’re really looking at here is some of that medium. In some cases, you might say higher density, but again, because it’s a smaller lot. So we’re not talking a lot of units, but it might be, you know, more in that ten to fifteen unit range or, you know, fifteen to twenty unit per acre range, but still maybe only 80 to 100, 150 units, something like that. But the idea behind it is it needs to be something that’s meant to kind of help stand up and support existing and surrounding office. So we’re still focusing on that goal. Some of the areas you see here, down here at the bottom, is 20 and 22 Tech Park South. It’s already zoned as a mixed use. And then that spur right across from it is the Isaacson one that just came through, which is the office to condo conversion for 13 units. So again, this right here is an example of where this office was sacrificed, but around it these office buildings here are much better performing, a better condition, doing well. And so by adding some residential here, right on PIB, kind of in the gateway in, it’s gonna now help support some of what is around this. And so that’s kind of the idea. This section back here is research court. You’ve got Peachtree Farms down here, which already kind of has that little bit more of a residential type of character to it. But a couple of these buildings here are either fully vacant or, you know, in need of quiet repair. So there’s the opportunity to do some stuff around here that can maybe stand up some of the office within here, but also help further support, what we have at D. And then this is Spalding 141. So Goodwill Plaza here, Hapag-Lloyd, 5550 Triangle, and that’s this whole section here. And then on the other side, you have the Summit Building, Bank of America, and it’s kind of the space in front of it and the hotel. So that’s kind of a corridor area of some smaller lots where you could probably see some redevelopment occur at some point in time, which that kind of gives us the idea. D is our, we’re calling it commercial core. D is really the area where we don’t expect to see a lot of change away from office. A lot of the office and flex space or what have you in that area is doing well or conditioned well. So we don’t see substantive change. Obviously, most of this area up here is intuitive. The flex office space here, 5250 and 5390 is leasing up well. It’s performing. And so, you know, here what we say is any redevelopment here is going to be accessory in nature to the existing and surrounding office. So much lower intensity if it’s residential, odds are because it’s off the major corridors, it’s probably not going to support retail anyway. And so this is where you can amenitize it, you know, the trail heads can come through in certain places, that type of thing. And so that’s that to me is kind of like our stable base of office. And so not a lot of change.

00:32:32 – Rico Figliolini

Right.

00:32:33 – Shaun Adams

A, as you see here, we’re calling it the district hub, but it’s pretty center or central to the central business district, if you will. It’s right along 141. For context, this is engineering drive comes through right here so this kind of southeastern side of 141 is rod stone the liquor store the racetrack so that’s already is what it is. That’s built out and developed. The other side you have DR Horton back here and then this is the CarMax Plaza. There’s a little kind of right angle building tucked away that you don’t really see from the road, but overlooks the lake. So CarMax, parking right on 141, full signalized intersection, really underutilized space. And part of what we heard when people talked about amenitizing Tech Park beyond gathering spaces and trails was creating opportunities for entertainment, placemaking uses that wouldn’t pluck from town center and the Forum. Don’t want to start to compete fully with that. If there is a place to do it, it should be on a major thoroughfare. And so this is probably where your highest intensity of redevelopment would occur as it relates to additional commercial uses and residential because of its proximity and full access. And so it’s kind of the idea is that hopefully this kind of becomes your entertainment placemaking hub for the central business district.

00:34:05 – Rico Figliolini

I think part of that, wasn’t there at one point about adjusting some of the regulations for allowing recreational uses inside certain buildings that don’t exist actually at this point as far as an allowed use. Is that amended, I think, already?

00:34:16 – Shaun Adams

Yes, back in March. I think March, April timeframe, we did the social recreation facility and social hobbyist tax amendments that kind of address some of those smaller scale uses that didn’t, we didn’t really have a clean and tidy place for. But yeah, I mean, this could be the kind of thing where, you know, your fairway and socials or brewery, things like that. We’d love to see that type of anchor use come in here, something that could hopefully stabilize and make the CarMax building more, more valuable. Because it’s a pretty good shape building. If you put some stuff around it, you could foresee a situation. You’ve got 295 multifamily, 26 towns on this side, 75 towns coming on DR Horton. So you’re kind of in that 380, just shy of 400 range if out of all this you know in this area if you had a little more residential along with some entertainment uses you really have a core that can support that additional retail or entertainment use coming in so it brings a product to the city we don’t have hopefully that all of our residents up here in the shaded out area can easily pop down into and out but most anybody else coming to it is going to leverage you know the main thoroughfare 141 in the city to do it and so you know that’s we felt like if there was a place to have it that’s it okay and then I’ll hit F real quick because it should be real quick. This is really our saturn court down here. This is off of PIB. We call it flex office, but this is where most of our true kind of industrial one-story bay door flex office buildings are. Anything here is going to be more to enhance that. It shouldn’t see much in the way of true redevelopment there. It’s a pretty stable spot. And so we kind of drew those out on their own. And then the last one is B, we’re calling it district infill. Perspective wise, I mean, this is Jaybird Alley right here. So down here, you have the Comcast building down here below. This is Mary Our Queen up here. These two buildings right here are one property my understanding is this building is fully vacant most people are in this back building as you can see you look around you have a ton of underutilized parking and space an office park. And even the public engagement sector, our public engagement meeting this is where most people said hey the intensity of residential and everything if anywhere, that’s where it should be. It’s further away from town center where a lot of people feel like we already have a lot of growth going on. It’s adjacent to Holcomb Bridge Road corridor. We’re trying to do a lot to redevelop that corridor. And so this is where it makes the most sense. And so here is where we’re kind of proposing that medium to high opportunity as well for residential mix of uses. Still with a preference for built for equity products, I think there’s some opportunity because unlike C, these properties are larger. So you can take one property and do more. Where C, you might have some three to four acre sites. Here, you’ve got a lot of 12, 15 acre sites. So there could be some opportunity to do more with a mix of product types. You could potentially stabilize the office building with it, or you may have to take one to support others.

00:37:40 – Rico Figliolini

So let’s, I mean, medium to high density. So when, for example, I drove through, I think it was, what was it, Beaufort Highway? No, Peachtree Industrial Boulevard going south into the city. It was actually Chamblee I was driving through. And I hadn’t been through that part in quite a while, apparently, because all of a sudden I noticed all these buildings. Beautiful architecture, actually. Well-designed apartment buildings. Prettier looking, I’ve got to say, than Broadstone. But that’s just my take on it. Better architectural planning on that. Do we foresee that type of local development, too, maybe in that B area? Because, I mean, does that. Just so that people can sort of envision what is going to go where maybe as far as that goes.

00:38:31 – Shaun Adams

I consider that to be more of an urban higher density than a suburban higher density you know my vision for down here is there certainly may be a couple of sites where, you know, multifamily might be needed or might make some sense to be able to support the retail that’s right here. But really, when I look at this, doing some of that residential infill, you know, like a couple of zoning districts are talking about, I could see an opportunity for a mix of product types, whether it’s attached and detached townhomes with some stacked townhomes or smaller cottage homes, you know, where we can find an opportunity to do that, to bring in some more of that equity product, but it can be smaller footprints. And so it may be 15 to 20 units an acre. And, you know, in my mind, anything less than 20, you’re still kind of in that medium range. You get over 20 is when there’s a two in front of it and it starts to feel like, okay, for suburban areas, that’s probably, that’s the low end of high. You know, when you get like the Chamblee area, they’re probably 40, 50, 60 units an acre is what you’re probably seeing there. I don’t foresee that, you know, even our current regional or I say regional, but our current mixed use ordinance that we have, even with all the bonus density, you can get caps at 45. And 32 is the base. And so I don’t foresee it being Chamblee-esque, if you will. I want it to be a more efficient use of the space supporting the office. But I think my mind, when you say medium to high, I’m thinking this area is probably likely to be more in that 15 to 25 type of range and hopefully supporting as many of those office buildings as we can.

00:40:16 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Sounds good. So this is going to be presented to the city council again on December 17th. Public comments, public hearing. People can come to that meeting and make their public comments about that plan. It’s been out there already. There’s been public focus groups, a public meeting. So it’s been out there. Just for those people that might look at this, listen to this and say, I didn’t know about it, but it’s been out there. It’s been advertised. God, it’s been ad nauseum with being out there. So finally, it’s coming to city council, and it’ll be voted on at that meeting, because it’s gone past the first reading on it. Do you foresee any additional, is there any additional things that you should share, that you want to share right now that we haven’t covered, Shaun?

00:41:07 – Shaun Adams

As far as the plan, no. I mean, I think it’s pretty well out there. I mean, this is, to me, the biggest change is what the sub-areas are allowing us to do. I mean, other than stating that we’ve got a couple of zoning districts in the works as a byproduct of this so that we can fully implement the plan. But outside of that, we do have two applications in for December Planning Commission, but they’re not really specific to these changes. So we haven’t had that rush, even thought the moratorium ended on November 3rd, of people coming in. So it’ll be interesting as people maybe flip their heads out of the sand after the holidays in January and start to kick tires again to kind of see the reaction of the development community. The first couple of times they come in on some of these properties and talk with us about it.

00:42:00 – Rico Figliolini

Sounds good. Great. So again, for those, it’s December 17th, the city council meeting. If you have any questions, what I’m going to do is in the show notes for this, I’ll have a link to the meeting. I’ll have a link. I think we could get a link to this plan as well.

00:42:18 – Shaun Adams

It’ll be in the packet.

00:42:22 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Is there a separate PDF available on this that we can link to?

00:42:27 – Shaun Adams

I can get one set up for the full plan that’ll be shown. This was a specific presentation that doesn’t have the full plan in it that I’m sharing right now. But I can get the full plan maybe with a draft watermark on it or something and then have that so it can be shared.

00:42:45 – Rico Figliolini

Alright, that’d be great if you could do that. If anyone has comments certainly leave it in the comments email, myself or actually Shaun Adams at the city if you have any questions and sorry my cats are going crazy so just you know put your comments and we’ll see about getting answers to you before the meeting or certainly bring them to that meeting and you’ll know a little bit more about what’s going on. So Shaun, thank you. Appreciate you being with me. Hang in there for a minute while we say goodbye. In fact, if you want to take the map off, you’re fine to do that. Everyone else, thank you again. This is Peachtree Corners Life. My name is Rico Figliolini, host of this, and publisher of Peachtree Corners Magazine and Southwest Gwinnett Magazine, and Shaun Adams here. Give me your title again, Shaun, because I should remember that.

00:43:39 – Shaun Adams

Community Development Director.

00:43:41 – Rico Figliolini

There you go. So tell us all what you think. Give us some feedback in the comments. We’ll look forward to the next episode of this podcast when we talk to Shaun again, likely Brian Johnson, the City Manager, and we’ll get more information about what’s going on. There’s going to be a lot going on in 2025, that’s for sure. So thanks again. Hang in there.

Balancing Creativity and Parenting: Jill Tew’s Journey

In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, Rico Figliolini sits down with debut author Jill Tew to discuss her gripping sci-fi novel The Dividing Sky. Jill shares her fascinating journey from a corporate career to becoming a published author, revealing how her love for science fiction and storytelling shaped her path.

