Following part one of AccessWDUN's series of stories on the City of Gainesville's 2021 mayoral race, candidates Sam Couvillon and Devin Pandy were asked to voice their thoughts on growth in the city in part two.
Pandy said in his eyes, the growth of Gainesville is inevitable, and the city's focus should be on preparing for that growth.
"Let's ensure that the housing developments going up are quality and affordable," Pandy said. "Let's ensure that we are looking at a 20 or 30-year progressive plan for our transportation ... let's look at bold things like maybe putting in a park and ride area so that folks coming in from Forsyth and Gwinnett, or coming down from Lumpkin can park somewhere and either rideshare, catch a bus, catch a taxi or carpool."
Pandy said one "bold idea," is to pursue conversations with MARTA about running an elevated rail line through the city to alleviate traffic issues caused by city growth.
While Pandy knows that some of these ideas would take years of planning and development, he believes it's important to look into the future to plan for future residents.
Pandy said the growth of Gainesville's businesses and workforce would also be a focus for him if elected as mayor, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Our local businesses are part of the lifeblood of the city," Pandy said. "There's this cycle ... where you have businesses who need employees, you have employees who need jobs, but then you have employees who don't have transportation to make it to that job, or they don't have the prerequisite skills to fill that job."
Pandy said he believes housing affordability is also an issue in this cycle he described. While he does not believe there is a single solution to fix this cycle, he said the city can look at a series of related solutions.
"Let's come up with a plan and work together to ensure that not only are our children taken care of in the future but that they do better than we do," Pandy said. "So if we see that our roads right now are suffering, let's do something about it. If we see that people are being priced out of the city ... let's do something about it."
Like Pandy, mayoral candidate Sam Couvillon said he believes it is not possible to slow down growth in the City of Gainesville.
"The metro area has kind of maxed out, the Gwinnetts, the Cobbs, DeKalbs, Fulton County, even Forsyth County, they've kind of bubbled out and have grown as much as they can," Couvillon said. "I don't think it's something where we can just tell people not to come. I mean, people are going to come to Gainesville."
Couvillon said that while he is glad that Gainesville has a variety of amenities such as the growing downtown district, the city must keep up with traffic needs in the wake of this growth.
"It's not something that you can just do, you know, wake up one morning and say, 'Hey, we're going to add lanes to Dawsonville Highway,'" Couvillon said. "We have to work with the state Department of Transportation."
Moving forward, Couvillon said he would like to maintain a good relationship with GDOT, referencing current mayor Danny Dunagan's relationship with the department. He said one recent example was when Dunagan and the city collaborated with GDOT to move up a timeline to widen Green Street by several years.
As far as job growth in the city goes, Couvillon said they have several key partners who will likely continue to grow and attract new businesses to the region.
“We have a very good local partner in Kubota that is still growing … we have Fox Factory which has come to town and it’s still growing,” Couvillon said. “We have an industrial park that the city is in the burgeoning state of developing, and that will bring more business to Gainesville and more jobs to Gainesville.”
Couvillon said he knows that some citizens are concerned about growth, and he does understand that concern. However, he said that growth can actually have some positive impacts on longtime residents, especially those who are property owners.
“It allows us to put less pressure on property taxes, which should help the local property owners because we’re not having to raise the millage rate,” Couvillon said. “When you have those commercial tax dollars that come in, it helps mitigate any tax increases elsewhere.”
