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

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

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

Podcast Timestamps:

⏳ [00:00] – Introduction

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

⏳ [04:10] – Simpsonwood Park Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast Transcript:

00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:00:08 – Eric Christ

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

00:00:20 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:01:35 – Eric Christ

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

00:01:42 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:02:10 – Eric Christ

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

00:02:55 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:03:00 – Eric Christ

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

00:04:14 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:04:21 – Eric Christ

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

00:04:55 – Rico Figliolini

How many acres are there? 

00:05:06 – Eric Christ

227 acres.

00:05:08 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:05:18 – Eric Christ

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

00:06:09 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:06:15 – Eric Christ

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

00:08:16 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:08:23 – Eric Christ

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

00:08:59 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:09:02 – Eric Christ

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

00:09:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:09:56 – Eric Christ

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

00:10:52 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:11:01 – Eric Christ

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

00:12:37 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:12:43 – Eric Christ

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

00:14:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:14:50 – Eric Christ

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

00:16:01 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:16:16 – Eric Christ

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

00:18:17 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:18:32 – Eric Christ

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

00:19:12 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:19:29 – Eric Christ

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

00:20:06 – Rico Figliolini

Impervious?

00:20:08 – Eric Christ

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

00:20:39 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. And that sounds reasonable. Are they still?

00:20:43 – Eric Christ

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

00:20:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:20:58 – Eric Christ

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

00:21:40 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:21:51 – Eric Christ

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

00:22:22 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:22:27 – Eric Christ

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

00:23:38 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:23:54 – Eric Christ

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

00:24:32 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:24:36 – Eric Christ

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

00:25:23 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:25:31 – Eric Christ

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

00:25:50 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:26:18 – Eric Christ

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

00:27:51 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:27:53 – Eric Christ

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

00:30:16 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:30:25 – Eric Christ

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

00:31:04 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:31:18 – Eric Christ

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

00:31:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:31:51 – Eric Christ

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

00:32:14 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:32:52 – Eric Christ

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

00:37:31 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:38:22 – Eric Christ

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

00:39:17 – Rico Figliolini

That’s right.

00:39:18 – Eric Christ

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

00:39:38 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:40:22 – Eric Christ

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

00:40:33 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:44:55 – Rico Figliolini

How many precincts are in the city of Peachtree Corners?

00:44:56 – Eric Christ

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

00:45:40 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:45:45 – Eric Christ

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

00:46:43 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:47:00 – Eric Christ

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

00:47:18 – Rico Figliolini

There you go. Okay.

00:47:20 – Eric Christ

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

00:47:32 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:48:22 – Eric Christ

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

00:51:56 –  Rico Figliolini

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

00:52:04 – Eric Christ

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

00:52:20 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:52:26 – Eric Christ

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

00:54:26 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:54:47 – Eric Christ

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

00:55:03 – Rico Figliolini

Because it’s a nonpartisan race.

00:55:05 – Eric Christ

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

00:55:21 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:55:45 – Eric Christ

Sure. I’m always happy to do it.

00:55:47 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:56:56 – Eric Christ

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

00:57:13 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:57:17 – Eric Christ

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

00:57:24 – Rico Figliolini

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast Transcript:

00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:00:20 – Gabrielle Mills

Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me.

00:00:22 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:00:32 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:00:36 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:02:39 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:04:38 – Rico Figliolini

It’s amazing. All under one roof.

00:04:42 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:04:51 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:05:04 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:05:57 – Rico Figliolini

That’s right.

00:05:58 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:06:48 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:07:37 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:09:14 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:09:42 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:10:37 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:11:06 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:15:01 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:15:31 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:16:19 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:16:33 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:17:02 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:17:11 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:17:36 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:17:53 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:19:48 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:20:27 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:20:30 – Rico Figliolini

I could see that.