Dive into the themes of worldbuilding, dystopian futures, and emotional experiences that form the core of her book. Jill also opens up about the evolving publishing landscape, offering insight into how authors today must stay agile and seize new opportunities. Plus, hear her thoughts on balancing writing with parenting and her excitement for her upcoming middle-grade novel with Disney.

This episode is perfect for fans of sci-fi, aspiring writers, and anyone curious about the creative process behind a debut novel. Tune in to discover more about The Dividing Sky and Jill Tew’s captivating writing journey!

Resources:
The Dividing Sky on Penguin Random House: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736783/the-dividing-sky-by-jill-tew/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/764010/freedom-fire-kaya-morgans-crowning-achievement-by-jill-tew
Jill Tew’s Website: https://www.jilltew.com/books

Timestamp:
00:00:00 – From Corporate to Creative and Spreadsheets to Sci-Fi
00:08:12 – Exploring the Dividing Sky, A Dystopian Tale
00:13:17 – Worldbuilding Responsibility for Sci-Fi Authors
00:17:49 – Exploring Mixed Media Formats for Storytelling
00:20:43 – The Evolving Publishing Landscape
00:26:22 – Balancing Writing and Parenting
00:28:00 – Writing Tricks and Techniques
00:30:02 – A Young Black Girl’s Renaissance Faire Journey
00:32:11 – Writing for Young Readers
00:33:06 – Capturing Friendship, Uncertainty, and the Power of Perspective
00:35:40 – Closing Thoughts

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life, a podcast here in the city of Peachtree Corners in the county of Gwinnett, just north of Atlanta. So I want to welcome you all for visiting with us today. We have a first-time author, Jill Tew, who’s visiting with us, who lives here in Peachtree Corners, actually, as well. Hey, Jill.

00:00:20 – Jill Tew

Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you.

00:00:23 – Rico Figliolini

This is great. I mean, I just love the idea of being an author myself. I’m sure I have a book in me somewhere, but I can appreciate the endeavors of a first-time writer and author doing this. Yours is actually called The Dividing Sky and is available on Penguin Publishing, their website, and anywhere else that you can find a book.

00:00:50 – Jill Tew

Anywhere books are sold. Yeah, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. I’ll always shout out local indie bookstores. If it’s not on the shelf, you can always make a request.

00:00:58 – Rico Figliolini

Excellent. So you were born in Georgia. You went away for college. You ended up in Denver for a few years, and then you came back to Georgia. Tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are and where you’ve been in life.

00:01:14 – Jill Tew

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up not far from here in the Dunwoody, Sandy Springs area. When I was growing up, it was Dunwoody, and then they incorporated, and so that changed.

00:01:22 – Rico Figliolini

Right.

00:01:23 – Jill Tew

And yeah, I grew up, I always loved writing and storytelling and went away for college to do something more practical. I thought that that was kind of what I was supposed to do. So I went away to school in Philadelphia at an undergraduate business degree and did that and was convinced that that was what I was going to do. I was going to go be an international businesswoman. And I was on the right track. You know, I graduated, I did pretty well in school, I got a very sort of like prestigious corporate job out of school, I was a management consultant. So I was working in New York advising major corporations. And yeah, after that, you know, I decided that maybe the corporate environment wasn’t quite for me, but I still loved business and I loved solving problems that way. And so I ended up moving out to Denver and worked at a startup for another couple of years. That startup ended up getting acquired by Comcast and it was kind of a really cool process to be a part of from start to finish. And that was when the time that I realized that I still had this like creative bug in me from when I was younger and I began to pursue writing as a hobby. And then a few years later, as things kind of shifted, the pandemic happened and I was growing in my craft. Then it shifted from being, you know, less of a hobby to more of, you know, a full kind of wholehearted pursuit. And now it’s a career.

00:02:47 – Rico Figliolini

Cool. What did, when you were younger let’s say, I don’t know growing up being a tween and stuff, what was your, did you have any, did you see yourself being creative at that point? What transpired even at that age? Because usually it seems to start young.

00:02:58 – Jill Tew

Yeah, totally. So it’s funny, you know, I never had any like visual art ability so I never thought of myself as like a creative person because I was like, oh I can’t paint or draw for beans. But I loved wordplay and so I loved like making things rhyme and making up funny like poems and like parodies of songs. My favorite book when I was growing up was actually my rhyming dictionary because I would use it to just like make up funny stories and poems and stuff. I loved books you know, I loved, I think, storytelling in all of its forms. So my favorite at that point ended up being musicals. So I, again, kind of love musicals for the storytelling ability. And I would find myself, you know, watching, you know, science fiction movies or books, or shows, excuse me, or when I was a little bit older, the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out. And I would just like, think about these worlds and thinking about these adventures and, you know, kind of come up with some of my own. I never wrote any fan fiction, but I read it heavily. And I just loved, you know, kind of imagining the different places that these stories could take me. And looking back now, it all kind of clicks. And I see, you know, where that spark kind of started. I loved writing stories and creative writing in school, but when I pivoted to that point of more pragmatic and practical approach, I should have known that eventually I was going to end up circling back.

00:04:17 – Rico Figliolini

That’s funny. So was science fiction, fantasy, was that area mainly your interest?

00:04:23 – Jill Tew

Yeah, mainly. I grew up you know reading animorphs. That was probably my first like science fiction love as a kid. I watched this show that not everyone remembers but if you know you know. There was a show that ran like the late 90s early 2000s called Farscape and it was like yeah. So it’s like Jim Henson Studios, like Muppets in space, but for like adults, like, you know, just like the best, like found family space opera of these like kooky alien characters coming together. I imprinted really hard on that show actually. And I feel like that was kind of where I got the bug.

00:05:00 – Rico Figliolini

Okay, cool. I agree. You listen, people get it from different places and depending on your age, it’s just, you know, it goes. I mean, my kids are voracious readers, and they’re into fantasy, sci-fi as well. Lord of the Rings was like a 13-year-old kid reading it. It’s a dense piece of work also.

00:05:21 – Jill Tew

Yeah, absolutely.

00:05:25 – Rico Figliolini

I can see that. So with the work you’ve done, you know, getting into it as a hobby, how’d you get into it as a hobby? What were you doing as far as writing profiles, short stories, trying to pull together a novel idea? How’d that work?

00:05:38 – Jill Tew

Yeah, it’s really funny. I have some friends who kind of started writing with short stories. I have a lot of friends actually that feel like they’re either good at short stories or novels. And like very few can really do both because they’re very different kind of media, like very different formats.

00:05:52 – Rico Figliolini

Sure.

00:05:53 – Jill Tew

So for me, you know, when I thought about a story, when my first story came to me, it really was this kind of bigger story that needed kind of a full length novel. I was at the startup job on the verge of burnout. And some coworkers thought that we should go see a movie after work. And so we went to the theater and it was Divergent. It was that movie that came out probably a decade ago. And walking home from the theater, I remember like that spark, like reigniting in me and me saying like, oh my gosh, like I’ve been missing this. Like this is what I want to do. I don’t want to make spreadsheets for the rest of my life, I just want to tell a story and I went home and instead of like working on work that night I started like plotting out this novel that I had in my head. It was the idea for like a parallel universe like sci-fi story and seven years later that story got me my agent. And then we went on submission and which means like you take the story to publishers and see if they want it. That book did not sell. But while it was out to editors, I ended up writing the book that became my debut, The Dividing Sky. So yeah, that was kind of the beginning of the journey was seeing Divergent and remembering that part of who I was.

00:07:01 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, Divergent. That was a YA novel that that movie was based on. A trilogy, I think, even because they came out with some more stories.

00:07:09 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:07:10 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. I love the process of writing the whole idea of doing it. You know, reading up on and listen to, you know, podcasts about writing the craft, like you said, because it is a craft, right? It’s an artisan craft almost in some ways. But putting things together, usually most authors that I’ve heard about or read about say that first book is usually that exercise of writing. But it’s not the book that ever gets published. It’s always the second or third book that might get you there. So is this book a duology, a trilogy, or is it a one-off book?

00:07:47 – Jill Tew

Yeah, right now it’s a standalone, I think. So actually I should say that next fall, actually I’m publishing The Penguin Random House again, a book that you could think of as like a companion novel. So it’s another kind of dystopian romance. It’s about a hundred years before the events of this book. So it kind of sets up how we get here, but you can read them in either order, honestly. Readers have been clamoring for a sequel already for The Dividing Sky. And so I am putting some thoughts together about what I want to pitch to my editors. It definitely has, it’s not a cliffhanger, but it leaves some questions open-ended at the end. There’s room for more. And so I’ve been thinking about where else the story might go.

00:08:28 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. No, I could tell. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but just the synopsis of what the story is about. It takes place in 2364. It’s an 18-year-old Liv Newman. Interesting storyline about what she does.

00:08:43 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:08:43 – Rico Figliolini

And that the rookie police force person, I guess, Adrienne Rowe, that follows her and finds her, and she’s lost all her memory, even though memory is part of her job. So, I mean, it’s just I think it’s such a great premise, and I can see how it could go further. You’ve done a lot of good reviews, it seems. Kirkus Reviews called your debut a gutsy novel. You’ve had other reviews in there and your comparisons even to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. What does it feel to be talked about like that? You know, to get those reviews?

00:09:21 – Jill Tew

Yeah, it’s a lot. I mean, when I finished it, and we were kind of wrapping up the editing process, I knew it was something special. But you never know, you know? I think, a lot of the power of those reviews comes in, like, who they assign to read it. And all you can do as a reader, as an author, honestly, is like, hope your book finds its people, like at every level, even, you know, bookstores. And so when I saw those star reviews, my first thought was like, oh my gosh, like this book might have a shot at like finding its people. And, you know, I mean like any author I think would like dream of being compared to Octavia Butler. I feel like I don’t want the book to be like overhyped, but you know, it’s funny. Like, I mean, I love Parable of the Sower. I love that book and Octavia Butler, her writing was brilliant. I think when I reread Octavia Butler or the Parable of the Sower this past year, I was reminded of how much of that story kind of seeped into my authorial DNA. In that book, the main character has this sort of like, you could call it a gift or a curse or just ability to feel like the physical things that others feel you know like if somebody gets punched in the face like she feels that pain and this idea of like a character like having empathy for like extreme like speculative like couldn’t possibly be real like empathy for others in that way has leaked into my DNA for sure. I think you know Liv in the Dividing Sky she’s what we call an emo proxy meaning that her job is actually to read books, watch movies, look at blades of grass blowing in the wind or sunsets, and have emotional experiences about those things. And then sell those emotional experiences, those emotional memories to wealthy clients who are too busy working to live life for themselves. And so this idea of transferring emotions, of channeling an emotion so that someone else can experience it, I feel like is tangential to that ability and Parable of the Sower in a lot of ways.

00:11:13 – Rico Figliolini

I love that idea. I mean, the fact that we look at COVID, we look at the sense of loss of personal connections with people, eventually losing you know I could see that it’s sad world almost a dystopian world where you literally have to work through other people’s emotions. Which is really what we do with social media right? When we scroll through TikTok for about 30 minutes we’re living through other people’s lives. It’s not that much different.

