InTucker Magazine

From the Mayor -July 2021

On July 1, Mayor Auman issued his 2021 State of the City Address on the City of Tucker’s social media channels. Here are some excerpts from his remarks:

Aviate, navigate, communicate.

Everyone who has learned to pilot a plane knows this axiom. They know it applies to “normal” flying conditions, and is even more important in times of crisis. It means first fly the plane. Secondly, know where you are and where you’re going. Third, talk to everyone concerned about where you are and where they are. I don’t fly planes, but I have found this advice helpful in all kinds of circumstances, and especially in leading the City of Tucker.

A city, like an airplane, is a complex piece of machinery. We have about 40 people working at City Hall everyday, a cadre of contractors we use for specific jobs like maintaining the parks, improving roads and safety conditions, working in our courts. We have about 30 men and women appointed by the Mayor to serve on our boards and commissions. We have our elected officials working diligently to set priorities, cast a vision and make policy decisions about the City’s future. They have myriad responsibilities and duties day-to-day, and about 36,000 bosses in the form of voters. It’s a complicated machine.

We have flown far and fast in this last year despite mountainous obstacles and strong headwinds.

I asked our various officials and department heads to put together a summary of accomplishments and initiatives from the last year so I could give you an overview of the year; that is, the aviating we’ve done.

I’ll also give you a report on where we’re heading; that is, the navigating we’re doing. And, by the end, I hope I will have communicated what you need to know about our journey. 

Let’s begin with our three core services:
Our Parks and Recreation Team stays busy not only with year-round programming, but with constant improvements to all our locations and facilities, and always with an eye to adding more physical improvements and more quality programming to appeal to everyone who calls Tucker home. When COVID made its first appearance last year, they immediately assessed what would be needed to keep our parks and programs safe and operational. Of course, many things had to be curtailed either by health and safety considerations or by emergency orders, but they kept finding ways. From the very beginning, they arranged to have all the playground equipment cleaned and sanitized everyday, so our citizens could get outside for some safe recreation with their children. Our park trails and walkways remained open with proper protocols so that, despite the lockdowns we all had to endure for a while, Tuckerites could enjoy some fresh air and exercise.

We re-opened the Rec Center back in November for all the programs we could safely conduct, including contactless basketball. Our 10 and under basketball all-star team even won their district championship and competed in the state tournament. We also carried on with adult pickleball and golf leagues for all levels of skill and tournaments for each.

Already this year we’ve hosted a 5,000-egg annual egg hunt, a dive-in movie, and an Adult Field Day with over 100 participants. One particularly exciting development for me was to see a full youth baseball league in Tucker for the first time in 15 years! I literally stood with parents and grandparents of Tucker families seeing their kids and grandkids play where they played, and the happy memories were palpable. I had one parent tell me that an active youth baseball league is the hallmark of a healthy community and, as a lifelong fan, I couldn’t agree more. 

And, in perhaps the most significant event in our Parks Department since I last reported to you, a few weeks ago, we renamed and dedicated the former Smoke Rise Bath and Racquet Club as Bill Rosenfeld Park. We lost Bill as a friend, a colleague, a leader, a founding member of our City Council, a neighbor and a leading businessman back in January, and this is our way of ensuring that his memory and his example lives on.

The other core service areas for your city government are Planning and Zoning and Code Enforcement, where they have also had almost no downtime during the pandemic. These departments are charged with planning our land use, keeping up with building permits and inspections, and with updating our code whenever we find weaknesses or lack of clarity. The Council passed six separate updates to our code this year, dealing with stormwater control, illegal discharge into our waterways, litter control, recycling water at car washes, side-corner lot regulations, and controlling urban camping, all researched and initiated by our professional planning staff.

We carefully, and in cooperation with property owners, began enforcing code to get rid of abandoned and dilapidated signage citywide; identified nuisance properties that required enforcement to make them safe and useful again; and continued to work hard to be in compliance with the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, through a rigorous audit process.

In Community Development, this same department oversaw significant improvements to the Peters Park Community, over and above the park improvements, including gateway signage, street signage, landscaping rights-of-way, remediating dangerously dilapidated property, and installing an important new sidewalk on Elmdale to serve the area.

They led the effort on properties to be abated, such as the junk car lot next to the railroad in downtown. This was the source of one of the most dangerous fires in our time as a city, and our actions led to clearing that lot and returning it to a safe, useful purpose.

And all during the pandemic, they advised and supported our Planning Commission, Zoning Board of Appeals, Downtown Development Authority, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Public Facilities Authority, and more, providing training, administrative support, and assisting in presentations to community and professional groups.

Another area where your city is busy at work everyday is in traffic and road safety improvements. With money Tucker receives from SPLOST (the extra penny in sales tax voters approved in 2017), we rebuilt and/or repaved 16 more miles of the worst conditioned roads in Tucker last year.

In addition to our repaving program, we also completed some significant safety improvements, including urgently needed signalization projects at Brockett/Cooledge and US-78, and at Chamblee-Tucker and Livsey Rd. in front of Livsey School. At the new Smoke Rise Elementary School, we’re completing an entirely new intersection with traffic lights, turn lanes and more to serve the school and other new development there with safety and traffic improvement to be in service for the beginning of the 2021-‘22 school year.

In addition to the new sidewalk on Elmdale, we also added an important sidewalk down Cowan Road, connecting Idlewood with Hugh Howell.

And perhaps the most visible recently completed work is the new sidewalk and streetscape project downtown. This is actually Phase Two of a project that began with community volunteers almost 15 years ago and it includes all the new sidewalks you see along Lynburn, 1st Avenue, and 2nd and 4th Streets. The streetscaping includes the decorative streetlights, benches, trash cans, grassy areas and all the things that will create a downtown that is much bigger than just Main Street. It will catalyze investment in our downtown, and bring the kind of amenities we’ve all been hoping for like retail, restaurants and even residential into the downtown area.

All this work that I’ve mentioned so far, including our three core services and the other activities like road and safety improvements, all lead toward the overarching purpose of a city, which is what we call community and economic development. Economic development is not so much a service in and of itself, but more of the culmination of everything we do. It results in the visible, tangible improvements to the community and our quality of life. It’s new employers, new businesses, new housing of all kinds, and all the things that cause people to want to come and stay in Tucker. It’s what I mean when I talk about being a place where a person can live, work, play and pray for the length and breadth of their lives. It’s the reason we fly the plane.

To see Mayor Auman’s full State of the City speech, log onto youtube.com/CityofTucker.