00:20:34 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:22:53 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:23:04 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:23:19 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:23:45 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:26:08 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:26:18 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:26:39 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:27:00 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:28:02 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:28:52 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:30:01 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:30:14 – Gabrielle Mills

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

00:30:39 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:31:13 – Gabrielle Mills

Thank you for having me.

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

THANK YOU TO THE SPONSORS OF OUR SHOW

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

Transcript:

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:00:08 – Brian Johnson

Hey, Rico. How are you? 

00:00:13 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:02:10 – Brian Johnson

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

00:06:55 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:07:32 – Brian Johnson

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

00:07:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:07:55 – Brian Johnson

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

00:08:15 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:08:34 – Brian Johnson

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

00:08:52 – Rico Figliolini

In Peachtree Corners? Wow. Okay.

00:08:52 – Brian Johnson

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

00:09:46 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:09:51 – Brian Johnson

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

00:12:34 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:13:33 – Brian Johnson

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

00:16:05 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:16:42 –  Brian Johnson

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

00:17:49 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:18:41 – Brian Johnson

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

00:19:01 – Rico Figliolini

Right, right.

00:19:01 – Brian Johnson

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

00:19:22 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:19:58 – Brian Johnson

It is always dangerous.

00:20:04 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:21:28 – Brian Johnson

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

00:22:13 – Rico Figliolini

For sure.

00:22:13 – Brian Johnson

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

00:23:47 – Brian Johnson

Right.

00:23:48 – Brian Johnson

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

00:27:18 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:27:44 – Brian Johnson

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

00:27:49 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:29:30 – Brian Johnson

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

00:30:28 – Rico Figliolini

Absolutely.

00:30:29 – Brian Johnson

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

00:30:57 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:31:18 – Brian Johnson

Fort Payne, yeah.

00:31:20 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:31:44 – Brian Johnson

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

00:32:45 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:33:07 – Brian Johnson

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

00:33:27 – Rico Figliolini

Why build something that can last for 100 years?

00:33:33 – Brian Johnson

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

00:34:22 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. Yes.

00:34:24 – Brian Johnson

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

00:34:31 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:34:56 – Brian Johnson

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

00:36:47 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:37:14 – Brian Johnson

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

00:38:15 – Rico Figliolini

That’s interesting

00:38:17 – Brian Johnson

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

00:38:24 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:38:33 – Brian Johnson

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

00:38:36 – Rico Figliolini

Okay, we are paying for that.

00:38:37 – Brian Johnson

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

00:38:49 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:38:55 – Brian Johnson

Take over the millage.

00:38:58 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:40:05 – Brian Johnson

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

00:40:32 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. Those balloons. Yeah. Yeah.

00:40:34 – Brian Johnson

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

00:40:38 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:40:41 – Brian Johnson

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

00:40:46 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:40:53 – Brian Johnson

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

00:41:26 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:41:36 – Brian Johnson

And have a FAA license, a pilot.

00:41:40 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:41:41 – Brian Johnson

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

00:42:18 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:42:24 – Brian Johnson

There is a height.

00:42:26 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:42:40 – Brian Johnson

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

00:43:16 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:43:37 – Brian Johnson

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

00:44:05 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:44:14 – Brian Johnson

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

00:44:16 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:44:21 – Brian Johnson

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

00:45:37 – Rico Figliolini

Interesting.

00:45:37 – Brian Johnson

It’s a dangerous time.

00:45:39 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:46:05 – Brian Johnson

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

00:47:03 – Rico Figliolini

Because it was a commercial?

00:47:04 – Brian Johnson

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

00:49:50 – Rico Figliolini

Amazing.

00:49:51 – Brian Johnson

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

00:50:16 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:50:26 – Brian Johnson

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

00:50:51 – Rico Figliolini

Right.

00:50:51 – Brian Johnson

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

00:51:01 – Rico Figliolini

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

00:51:31 – Brian Johnson

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

00:52:07 – Rico Figliolini

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