00:11:39 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:11:39 – Rico Figliolini

So is there, and as you know, every book always says, none of this is based on real events or real characters or people, but you know, an author writes from what they know a bit, right? Is there a particular part that was difficult to write or a particular part that you felt more deeply about in this book?

00:12:01 – Jill Tew

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So I think, there’s the world of the book starts off and it’s called the Metro. And it’s sort of this like hyper capitalist world where everything is hinged around productivity. And so you’re only valuable insofar as you can earn money for this mega corporation that we call Life Corp in the book. And that’s why everyone is so, you know, focused on working is because like, that’s how you get not only money, you know your productivity score dictates you know where you can live what you can do kind of just like the confines of your life. And so like of course you’re going to outsource reading books or child care or you know repair work or like dates with your wife to like proxies who will go and handle that for you. Now Liv and Adrian end up discovering this other community outside of the borders of the Metro called the Outerlands. And there are people out there who have been kind of vilified. But the closer they get to this community, the more they realize that they have a very different way of living that feels more connected and feels more like in harmony and is slower paced and appreciates the value of human life, not for being productive, but just for being intrinsically valuable. And that was hard. I mean, I did some thinking about what I wanted that world to look like, because, you know, I think as an author, like you’re going to be depicting a society that is like, you know, in some ways, kind of what you’re saying, what we should like swing closer towards or keep in mind, something that’s supposed to show, you know, what could be be possible. And you have to like take that responsibility really seriously. So I thought a lot about the elements I wanted to highlight and you know what I wanted to kind of telegraph as yeah, like a way of life that is you know maybe more in balance.

00:13:37 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. I mean you’re not too far off with the, with what you were saying before about how work or credits may affect your life because, I mean China does that right?

00:13:42 – Jill Tew

Oh yeah, the social credit, exactly, right.

00:13:48 – Rico Figliolini

And we’re not that far from that. I mean, we’re stepping towards it a little bit because even credit ratings, it used to be that apartment rent wasn’t counted in that. Now it is. Utilities and the use of utilities is being counted in that. It wasn’t before.

00:14:10 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:14:11 – Rico Figliolini

So I don’t think we’re too far from that social credit kind of deal.

00:14:13 – Jill Tew

I agree. Yeah.

00:14:15 – Rico Figliolini

So, and you do take responsibility as an author to be able to, I mean, as a reader, I take responsibility of what I want, what I like. So it’s a two-way thing, two-way street, right? To a degree like that?

00:14:31 – Jill Tew

Yeah, absolutely.

00:14:32 – Rico Figliolini

But I like where you’re going with that. World building is a very difficult thing.

00:14:36 – Jill Tew

It’s hard. It’s real hard. Yeah.

00:14:38 – Rico Figliolini

I mean, you do it well. I think people realize that without even putting too much thought into it they all of a sudden realize they’re in it and they like it. A bit like Blade Runner.

00:14:52 – Jill Tew

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think you know all of those stories. I think it’s funny as a sci-fi author and like dystopian author especially like you just realize you’ve been like swimming in this like ether and like all these ideas and you know there’s like androids in my book you know like all these things have just kind of like seeped into like your, the compost pile that you’re using to you know to grow your story.

00:15:13 – Rico Figliolini

Definitely, for sure. So where do you find, so you mentioned like movies, a couple of movies and stuff and obviously some books. Are there other books of sci-fi or movies or shows besides Farscape and some of the ones you’ve mentioned already that you’ve taken inspiration from?

00:15:28 – Jill Tew

Yeah, definitely those. You know, I mean, I haven’t really, I haven’t sold a book in space yet, but like I love Battlestar Galactica. That’s kind of like a classic space, you know, space story. What was I talking to somebody in an interview the other day about when I was younger, there were these two movies that came out back to back that were both about like androids that like you know kind of bordered on being human. So one was like AI, the Haley Joel Osment movie but he was like a little boy almost like a pinocchio metaphor. And then the other one was Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams.

00:16:00 – Rico Figliolini

Yes.

00:16:06 – Jill Tew

Where he lives over like 200 years. And I think those books, I mean the movies came out like back to back and I just feel like there was a moment there where everyone was kind of thinking about like technology and humanity and like where do you draw the line. And I think like I always wrestle with those ideas. The android character in Dividing Sky, Naz is Adrian’s like partner on the force. They’re like buddied up and he like he’s got a heart of gold right? Heart of like chrome and gold, I guess. But he you know, for being you know a robot essentially like he cares a lot about his partner. And I wanted to kind of subvert the idea of an android being clinical and like hard and cold and have one who’s like prime directive really was like the care of his partner. And there’s a book that is a little bit more recent it’s another like YA sci-fi book a trilogy actually, called the Illuminae Files. So if anyone’s listening and like has a young reader in your life that likes science fiction, this book is fantastic. It’s like a mixed media format so instead of just like prose on the page it’s told through like chat transcripts and like security camera footage and like all this really cool like artifacts. It’s a really fun read and also great on audiobook so I would highly recommend that one as well.

00:17:18 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. I haven’t heard about that one yet. But I guess trending today, I mean, you see, my kids are into YA novels too, or at least they were in YA novels. They’re into young adult novels, maybe, right? And so there’s trends out there, right? Different ways of writing. Like you said, I mean, it could be multimedia. It could be transcripts. It could be just different ways of doing it. Do you find, are there any, is there anything out there that’s trending that you think would work for you even for you to do?

00:17:53 – Jill Tew

I like, it’s my dream to someday do like a full mixed media like mixed format book like that’d be awesome. There are a few of those in Dividing Sky like we have some like police reports there’s some doodles in there that are really cute. We have like a scientific study abstract and a job description actually opens up the book so there’s like some fun little things we did in there from a design perspective to kind of make the world feel more fleshed out. But I would love to be able to play around with different mixed media formats because it’s almost like a puzzle coming together even more than like a novel already is. It’s like thinking about what elements you pull from like the real world that you’ve created to give a full picture of the story. So I think that’s really cool.

00:18:34 – Rico Figliolini

I’m curious. Your book is probably available as an audible.

00:18:38 – Jill Tew

Yeah. Oh, the audio book is fantastic. So we have two amazing voices. The story is dual POV. So it’s Liv’s perspective and Adrian’s perspective. And so we have two narrators, which is great. So Kaya Freight does Liv’s voice, and she is like a well-known anime voice actress. She does a bunch of audiobooks. She just did the voice of Violet from Fourth Wing on the like full cast edition of the audiobook so she’s amazing. And then Junior Nyong’o did Adrian’s voice and he’s a fantastic actor in his own right. He’s done a few audiobooks as well I think some things for the stage. He’s also Lupita Nyong’o’s little brother which is really cool too. So they both did a fantastic job. I’m like so, I’m a big like audiobook, I have like a high standard for audio books. And so I was like, okay, like can’t get just anybody. But I’m so pleased with how it turned out.

00:19:30 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no, I can appreciate that. When I go on my two, three mile walks, I always listen to a novel or something. And if I hear a really good performance or voice, I always look for what other stories they’ve read.

00:19:42 – Jill Tew

Yeah, exactly.

00:19:42 – Rico Figliolini

Because I mean, just, you can have a really bad reader or performer just.

00:19:51 – Jill Tew

They can ruin a great book, yes. That’s happened to me, unfortunately, a few times when I’ve listened. It’s like, ugh, yeah.

00:19:55 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, same on that, but it goes that way sometimes. So you’ve gone through the process of writing your book, publishing it. I’m sure it took a little time to, like you said, it took seven years to get an agent. You wrote the book for seven years, but your first book.

00:20:09 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:20:12 – Rico Figliolini

And you got an agent. Were you surprised about the process of actually, behind the scenes process of what it took to get the book published?

00:20:19 – Jill Tew

Yeah. So the process of going on submission, I think, was more straightforward. It’s basically like getting an agent, but like all over again. So, you know, you send the manuscript out to editors, you know, your agent ideally has relationships with different editors and publishing houses. And, you know, in science fiction and speculative work, especially, it just takes a long time because editors are also editing books they’ve already acquired. So they’re editing those things. They’re reading a bunch of submissions every day, every week. So the time it took, like that was kind of expected for me. The Dividing Sky actually sold in like five or six weeks, which was pretty fast. And that was amazing. But yeah, so after that, I think, you know, I knew that it would take about 18 months to two years for the book to come out after that, which is about right. So we sold it in October 2022. It just came out. So that’s about right. And over that time period, yeah, you’re editing more at the high level story structure level. And then you go into line edits. So that’s like at the prose level. And then you get to copy edits, which is like typos. So all of that takes, you know, months and months and months. You know, I think what might have been surprising to me is that, you know, a year before the book even comes out, that’s when like marketing and sales and like cover conversations really kick off. And so, you know, you might be working with your editor for a year before that, but it’s like that one year timeline like starts like now all of a sudden it’s a real thing for like everybody else at the publisher. So that part’s always really exciting. So now we’ve got, we’re going through that process now for my next YA book.

00:21:55 – Rico Figliolini

Gotcha, okay. And publishing has changed right? So I mean you have Amazon selling books you have Audible selling books on credit. So authors aren’t making the millions that they used to make before, let’s say. And it was definitely an exclusive club to some degree, right? Where you can make at least a full-time living between a book and then talking tours and stuff like that. Did you find anything about that that was surprising?

00:22:27 – Jill Tew

Yeah, you know, I don’t have much to compare it to because I’m an author now. But you know, from what I gather, you know, I think the biggest thing that’s changed is that people’s attention is just split in so many different ways. And that has upstream effects, right? So if people don’t read the way that they used to, you know, we have so many different things vying for our attention between, you know, the different streaming services and social media, and, you know, all the other forms of media out there, video games. And so I think authors are not, you know, one of only a handful of different forms of entertainment anymore. There’s so much more out there. And so, yeah, I think it’s harder. You know, I think publishing houses definitely feel this, you know, both because, you know the big five publishing houses that they have their own like traditional way of doing things that now may not be as effective and because new players are entering the fray. Like TikTok has their own publishing house now called Bindery. And Bindery partners with local TikTok influencers to like who become editors and like kind of curate their own stable of authors and then promote them through you know going viral on TikTok. And so you know there’s all, and it’s working really well. I mean, I have good friends that have Bindery deals and they’re being treated very well. And I think for authors it’s a totally viable path. So yeah it’s just fascinating to see and then also even downstream you have like book boxes so they’re these companies that will create these beautiful exclusive editions of books and kind of spray the edges and maybe redo the cover and put the illustrations inside and now they have their own publishing houses as well. So they’ve spent years getting to know what readers want really, really well. And now they’re like great, like we can just go buy that we don’t have to pay the publisher to acquire the licenses for these books, we’ll just edit and like have our own authors. And so I think from all these different angles, publishers are feeling this push of like, okay, how do we get closer to readers, but also explore these new channels of marketing, right? I think it’s kind of a free-for-all right now. And I think, yeah, authors can just stay agile and nimble and kind of react to what the market’s doing and just try to seize opportunity where it comes honestly.

00:24:29 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah and hopefully that you know maybe one of these becomes a Netflix series or movie or something, right?

