The Future of Simpsonwood Park, Housing Changes & Peachtree Corners Elections – A Conversation with Eric Christ

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.