00:24:35 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:24:40 – Rico Figliolini

With all the streaming services looking for content and stuff it’s unbelievable. And with ChatGPT. I’ve had a few friends that think they’re authors now because they can just get ChatGPT to write a piece for them. It’s amazing. It’s not that easy.

00:24:57 – Jill Tew

No, it’s not. And like you, if you don’t enjoy the like puzzle and like mental exercise that is writing, maybe being an author is not for you. Like you should enjoy, it’s hard, but you should enjoy the process.

00:25:10 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, that’s for sure. It is hard. And it’s, if you’re not willing to spend weeks, months and several years on it, then just drop it. You’re a parent of two kids, two young kids. I think one of them is starting school, maybe shortly? How do you balance? Writing is different than a 9-to-5 job, and it’s even different than some of these remote or hybrid jobs. Because someone could say, well, you can write almost any time. Although your creativity might be good at 6 to 7 in the morning maybe, or maybe at night after the kids go to sleep. So how do you balance that? How does that work for you creatively?

00:25:49 – Jill Tew

Absolutely. So yeah, so when I, before I got an agent, when I was like, when they were very young, I would write mostly at night. Now I write in the morning. So, you know, you can write anywhere. But for me, like once my kids are awake, like a good half of my brain is just like tuned in to wherever they are, like whatever they might need. Even if like I’m in the basement of my office and they’re upstairs, like you hear the pitter patter of little feet and I’m like, oh, like there goes like a chunk of my focus. So I need to write when they’re asleep. So, yeah, I get up early. I write, my like dedicated writing time is usually in the morning from like 6:30 to 8:00 or so. And now because my oldest is in like full time school now and my youngest is in a half day preschool program, I have more of the time during like waking hours to write. But you know, I’m still a full-time mom so my you know, I’m doing grocery shopping, I’m doing laundry. Like that time gets filled with other things too. So I really protect that 6:00 to 6:30 to 8:00 time and I can get a lot done in that time. If I’m like plotting out my story and I know what the next scene is and I know, you know, what I need to happen and what conversations need to happen in that part of the book, I can bang it out. You know, as long as I’m just like keeping that time and like holding it sacred and getting up every morning to do it a little bit at a time, I can chip away at a manuscript.

00:27:11 – Rico Figliolini

Do you set up an outline? Do you start with an outline?

00:27:15 – Jill Tew

I do. Yeah. Some authors can be more kind of like flexible and kind of discover, you know, where their story takes them. I always outline. I’m a plotter, as they say. So I plot out my story. I made spreadsheets for a living, you know, before I was an author. Now I make them for my like outlines and my revisions. Love a good spreadsheet still. And yeah, I need that. Yeah.

00:27:37 – Rico Figliolini

Do you create profiles for some of your characters or do you let them tell you where they go as you’re writing?

00:27:44 – Jill Tew

Yeah. Some authors do that and have like a big story bible. I’m not, I don’t do that only because I know that it will make me procrastinate. Like I could spend forever building that out and then never actually get to the story. So I kind of let, I have like a few character details that I use in service of like figuring out how the plot works. And then the rest of it, I kind of build in over the course of revisions as things kind of flesh themselves out. Yeah.

00:28:06 – Rico Figliolini

Are you a bit of a procrastinator?

00:28:09 – Jill Tew

I’m not, but I can get in my head about like a story not being good enough to get started and I think that’s the biggest thing when you’re writing. Even, you know, for an established author writing the next thing and like that blank page is always scary. So yeah, if I don’t just like start then like I can get in my head and say like, oh let’s wait you know, a few more days. Like just, nope, just got to do it. You cannot revise what doesn’t exist. So you have to start first.

00:28:29 – Rico Figliolini

That’s good. I love that. Do you set goals for yourself, like word counts or time or anything like that?

00:28:37 – Jill Tew

Yeah, I try, you know, I’m generous with myself because I know that I, if I’m not careful, I’ll burn out. And then like that goal won’t be hit anyway. So especially when I’m on my own deadlines, not my editor’s deadlines, I try to take it easy, you know. I can do 1000 words a day pretty reliably. And so you know, that gets like three months later, that’s a full book, right? So that’s kind of usually my pace. And I do like to kind of backwards plan and think about, okay, by the end of the week, I want to be at this chapter. By the end of the month, I want to be here. That way I just know that I’m on track. Or that I need to adjust my plan if I’m falling behind or, you know, sometimes as you’re writing, you’re like, oh, like that scene actually belongs somewhere else. Or I can like accomplish that in a paragraph instead. So you’re always revising, like you’re not holding it too tightly, but I like a good plan. It just helps me know where I’m going.

00:29:26 – Rico Figliolini

I know the kids are kind of young, but the oldest, what does she feel about mom being a writer and author?

00:29:34 – Jill Tew

Oh my gosh. Yeah. So the moment they began to kind of finally get it actually was last February. I sold my middle grade book, which is like a nine to twelve year old reader, kind of like that’s like younger than young adult right? I sold two books to Disney. So my first one, my first Disney book’s coming out in April. But when I told them that it was with Disney, they were like, oh, Disney, like we get it. That was amazing. And then actually like three days ago, I was going to, we were picking up Mellow Mushroom for dinner. And we went to Johns Creek Books and Gifts, which is like right down the street. And my book is there. And so I was like, our oh, pizza’s not ready yet. Let’s just go in this bookstore. So my oldest was with me. And I was like, hey, do you see anything that looks familiar? And like her eyes popped out of her head. I think for her, she was like, oh, like mommy writes real books. And they’re like in the stores. And that was, I think she was like proud, but like also just like over, like it was very cute. But yeah she like, she couldn’t believe it so that was really cool.

00:30:33 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, that must have been a great feeling.

00:30:35 – Jill Tew

Yeah, I mean she, you know, like the whole house, my husband’s been amazing about this too. Just like the whole house has been like, mommy’s books coming out. So we have like just keep track of like whose birthdays come in like the calendar year and so it’s like, oh like daddy’s birthday, mommy’s birthday, you know my youngest, my oldest, whatever. And they slotted my book’s birthday in there so they’re like, mommy’s book’s birthday. And then yeah, and then Christmas. And so yeah. So it’s been like a big thing we’ve been building up to so yeah.

00:31:00 – Rico Figliolini

That’s fun. Now you did mention a middle grade book you wrote. So tell us a few you know tell us about that.

00:31:10 – Jill Tew

Yeah. So that’s coming out April 1st. Oh I have that, I’ll show you the cover because it’s very cute. So that book is, it’s called Kaya Morgan’s Crowning Achievement and it’s about a, let’s see put the camera, a black girl growing up in suburban Atlanta who is competing to be crowned the first black queen of her local Renaissance Festival summer camp. And it’s really good. I loved the Renaissance Festival growing up. It was a big part of my nerd awakening, probably. And there’s just so much in here about this girl kind of discovering where she belongs and what she’s interested in, even as society tells her that maybe those things don’t make sense for who she is. And also a bunch of Renaissance Faire puns in here.

00:31:54 – Rico Figliolini

So that’s great. And that’s a great festival. First of all, anyone that lives in Atlanta should be able to visit.

00:31:59 – Jill Tew

It’s amazing. Yeah, I go every year. So, yeah, that one’s coming out in April. And Disney has, it’s been great to work with too. It’s kind of fun to think about younger kids and readers that are maybe still looking for, they don’t know that they’re readers yet. They’re looking for the right book to hook them. And so I think a lot about the reader looking at this on the shelf and saying, okay, maybe I can get into books.

00:32:13 – Rico Figliolini

So that’s a lot different to write than a YA novel.

00:32:21 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:32:22 – Rico Figliolini

I mean, did that process take longer? Is it the same agent or you had to find a different agent?

00:32:30 – Jill Tew

Yeah. Same agent, different publisher, obviously. So yeah, for this one, you know, it’s interesting. You know, I love a good love story. There’s no romance in my middle grade, right? So where’s my romance arc? But that’s okay. There’s a friendship arc, which is really good. And yeah, the voice is different. I think younger kids, I think even for a young adult, like in YA, everything is so immediate and urgent, but for middle grade, even more so, right? So your best friend doesn’t invite you to the birthday party, your world is crashing. It’s crumbling down, right? And so it was fun to kind of get back into my like 12-year-old headspace. Remember what it was like, like not knowing who I was going to be, like who I was going to end up becoming. There’s a lot of that uncertainty and like, who am I, where do I fit in? It was fun to revisit that and kind of provide, you know, one perspective.

00:33:20 – Rico Figliolini

That’d be interesting for your kids to pick that up as they get older.

00:33:24 – Jill Tew

Yeah exactly. It’s different yeah.

00:33:37 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, critiquing mom on, I don’t know about this mom.

00:33:38 – Jill Tew

Yeah I can’t wait. Yeah my oldest is still, she loves her like Dog Man and Captain Underpants right now. But I think as she gets older she’s like, she’s close to getting ready for this. yeah we’re going

00:33:42 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I remember Captain Underpants, my kids bought those too. Actually, because of the school book fair, it’s scholastic books and stuff.

00:33:50 – Jill Tew

Yeah.

00:33:56 – Rico Figliolini

How far out do you think? I know you’re working on the other book. So how far out do you plan? I mean, or are you taking it as you go?

00:34:08 – Jill Tew

Yeah, I think I take it as I go. I mean, I have a few books, book ideas in me. So right now I’m actually, I need to start drafting. My second Disney book comes out April, 2026. So I need to start drafting that. I have the outline ready to go, but that’s kind of where I’m at in terms of my like workload. After that, I have no other contracted books yet. We’re on submission with an adult space opera, which I’m holding my, crossing my fingers for. But I’m excited to have some time in the early part of next year for a book that like, is not under contract, like nobody else knows about like, I just want to like play around again. Because I think, like, you know, it’s amazing to have book deals. But you know, there’s, you know pluses and minuses to everything and I miss that feeling of like this is just for me. So I’m excited to get back into that.

00:34:51 – Rico Figliolini

That’s cool. So have we missed anything that you’d like to cover that’s maybe, that I didn’t quite get to?

00:34:59 – Jill Tew

I don’t think so. I think that’s me.

00:35:02 – Rico Figliolini

Do you want to show us the cover of your new book? Do you have that?

00:35:04 – Jill Tew

Yeah, I do. Let’s see. This is The Dividing Sky, which this cover is absolutely gorgeous. It gives me all of the science fiction, romance vibes. Yeah, they did it, so pretty.

00:35:17 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. Excellent. Well, we’ve been speaking to Jill Tew, author, first-time author, lots of books out at this point with Disney and this first novel. Appreciate you spending time with us. And it’s great to see, you know, Peachtree Corners has a lot going on and it’s good to see, again, I’d love the opportunity to talk to different people from different areas of different professions, different skill sets. So this was great. Love talking about the, talking shop to some degree, although I don’t do writing, I publish magazines, but that’s about it.

00:35:53 – Jill Tew

It’s all connected. Absolutely. Thank you so much for this and for having the spotlight. I love the city. When we were moving back, it was top of our list. So we’re so happy to be here.

00:36:02 – Rico Figliolini

Great to have you. Hang in with me for a minute. I just want to sign off a little bit, but I also want to tell everyone EV Remodeling Inc. is our sponsor for these podcasts and for our publications. So check them out. Eli lives here in Peachtree Corners with his family. They do great work from start to finish. So no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s one room or all the rooms in your house, you should visit them. So EVRemodelingInc.com is where you can get that info. And if you’re listening to this through our website or wherever you’re listening, I’ll have links in the show notes. So this way you can find more about Jill’s books and about the Disney book as well. We’ll have that link as well. So thank you all for being with us. Appreciate it.

Early voting is open; Election Day, November 5

In this episode of Peachtree Corners Life, Georgia State Representative Ruwa Romman returns to discuss her re-election campaign for House District 97, covering Peachtree Corners, Norcross, Berkeley Lake and Duluth. Join host Rico Figliolini as they dive into pressing issues, including Gwinnett County’s rapidly growing population, the urgent need for infrastructure improvements, and the impact of the upcoming transit referendum. Ruwa also shares her insights on housing affordability, the role of public transportation and how small changes in tax law could affect both local businesses and homeowners. She emphasizes the importance of civic engagement, recounting how a local election was decided by just four votes. Don’t miss this insightful conversation about the future of Gwinnett and the power of your vote.

Resources:

Ruwa’s website: https://www.ruwa4georgia.com/
Ruwa’s House email: Ruwa.Romman@House.GA.Gov
The Georgia My Voter Page has all of your voting information, including your polling location and which districts you fall in. You can also request and fill out your absentee ballot on your My Voter Page, or by visiting this Gwinnett County specific page.

“Gwinnett is growing very rapidly. And if we don’t start this now, we’re going to run into a lot of problems in the future where we’re going to see a situation where our infrastructure can’t actually handle how many people are coming in. It’s not going to be able to handle the businesses that want to come here. It’s not going to be able to handle the kind of growth that would bring better jobs and that would improve our communities. And the sooner we can start prepping our infrastructure for that kind of a demand, the less disruptive it’s going to be.”

Timestamp:

00:00:00 – Candidate Ruwa Romman Discusses Georgia State House District 97 Re-election
00:01:31 – Concerns over Statewide Homestead Tax Exemption
00:07:16 – Keeping Tax Cases Local and Efficient
00:09:49 – Vague Tax Exemption Amendment
00:12:18 – Tax Loopholes and Small Business Impact
00:14:50 – Gwinnett County Transit Referendum
00:23:46 – Convenient Airport Transportation Options
00:25:54 – The Need for Public Transportation and Infrastructure Improvements
00:28:00 – Addressing the Housing Crisis
00:31:40 – Challenges of Profit-Driven Development
00:34:03 – Home Buying and Energy Costs
00:36:41 – Negotiating Monopoly Power on the Grid
00:39:47 – Importance of Civic Engagement and Voting
00:41:25 – Voting Tips: Early, In-Person, and Ballot Drop-Off Options
00:43:38 – Importance of Voting In-Person and Ballot Drop-Off
00:46:09 – Navigating Voter Registration and Provisional Ballots
00:49:05 – Advocating for Public Service and Effective Governance

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of Peachtree Corners Life here in Gwinnett County. Beautiful day, although it started out freezing this morning, but we’re up to about 62 right now. We’re here with a candidate that’s running for re-election, Ruwa Romman. Hey, Ruwa, how are you?

00:00:19 – Ruwa Romman

I’m good, thanks. How are you doing?

00:00:21 – Rico Figliolini

Good. Good, thank you. Ruwa is running for Georgia State Rep House District 97. Actually, she’s running for re-election. She’s been in the term for one term, I believe. And so it’s time for a re-election, right? She represents, the area that she represents is Peachtree Corners, Berkeley Lake, Duluth. That’s about those three cities mainly, right?

00:00:44 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, it’s four. So it’s Berkeley Lake, Duluth, Norcross, and Peachtree Corners.

00:00:50 – Rico Figliolini

And as far as Peachtree Corners goes, it’s about a little bit more than half the city.

00:00:55 – Ruwa Romman

Yep.

00:00:56          Rico Figliolini

I believe, if it looks right.

00:00:58 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah.

00:00:59 – Rico Figliolini

So we’re going to hop right into this. We’ve interviewed her, the person running against her, Michael Corbin, a week or two ago. So he’s out there. So you can listen to that interview if you like. Find it out on our website. So this one, we’re going to be discussing a few issues we may not have touched upon with Michael Corbin. One of them is the constitutional amendments that are coming in this, actually, that’s going to be on the ballot this November. So, and you all should be aware of it. So one of them, the biggest one we’ll start off with, to me is the biggest one, because I’m a homeowner, so I can be a little soft on this, is a statewide exemption to local homestead tax. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about, you know, in brief, what that means to a homeowner who, they’re in Peachtree Corners?

00:01:47 – Ruwa Romman

Absolutely. So what it does is it puts a cap on how much home assessments can go up by about 3% per year. So what it’s doing is it’s essentially limiting the increases to property taxes. The cons, however, is that it’s kind of multifold, right? When we were working during session, we knew that housing costs were a big problem and we really wanted to reduce those costs. But what ended up happening is that we passed a bunch of referendums, including the Gwinnett one that we recently got passed. This is one of the other ones that got passed. So I’d originally voted yes for it. I’ll be voting no for it at the ballot box specifically because when you are adding on so many exemptions, one on top of the other very quickly, it can become very disruptive, particularly for local municipalities. So what do I mean by that? If a city or county’s funding is disrupted too quickly, suddenly you’ll start to see even slower responses to things like potholes, streetlights being off, school funding, you name it. So what we’re trying to do, at least for me personally with my vote, is that I’m trying to strike a balance between not shocking our municipalities too much and then shifting the burden onto our cities and our counties. I just don’t think that’s fair with the way that the bill is going to end up working out because we already passed the Gwinnett Homestead exemption.

00:03:10 – Rico Figliolini

So what is the? Okay. So if I look at my property tax, right? The way it works is that an assessment is made. Most people will know this, right? So usually it’s 40% of your market value of the home, which means that the county or the municipality doesn’t have to increase your millage rate. But in effect, because of the appraisal, your property tax can’t go up. So nothing is owed on it, just the appraisal’s done, and your property tax can be 20% higher. My property tax essentially I mean, won’t say 20% higher, but it was probably 12-13% higher. Due to COVID, right? Because it was then it went up, assessed, and they don’t assess every year I mean, they do, it doesn’t always change every year. So I think we’ve gone through that struggle where I don’t foresee a 12% increase again.

00:04:12 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. No, no, no. And we’ve already increased your homestead exemption. So all of this, the reason I’m worried about this bill in particular is it sets a statewide standard, but the problem is municipalities and counties are very different. And my worry is that, you know, as an example of Peachtree Corners, say they’ve decreased your tax bill, which people should have seen at least either their taxes not go up this year or go up by only a much smaller margin. Some people actually saw a decrease in their tax assessments this year. But the hope is that with the Gwinnett one specifically, it is tailored to Gwinnett residents. The problem with this bill is it creates sort of a weird opt-out mechanism that can create some problems for municipalities and counties that I’m worried about. So it’s more of a logistics thing. And what I tell people is that when it comes to constitutional amendments, if you have a concern, it’s actually okay to vote no, because it’s easier to get it back on the ballot next time around than it is to take it off or revoke it.

00:05:11 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. So, but the next time around would be two years from now, if it goes through the process.

00:05:15 – Ruwa Romman

We can decide. We can actually do anytime. So the Gwinnett homestead exemption was immediately put on the ballot during, like immediately during the primaries.

00:05:26 – Rico Figliolini

Okay, alright. So in your opinion this shouldn’t, this cap of three percent would wreck havoc possibly with our county or you’re talking about statewide with a variety of counties?

00:05:38 – Ruwa Romman

And we’ve seen this in California as well where it has increased things like homelessness and been very, very disruptive. A lot of times when people talk about, you know, I don’t like to dunk on California, but this, when I was doing research on this, and that’s why we actually did our guide a little later, is I was doing research on how this has worked in other states. And what we found is when you do this kind of a statewide mechanism or whatever the case may be, you end up seeing all of these unintended consequences down the road that you didn’t really expect, right? You had good intentions, you want to lower costs, which is great. But my recommendation to people is do it by county or municipality instead, because then you’re able to tailor it for your specific district or location. The other thing I will say is that this referendum in particular did not have a fiscal note. So we don’t actually know how this would impact even statewide revenue related matters. So say, for example, there is a small business program that has been vital in bringing small businesses to Gwinnett County or Peachtree Corners, whatever the case may be, we could inadvertently defund that program and then lose out on that tax revenue for the city. And then you start to see services go down in quality over time. So for me, the fact that I don’t know how much this is going to cost us, I don’t know how much this will be disruptive on top of the Gwinnett one that we’ve already passed. It gave me pause and that’s why I switched from yes to a no.

00:07:10 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. And people can appeal their assessment. So, I mean, it’s not like they can’t go out and appeal it. And what you’re saying is really to keep it local. It’s almost like a Republican thing, right? Keep, yeah. Keep the power local versus.

00:07:25 – Ruwa Romman

Big local. Yeah, I’m a big local person and fan, so…

00:07:28 – Rico Figliolini

Right, so keep it local. You know, if we don’t like what’s happening at the county level, I know in Peachtree Corners, there is no millage rate, but at the county level, obviously, there is. So if you have a problem there, you can either appeal your assessment or, listen, just vote the county commissioner out, that’s like voting these things in like this. So let’s move on to tax court in the judicial system and what that means in brief.

00:07:53 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, so I am going to be voting yes on this one because I think that we need to remove tax cases from your general queue. I would much rather that a case where somebody is waiting for their case to be adjudicated to not have their life hang in limbo because of a tax case that’s taking up a lot of time. The other thing is that tax cases require a lot of expertise that not every judge might have. And the hope is it would relieve the burden on the criminal justice system as well. Now, some of the cons on that one is obviously that means that the governor gets to appoint those judges, not us as people, we don’t get to vote for them. So less oversight. The other one that people had mentioned to me recently is that if you have a tax case, it might be a little more burdensome or costly if you’re low income. But for me, I really think that we should just kind of take those because there’s such a niche type of law that, you know, take it out of the generic queue and put it in its own queue because then, you know, businesses can kind of deal with their own stuff and not take up the court’s time. But again, per usual, if you have concerns with it, vote no and let’s fix it.

00:09:04 – Rico Figliolini

So just, is there, I mean, I’m sure there’s statistics about who is in the tax courts, not tax courts, but you know, how many people, what the demographics are, like, is it majority business people that are going to these? Okay.

00:09:24 – Ruwa Romman

So it’s majority businesses, but you know, with everything that happens with systems, you’re always going to have a small group of people that could be negatively impacted. We don’t, unfortunately you don’t actually have that much research on it. I wish we did, but we do know that when it comes to businesses, they do want to be able to finish their cases sooner rather than later. And this would be an opportunity to do that. But again, as I always say, when it comes to constitutional amendments, if you have concerns, err on the side of no. I just think in this case, the positives outweigh the negatives, but I totally understand if people think the opposite.

00:09:58 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Referendum A, not one, two, but A, is tax exemption for tangible personal property.

00:10:02 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So I voted no on this one during session, and will be voting no on this one at the ballot box. There’s a few reasons for this. One, we don’t actually fully describe what we mean by, tangible property is the term that is being used for this specific amendment. It’s basically tax exemption for certain types of tangible personal property. We kind of define it, we kind of don’t. There’s a lot of room for people to take advantage. So somebody could take this tax exemption. And what it does, it actually raises the exemption from 7,000 to 20,000 and just a lot of room for misuse. And the intention was to help businesses. But the reality of the situation is that it would mostly help larger companies and corporations and could actually inadvertently hurt small businesses. Because the way that small businesses do their taxes, I’m not really sure that they’re going to be able to benefit from this as much and could actually be hurt. Because again, we have a lot of programs that support small businesses and this might be taking away from that support.

00:11:09 – Rico Figliolini

So I read something online about this particular piece just recently, and I agree with you. It was vague. I mean, it didn’t say exactly what it was, but it did say along the lines, it gave an example, for example. So maybe it’s a bad example, but what they gave is, let’s say you buy a computer system. It’s a $5,000 system. You’re paying sales tax on it. The tangible personal or the tangible property tax, you have to pay an additional tax on that equipment, if I understand correctly.

00:11:44 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, and it depends on how you’re using it too. So it depends on the usage. It depends on what it’s generating. It depends on the equipment and how it’s used in your business. And that’s why I’m saying it’s so vague that what you’re bringing up makes total sense. You’re like, okay, you’ve already paid taxes on it once. Why are you paying taxes on it again if you’re using it for your business? The problem is that the way that taxes get itemized, the concern is that there is going to be a lot of ability to misuse this and it would cause a decrease in revenue. And we would take away programs that actually help small businesses to succeed. And the next thing you know, these larger corporations are benefiting in a way that was supposed to help you as a small business owner, but actually ends up hurting you in the long run.

00:12:31 – Rico Figliolini

So, but the larger businesses, I mean, this is a maximum of 20,000. The larger business, 20,000 is like a drop in a bucket or is it per?

00:12:40 – Ruwa Romman

Again, it totally depends on how it’s set up. And that’s what I’m saying. It’s, these are like, this specific referendum was written in such a way that I voted for it, no, on the house floor. And will be voting for it, no, again, because it was kind of ran through. There was no, and I don’t, and I need to like quadruple check this, but I looked for a fiscal note, I couldn’t really find one that would tell me how much this would cost or the impact it would have on our state. For me, I can’t even tell you to make a decision on this appropriately because I can’t even give you adequate numbers to say, yeah, it’s only 20,000, not a big deal, drop in the bucket for a large business, but a big deal for a smaller business. But I don’t even know if that smaller business could even qualify or what hoops they have to run through or what items count kind of thing. And on top of that, I don’t even know how much it would cost us in the long run to be able to give you like a ‘yes’ recommendation.

00:13:37 – Rico Figliolini

So if anyone wants to find out about this particular referendum, I mean, any of these three, they can go, I’ll have links on in the show notes, but it should be easy enough to find where they are.

00:13:49 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So we have put up a voter guide on all of our social media channels. I’ve got to just finish it on Facebook, but right now it’s on Instagram. Actually, no, it’s everywhere. It’s on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blue sky, wherever you get your information. We posted the entire guide for everybody to be able to access. And it goes through the pros and cons of each one. I also go through how I voted for it during session and how I’ll be voting for it at the ballot box and why. Because I do believe in that transparency, right? Like you can disagree with me on, hey, we need to lower these taxes at all costs possible. Like, cool, totally no problem. I just never want people to question what their elected official is doing and why.

00:14:28 – Rico Figliolini

I appreciate that transparency. So even if you change your vote and you decided to vote yes or no, it’s good to know why you changed that. Alright. So let’s move away from that a little bit. There’s another referendum coming up just for Gwinnett County, and that’s the transit referendum. I think on infrastructure concerns here in Peachtree Corners, I mean, we’re mainly a car city, if you will, and the autonomous vehicle Technology Park thing just drives that. It almost feels like Michigan sometimes. So how do you think this referendum would address our issues or impact us locally here in Peachtree Corners?

00:15:08 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So one of the things that I’ve noticed, for example, is that in my district alone, we have four different cities and three of them are downtown centers. So they have festivals, they have events, they have a lot of incredible activities, and it comes with a lot of traffic. And so what I tell people is imagine if you could take a convenient bus to the fall festival in Duluth or, for example, to any of the Norcross festivities that happen in addition to the Peachtree Corners festivities. Because suddenly you don’t have to worry about parking. You don’t have to worry about getting stuck in traffic. You don’t have to worry about any of that kind of stuff. So this transit referendum specifically would pay for 115 miles of quick ride BRT light is what it’s called. And what’s really great about BRT light is that it’s almost as fast as a train without needing to build the infrastructure for trains. It would do almost 26 miles of bus routes. It would have nearly 346 miles of county ride services, 20 transit transfer centers, two airport connectors. And for Peachtree Corners specifically, there is going to be one of those airport connector routes in Peachtree Corners.

00:16:27 – Rico Figliolini

Now, this would connect to the Doraville station or?

00:16:33 – Ruwa Romman

These are like express buses. So to give you an example, right now, I can drive about 10 minutes to Sugarloaf Mills and I can take a bus and it will take me directly to downtown and only has four stops downtown before I get to the Capitol. So on days when I don’t have late evening events at the Capitol during session, I will literally take the bus and spend that hour that I would have spent in traffic responding to emails or getting work done or doing calls or whatever the case may be. And I’ll be in the HOV lane. And it’s incredibly, I mean, I’m kind of skeptical about buses, to be honest with you, but I decided to try it. And I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s a clean bus, has Wi-Fi, is full every single time I’ve taken it to the point that they’ve now had to run buses every five minutes during rush hour, because the buses will overfill and people will have to go onto the next one. So it would be similar to that kind of an experience. Think of like a charter bus with the nice seats and the cushions and things like that. And the hope is to build that out for the entire county. Now, it’s going to be a 30-year project because infrastructure takes time to build, but it starts with the most dense areas such as Lawrenceville and works its way out. So over time, what you’ll see is you’ll see a decrease in traffic because there’s less cars on the road. Instead of having 40 cars, it’s going to be just one bus. And I don’t know if any, you know, for the listeners who have to commute, it just gets so, so awful.

00:18:00 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, it’s interesting because with remote work now and hybrid work still being in place, I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere. If anything, it just brought me more hybrid rather than just dedicated remotely working. But coming from New York, I mean, and having lived here since ‘95, I can see some, there’s good reasons in my mind. Like there’s the Long Island Railroad. There’s other rail systems or even express bus systems that are coach seats and stuff that work really well. You paid a premium for that above the normal bus payment. And they were clean and they were safe and stuff. Different than the bus, than the train system, at least in New York at the time. And even here sometimes you hear things happening on MARTA. MARTA’s not always the safest or the best that it can be, just because of the nature of the beast, I guess. But I can see why there would be some resistance to this a little bit with regard to spending the amount of money. That’s going to be, what’s the total cost like over the period of time for this referendum?

00:19:15 – Ruwa Romman

It’s a one percent levied. I gotta double check the number but.

00:19:23 – Rico Figliolini

It’s a one penny tax actually. It’s a one penny tax on your sales tax. So it would be adding one more penny to any Equinet sales tax, right? And so over time, we’re talking billions of dollars being raised to be used. And it’s, like you said, it’s not really a train system. It’s not bringing, it’s not spending, you know, billion dollars to do two miles a track or something.

00:19:45 – Ruwa Romman

No, no, no. This is like, the way I’ve explained it to people is that it’s like the biggest bang for your buck right? We don’t have the density to justify train. And this is Gwinnett. This is like, by Gwinnett for Gwinnett kind of a program that focuses on only Gwinnett. I mean obviously it’s trying to also, you know, connect people to other transit systems in the area. But if there’s a, in our guide, there’s actually a map that will show you where it’s going to be a county ride, what’s called a quick ride, and actually Peachtree Corners, Norcross are both on the quick ride route. The county ride will include all of Peachtree Corners, Duluth, Norcross, and Berkeley Lake. You have the airport ride also connects into Peachtree Corners.

00:20:36 – Rico Figliolini

When you say airport ride? That goes straight to the airport?

00:20:39 – Ruwa Romman

Correct. So there’s going to be what’s called 20 new transit stations. One of them is going to be in Peachtree Corners. The other one’s going to be in Norcross. And the third one’s going to be in Duluth. So all of these downtown centers where we have a lot of people, you’ll actually be able to access at least one and up to four. So county ride, quick ride, rapid ride, and airport ride along these transfer stations and facilities. So one of them is going to be here in Peachtree Corners.

00:21:08 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. So if I wanted to go to the airport, what I’m getting at, is I could go to that hub, I could be dropped off here in Peachtree Corners, pick up the bus, and it takes you with some stops along the way, maybe. It’ll take you all the way to the airport. There’s no additional, there’s no jumping off, getting onto a different system to get to the airport.

00:21:30 – Ruwa Romman

It’s still the same system. Based on this map, there might be a transfer to the airport line, but you can also just park and ride. So you can just park your car, which is what I do with the Gwinnett one. And the, based on, I’m trying to see like, there’s a, it’s called Hartsfield Jackson ride and I’m actually trying to open it up.

00:21:49 – Rico Figliolini

So the one from Gwinnett county or from Peachtree Corners or these micro hubs, they won’t take you directly to the airport. You would still have to make a transfer somewhere?

00:22:01 – Ruwa Romman

Yes. Or drive your car directly to the airport. You would still have to make a transfer somewhere. I’m reading the map as we’re talking right now because I don’t have it memorized, but there, because like the, it’s a quick ride or a county ride. Well, you can either take that to connect you to the airport express bus because they don’t want to do any stops. They want somebody to be able to get on the bus and go directly to the airport. Or you can, I’m trying to find where the hub is.

00:22:22 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. So you can go there. So that’s my point because originally some of these things were, you get on it, you get to, let’s say, the Doraville MARTA Station, you hop on and then you get to the airport. But what I’m hearing is that if you’re hopping on the Peachtree Corners hub or Duluth or Norcross, that you go directly from here to the airport without making any jumps anywhere.

00:22:46 – Ruwa Romman

Exactly. Exactly.

00:22:49 – Rico Figliolini

So, I mean, I find that more convenient than having to stop somewhere, get off, walk, get another transfer, wait for that. Okay. So it’s straight.

00:23:02 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So if you have a car, I’m trying to see where the nearest hub is. There’s obviously the Indian Trail, like Greyhound one but I can’t, like the bus route, I’m like looking at the bus route. It starts at the Mall of Georgia, goes down to Sugarloaf Mills, goes down to the Gwinnett transit center at Gwinnett Place, Indian Trail. I can’t fully read what that says. It’s like OFS or something like that. It’s like right behind Norcross. But that one, any of these are on the route to Hartsfield-Jackson, and you don’t have to transfer. You just park, get on the bus, and it’ll take you directly to the airport.

00:23:38 – Rico Figliolini

Gotcha. Okay. Alright, cool. So this way everyone knows some of that. We’ll have a link also to that map. And so this way people can check that out also. There’s pros and cons, obviously, and we’ll try to find those links for people that want to look at that. Because it is a penny that’s being added to our sales tax, and it’s a commitment that will stay there for quite a few years, I think.

00:24:09 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, when building it, it’ll be about no more than 30 years. And the reason for it is that when you’re building this kind of infrastructure, whether it’s ordering buses or one of the things they’re going to do is these buses are going to have the traffic, like they’re going to coordinate with the traffic system. So if you’re on a bus, it’ll always be a green light. You don’t have to stop at traffic lights. You don’t have to get caught in that traffic. Some of them will actually have their own lane. So they have to designate some of the lanes for rapid transit bus as well. So a lot of that, again, going back to the biggest bang for your buck, you’re not laying down tracks. You’re not trying to rebuild stuff. It’s actually more technology-based. And the other cool thing is that for some of these quick transit ones, they’re going to be electric. So you don’t have to deal with the fumes of buses, increased exhaust, that kind of thing. But it does take time. So that was one of my cons is that it’ll take time for all this to be rolled out to the county.

00:24:59 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. I mean, there’s all sorts of things, legality and public hearings and stuff for these types of things to even set up the hubs, the micro hubs, like in Peachtree Corners. Like, where would that be? I know it’s on a map somewhere, suggested, but the ultimate place that it would be would take time and public hearings and stuff like that, I guess. But this is different than the last time the transit referendum was on the ballot, because that last time included, I think, a MARTA or several MARTA stops. I think it was at least one. And I think that was to Mall of Georgia.

00:25:31 – Ruwa Romman

Yep. Hello. I love cats.

00:25:35 – Rico Figliolini

I’ve got three of them. Do you want to take one?

00:25:37 – Ruwa Romman

Awesome. I’ve got two. But it’s great. Look, I’m a huge, I will say this. There is very little that I miss about my time in school in DC. But the one thing I do miss is having access to public transportation because it was just so nice not to have to sit in traffic. I could get so much work done. You know, you can be on your phone, you can relax, you can read. It’s just, I don’t like traffic and anything that will make that better would go a long way. And I will say too, Gwinnett is growing very rapidly. And if we don’t start this now, we’re going to run into a lot of problems in the future where we’re going to see a situation where our infrastructure can’t actually handle how many people are coming in. It’s not gonna be able to handle the businesses that want to come here. It’s not gonna be able to handle like the kind of growth that would bring better jobs and that would improve our communities and that kind of thing. We end up facing a ceiling, but the problem is people are still coming and we’re going to have, you know, hopefully more families and more kids and that kind of thing. And the sooner we can start prepping the, our infrastructure for that kind of a demand, the less disruptive it’s going to be.

00:26:44 – Rico Figliolini

And I agree with you on that. We’re seeing more apartments being built, multifamily. People aren’t buying as many houses because of the nature of mortgage rates and there’s less land to build on.

00:27:03 – Ruwa Romman

And we don’t buy these corporations. I mean it’s so infuriating.

00:27:05 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. I mean the trend is build to rent. I mean it’s just like crazy the amount of private industry purchasing these homes that you’re gonna, even in subdivisions where you’re gonna just, you know, rent them out to other people. And there’s a trend among younger people anyway to rent at this point because they can’t do the buying. And we were talking about it during one episode with the city manager about having affordable housing. How do you create that? How can you incentivize that or force that? Sometimes incentives don’t work. We literally have to force certain things. So when there’s not enough affordable housing and you have a need for labor, maybe the transit system is certainly one way to do that.

00:27:53 – Ruwa Romman

Yep. Yeah.

00:27:56 – Rico Figliolini

Let’s move on to, so let’s see, we’ve done the transit. Though there’s feedback. Alright. A little guy likes to chew on wires sometimes. Get electrocuted. So there’s feedback from the community, I think, that would be, that you’re hearing probably, especially if you’re campaigning, going door to door and stuff. So what type of feedback are you getting, whether it’s national thoughts or just local? What are the pressing issues that you’re seeing from this district?

00:28:30 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah, so my favorite part about campaigning, and for those who don’t know, as state representatives, we don’t actually get staff, right? So the nice thing about campaign season is it gives us an opportunity to fundraise and get staff and be able to door knock. And I’ll go and door knock myself. Well, everyone on the team canvases, it doesn’t matter if you’re the candidate or if you’re brand new, everyone’s doing the work. And what’s been really amazing to me is the fact that there are some things that haven’t changed, right? People have concerns about fully funding education, the size of classrooms for their kids. You know, how do we retain teachers because teachers are leaving, they’re burning out. You know, making sure kids have access to the best educators, taking care of those educators, that kind of thing. But the thing that has gotten like more, like we’ve seen more at the doors over time is actually, we were just talking about, which is housing. Whether that includes HOA oversight. Some people are starting to realize that there are these companies taking over HOA duties and it’s causing a lot of problems. One of the things I learned, and again, this is why housing is always harder for state people, because there’s so much that happens on a city and county level that is a little more complicated. But one thing I learned recently talking to one of our city council members is that companies are coming in and buying single family homes. They’re pricing out young families and it’s terrible, right? Cities are actually not allowed to have a database to track how many of these homes are up for rent versus being sold to actual families. And there are these laws that we have on the books in Georgia that preempt local ability to actually handle some of this part of the housing crisis.

00:30:12 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, that’s true. I heard the same thing, actually.

00:30:15 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. And so people at the doors will say things like, I wanted to, for example, move or get a larger home, but I can’t because we’re being priced out everywhere. I’ll tell you that there’s a house on the corner here that is $200,000 more than when we first bought our house in 2020. And it’s only been four years. And I don’t think, it’s not, I mean, it’s a great home. It’s a beautiful home, but I don’t think it’s worth half a million dollars. And so you’re seeing this insane housing market. And people keep talking about, well, we just need to build. They want us to lower standards in order to be able to build more, but that’s just not true. All you’re doing is making homes less safe and you’re just letting them pocket the extra part of their profit. So how do we, like you said, is there a way to force it? Is there a way to incentivize it? Is there a way to, you know, I think we use a lot of carrots here in Georgia because we really do care about being the number one place to do business. But the reality is that companies are profit driven. And if there are no consequences to not following the law, the law is just a suggestion at that point.

00:31:21 – Rico Figliolini

I mean, I totally agree. I mean, I was just speaking to someone else here in the city about a particular development that went up. The schematics for it or the renderings for it doesn’t look, the building itself does not look like the renderings that are given because they ended up using slightly different materials and stuff. And so when rezonings are done for, let’s say, multifamily and stuff, cities, counties, they want to allow, like you said, some room for innovative, creative work, right? But the problem is it is profit-driven. And when you have profit-driven, profit drives over everything else on that list. And if they can get away with using slightly cheaper materials, or if you say landscape, these got to be, you know, you got to replace all the trees, they’ll put in one-inch radius trees versus three-inch radius trees. Unless you specifically condition these things, they will not do it. Yeah, so that is a problem. The database for knowing whether a building’s bought, at least privately, like through an LLC or corporation, is out there. It can be found. In fact, there’s an app that interacts with it.

00:32:40 – Ruwa Romman

Like officially, you as a city, you cannot set it up yourself, and I think that’s just insane.

00:32:47 – Rico Figliolini

Yes it is. And in fact I’m looking at actually collecting that data at some point and publishing it because I believe there’s at least 12 to 16 percent that may be owned privately in the city.

00:33:00 – Ruwa Romman

Even worse. In Atlanta, 40% of single family homes are now owned by private corporations. They are no longer on the market. They are up for rent. These aren’t like people who have two homes and renting one out for college kids. These are actual hedge funds who are buying up these portfolio of homes. And sometimes they’ll just sit on them and then sell them for a profit. And the next one will sell for a profit. And suddenly the cost of a home doubles, even though no updates were made to it or very little, like, you know, shallow updates were made to it.

00:33:52 – Rico Figliolini

Right. Just cosmetic.

00:33:54 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. And if, I’m a new family or a young family or a young couple, like me and my husband are. I’m telling you, the reason I’m in the house I’m in right now is that the agent for the people who are trying to buy it to rent was so aggressive that she scared away the family. They had already outbid us. I’m serious. They had outbid us. We thought we weren’t going to get this house. And the agent for the family came back and said, look, they were very turned off by how aggressive that agent was. And even though your offer is lower, they’re willing to accept it. And we got really lucky. But it can, I mean, it’s tough. It’s really, really hard. And you add that on, you add the increase of everything else, utilities. So we don’t have an option of who you pick as your energy provider. And Georgia Power has increased our utilities four times. Four times.

00:34:27 – Rico Figliolini

Isn’t that amazing? Because they’re supposed to be capped at the amount of profit they’re allowed to take in a year. And yet you keep getting. And I’m sure the Georgia Power raised your tax because of the nuclear plant that went online that took them years and billions and billions of dollars over. It’s just ridiculous.

00:34:44 – Ruwa Romman

Yep. That’s what I say when I say about consequences. So I sit on the Energy Utility and Telecoms Committee. And to tell you how this worked and I’m a Georgia Power customer and it’s driving me crazy. And we are trying to figure out a way to allow for more community solar and solar options for homes so that way we can drive down energy costs. We’ve seen this work in other states. It’s really, really important for us to be able to create some form of competition because Georgia Power is a legal monopoly and it’s supposed to be held responsible by the Public Service Commission, but they’re not really fully doing that right now. And to your point about like Plant Fogel, everyone’s like, oh, we’re going to make it 25% clean energy. And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at these graphs and 2% of it is solar. 2%. We have farmers who would love to lease out their lands to solar companies and become solar facilities because what it does, it creates revenue for the farmer to then maintain the rest of their land and not have to sell this land that’s been in the family for a long time. But because Georgia Power is not, like keeps, I mean the only bills they come after are solar bills. It is wild.

00:35:50 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. Well they’re protecting an entity that’s why. And even in some states where they’re allowed to put solar and you’re allowed to feed it back to the grid and get paid for it you still have to pay an infrastructure fee because obviously there’s an infrastructure that has to be maintained.

00:36:08 – Ruwa Romman

I told Georgia Power, I said, I completely understand. You guys do, and they do. I like to be fair. They do a very great job of maintaining the infrastructure grid. But if you have a monopoly mostly on that grid and you’re part of the grid, can we come to a negotiation? And I’ve asked, I actually got yelled up at the CEO for asking this because she was like, we came up with the rebate rates already. You don’t need to reopen that can of worms. I was like, but what does that range look like? Can you explain it to me? Can you tell me how many cents on the dollar is required for you to be able to handle more solar and maintain the integrity of the grid? And they don’t want to answer that question.

00:36:45 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah. They may not have the answer to it even, but they don’t care to get it. Because if they, like you said, the information data is important, right? If you have that information, then you have to make it. If you don’t research that information, but you sort of know the answer, then you don’t have to worry about it.

00:37:01 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So if your bill went up, please email us, especially to my house email. It’s Ruwa.Romman@house.ga.gov. Because I do want to see how much people’s bills have gone up and I can actually bring that up during committee hearings and talk about it.

00:37:16 – Rico Figliolini

Good. That’s excellent. And just to tap one more thing on the private businesses buying property. I mean, the reason that that works out for them too, I think, is because there’s a tax advantage, right? They get to write off the mortgage, the interest rates and stuff, but they get to amortize the property because it’s an investment on their side.

00:37:36 – Ruwa Romman

Okay. So nobody knows this. I’m so glad you know this. I actually co-authored a bill on this with Representative Spencer Fry and nobody would move it. And it was really weird to me. So I’m going to try it again if I’m reelected. But the way that it works is that if, like you said, commercial property degrades over time. So businesses actually get a tax break on that commercial property. Well, they now count homes that actually appreciate in value over time to get that same tax break, right? So they’re like double dipping, it’s awful. So we wrote a bill. And part of the concern was some people who own small businesses will also own their home under that small business. So we didn’t want to go after single family homes. So I actually helped write this part where it said that if you are the business owner and your address is in Georgia, you can be exempt from this. But everybody else you can no longer get that like absolutely not.

00:38:28 – Rico Figliolini

So that would help to a degree, I can see. Although I can see the other side of that setting up a Georgia corporation that’s a subsidiary of a larger company, I mean those things can’t.

00:38:40 – Ruwa Romman

So they can’t have multiple homes. You can’t like, yeah, it was also to take away like any multiple home type, whatever the case may be.

00:38:47 – Rico Figliolini

Or maximum number or something that you can’t have more than two homes or something.

00:38:52 – Ruwa Romman

Exactly. Yep.

00:38:53 – Rico Figliolini

That’s great, Ruwa.

00:38:59 – Ruwa Romman

Very few people knew about this. And I was like, why don’t we just write a bill? And so we did.

00:39:05 – Rico Figliolini

Why not? You know, you could write a bill about it. Yeah, no, I appreciate you even thinking about that because most people don’t know that. Let’s talk a little bit, because we got just a little bit more time, about voting, right? What that looks like. You know, you’re an incumbent, you’re running for reelection, you have opposition from the Republican party, obviously. What did you want to say about that?

00:39:31 – Ruwa Romman

Yeah. So I have, I’ve been an organizer way longer than I’ve been an elected official, in addition to like my professional life.

00:39:38 – Rico Figliolini

Which by the way, what do you do for your professional life?

00:39:41 – Ruwa Romman

I used to be at Deloitte. Now I’m just like a freelance consultant now that I work, you know, now that I’m an elected official. But, you know, the thing that I really care about is I really want people to be civically engaged. And that starts with us filling out our entire ballot. Everyone always talks about the presidential. There’s so much, you know, energy and focus on that. But like we talked about at the very beginning, on our ballot is obviously the presidential. We’ve got our members of Congress. You’ve got your state senators, state house. You’ve got your referendums. You’ve got your county commissioners. So our county commissioner is Kirkland Carden, who’s amazing. And he’s up for reelection this year. And so please, I cannot stress enough, not only voting, but also filling out your entire ballot. We have people who will go vote and they’ll leave the rest of their ballot blank. And it’s a big problem. So if you have any questions or you’re not sure about something on your ballot, we’re doing a BYOB. So bring your own ballot to our GOTV rally, which is going to be at Shorty Howell Park this Saturday on the 19th. And you can actually vote early in any voting location in Gwinnett because it’s early voting. So as long as you’re in the county, you can vote anywhere. Between now and November 1st. And voting locations are open seven to seven. It’s really easy. There’s no lines. So highly recommend people go because, and the reason I mentioned this part is it took me three tries to vote in the primary this year. The first time we got there just a little too late. The second time I opened my wallet and my ID wasn’t with me. I happened to have taken it out like at an appointment or something. I forgot to put it back in. So it definitely took three times, three times is just the charm. So I always tell people don’t leave it until the last minute. You never know what’s going to come up. You never know what’s going to happen. If you request an absentee ballot, if you don’t get it back and mail it back by the 25th, it’s kind of my arbitrary personal deadline because of just mail delays. Please go vote in person. Just let them know to like, hey, I requested one, either got it or didn’t get it. And I would prefer to vote in person and they’ll be able to help you vote in person. But please, please go vote early. It’s really easy, really quick. If you have questions or want to go vote with someone, come vote with me on Saturday the 19th at Shorty Howell. We’ll have really great food, snacks. It’ll be from one to three and we want to make it fun.

00:42:03 – Rico Figliolini

And I think some of the early voting locations are at least.

00:42:10 – Ruwa Romman

Pinckneyville and Shorty Howell are the two in our district.

00:42:12 – Rico Figliolini

So Pinckneyville Recreation Center?

00:42:14 – Ruwa Romman

Yes. It’s the one that’s on the Main Peachtree Industrial, not in the back where the park is.

00:42:20 – Rico Figliolini

Correct. Okay, cool. So you have absentee ballot also, like you said. And those are counted based on when they arrive at the polling place or based on the postmark?

00:42:38 – Ruwa Romman

Most people say postmark. But again I don’t want to risk it. And I just tell people, please put it in. Because here’s the other thing, you can drop it off. So anywhere that there’s a voting location, sorry, not anywhere. During early voting, some of the locations have ballot drop boxes. You can check that out on the Gwinnett County website.

00:42:54 – Rico Figliolini

Pickneyville Park has one, the recreation center. There’s a drop box. Shorty Howell does not.

00:42:59 – Ruwa Romman

Yep. So please, that’s actually, if you have a ballot and you’re able to physically go, please put it in a ballot box by election day. I’m just really worried because there have been a lot of mail delays. There have been a lot of like just weirdness happening. Even if something is posted, it’s not getting where it’s supposed to be. So I just don’t want to run into an issue where somebody relies on USPS to mail their ballot. And it’s awful because this is what happens when you defund stuff, right? Suddenly services are worse. And people don’t know this. USPS is actually a constitutionally mandated thing. So unlike UPS and FedEx, they’re actually required to reach everybody no matter how far they are. Versus these corporations that can just say, well, we’re not going to deliver to you. And so it just makes it all worse. So that’s my long story spiel of if you do absentee, one, if you run into issues, reach out to us, two, drop it off. And three, if you’re not able to complete that process by the 25th, please go vote in person.

00:44:06 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Do you see, have you seen any, you know, with 300,000 people voted on the first day of early voting, which is a record in the state of Georgia. And so apparently, you know, I think, I forget what the, I don’t know what the breakout was, whether it was like 40 odd percent Republican, because you could tell from the data, I think, where the breakouts are. And I don’t know, 20 odd percent was like independents or something. Are you seeing or hearing, I know this is early still, but any issues with voter suppression or anything like that?

00:44:40 – Ruwa Romman

So, you know, what I tell people is that we have, over the past decade, have had to build the kind of organizing infrastructure to be able to get around a lot of that. So thankfully, we’re at a point now where a lot of people in Georgia know what to expect if they run into any issues. The one that I keep hearing most recently is that people will go on mvp.sos.ga.gov. That is your My Voter page. So mvp.sos.ga.gov. And they will log on and they will see that it’ll say their voter status is inactive. And so people have been feeling like, oh, I can’t go vote. So if you log on and you see that it says inactive, you can still go vote. That is totally okay. We did have a few people that tried to log in and their entire voter page is gone. It’ll give them an error. If that’s the case, reach out to us. We can connect you to a hotline that can help you figure that out. Some cases like that, but nothing too crazy.

00:45:37 – Rico Figliolini

So does that mean, so if they don’t see it online, but I go to a voting place, right? And they find my name in the database because they’re connected they’re going to find it. Let’s say I’m fine to vote, if for some reason they don’t see it there but I know I voted two years ago in a primary or something and so I should still be in there, can I take, can I request a ballot? I forget what you call that ballot.

00:46:05 – Ruwa Romman

Provisional.

00:46:07 – Rico Figliolini

Provisional. Thank you. I can ask for a provisional ballot and call that?

00:46:13 – Ruwa Romman

So the rule of thumb is before you get to that stage, very kindly and politely ask them to either pull up your address. There are different ways to do this, right? They can pull it up by your address. They can pull it up by your driver’s license number. And the reason I say that the provisional ballot should be your last resort is that once you submit a provisional ballot, you actually have to physically go to the voter registration location. It’s like the headquarters for Gwinnett. And you have to go and show up in person to fix your ballot. So I always tell people very politely, because this happened to me when I moved back after grad school, the person couldn’t find me in the system and she kept insisting I wasn’t in there. And so she was able to find me through my address rather than my name and it worked out. So, you know, first and foremost, try and be very polite about it. They’re doing their jobs. And then obviously as a last resort, yes, go ahead and request a provisional ballot, but be prepared to go down to the registration office to finish out what you need to get finished out for your ballot.

00:47:11 – Rico Figliolini

Can people register to vote still? Or is it too late at this point?

00:47:16 – Ruwa Romman

No, the deadline was October 7th.

00:47:21 – Rico Figliolini

October 7th. So, final words, is there anything else you would like to talk about before we sign off?

00:47:27 – Ruwa Romman

No, like I said if you run into any issues voting, finding out where to vote, your absentee ballot, whatever the case may be, feel free to reach out to us. You can, you know we’re on social media but the best place to do it is to email us at Info@Ruwa4Georgia.com. We are tracking cases and helping constituents vote. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us too about your ballot. You’re not sure who to vote for. I’m happy to give you my opinion. I’m very, you know, I try to be very transparent about that. And, you know, just please remember, I remind people that my city council member won his race by four votes in a runoff. So even if you think your vote doesn’t matter, particularly in a swing state like Georgia, it matters so much. So, you know, take a few minutes, go vote early, make it an event, take your friends and your family and yeah, happy voting.

00:48:21 – Rico Figliolini

Great. So on that note, I appreciate you being with me, Ruwa. Thank you. And in fact, you know what? Why don’t I get off for a second and then you give us your one-minute pitch. Even though you just did it a little bit like that, but definitely use this moment to give that pitch and ask for the vote.

00:48:44 – Ruwa Romman

Thank you. So my name is Ruwa Romman. I am the Georgia State Representative for House District 97, and I’m running for re-election. I ran because I wanted to put public service back into politics, and I want to keep doing that work. In my first term, I’ve been able to pass a bill out of the House. It ran out of time, so we’re going to keep working on it to designate EMS as an essential service. So I’ve worked on healthcare issues. I’ve worked on education issues by fully funding education this year, including the Hope Scholarship. I want to keep working on that. You know, when it comes to just making government work better for all of us, that continues to be my number one priority. And so if I’m reelected, I want to keep doing the work that I have been doing and advocating for you at the Capitol in every way that I can. But thank you for your support originally and I hope to have it again come November 5th.

00:49:33 – Rico Figliolini

Thank you for doing that. Hang in there with me for a minute, but everyone else, thank you for being with us. I appreciate you listening to the podcast. If you’re listening to this on like Apple or Spotify, leave a review. Love that because that’s an easy way for people to find us then. If you’re watching this on YouTube or Facebook, do leave comments if you like and we’ll see if there’s any questions you have that we can answer those for you. Otherwise, there’ll be links in the show notes on the website. But thank you again. Appreciate everyone joining us.

00:50:01 – Ruwa Romman

Thanks, y’all.