Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Sandy Springs City Council held a work session on July 21, 2026, at 6:00 PM, presided by Mayor Rusty Paul. The meeting focused on an update of the City's Comprehensive Plan ("The Next Chapter") and the Recreation and Parks Master Plan. Presenters included Michele McIntosh-Ross (Planning & Zoning Manager), Sukirti Ghosh (Principal, RHI), and Carlos Perez (Principal, Perez Planning and Design). The meeting adjourned at 6:26 PM.
Time for convening has arrived, and I would like to call this meeting of the Sandy Springs City Council to order for Tuesday, the 21st of July. The first uh portion of the meeting will be our work session and staff discussion items. Um, and so I would like to uh ask Ms. Michelle Macintosh Ross, the planning zoning manager, to update us on the next chapter. Yes, thank you. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. Um, as you know, we're um working on our city's comprehensive plan, the update as well as the recreation and parks master plan update. And so we wanted to give you an update on our initial stages of public feedback, and we have our consulting team RHI here to run through the presentation. I'll turn it over to security. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Um, I'm Security Ghosh, I'm principal with RHI. Thank you for the opportunity to provide you with an update for the comprehensive plan. It has been a great process so far. So, what we'll do is in the next 10 minutes or so, we'll provide you with that update. Um, we'll go through the project schedule where we are in that schedule. We'll share with you with regards to the community engagement what we have done to date and the kind of feedback, very, very preliminary feedback that we have been hearing from the community. Um, those are the key findings, and then end with the next steps. So, as you have seen previously, it's uh roughly one year long process. We have to submit the completed comprehensive plan by the June of 2027. But the focus for some of these months where we are right now is the community engagement. For the next six months or so, we are focused on heavily on the community engagement. It seems like where it is shown we are here four months into the process, but we are literally one month into the community discussion stage. We had a great public meeting. I'll share some pictures and notes from that last month, uh, around this time, and then we are reporting back to you, and we'll be having our next public meeting next month. So it's a cadence of meeting with the leadership, the public meetings, and then meeting with the leadership again. So that's the kind of cadence every month here on till uh the January of 2027. So engagement to date. We had the public meeting number one, and then it's not only the conventional meeting that we have planned, we have also planned along with uh our team partners CSW and Allison is here if you have any questions regarding the engagement. We had been going out to the community, leveraging existing events and festivals and getting feedback from the community. We are also proactively getting the pop-ups in the different community areas, including the farmers market, the Juneteenth, Sesame Street Live, and you can see the list, the stars and stripes on the right hand side, the concert series, uh, we had uh presence at the World Cup watch parties, and one thing that is coming up for the recreation the parks master plan is Brent and Carlos Perez, who is leading the recreation the parks master plan, who is going to be sharing a brief slide deck about the preliminary feedback that he has been getting. So they are going to be at the Morgan Falls, I mean the Overlook Park at Morgan Falls on July 25th. So there's a lot of pop-ups that are happening, and we'll be planning a lot more in the coming months. We have been meeting with a lot of stakeholders, like the city departments, uh, the council of neighborhoods, our Sandy Springs, Sandy Springs Conservancy. We had a full day of meetings with the community development and the economic development and all of the other departments with the city today. We'll be meeting with the nonprofit groups tomorrow. And we are planning a whole slew of stakeholder meetings uh come August. Of course, we have met with you all, the mayor and the council, City Council, Planning Commission, Board of Appeals, and we had our second advisory committee meeting last night, which was uh which went to really great. These are some pictures from the public meeting number one. Um hopefully some of you were able to attend public meeting number one. We had a variety of activities starting with the presentation and a lot of engagement opportunities. We had pin-up map uh map pinups, we had budget allocation, we had like comments from the public. So we had a lot of diversity of activities as part of the public meeting. Here are some pictures of the pop-ups that we have been attending along with the city staff, the Stars and Stripes, the Farmers Market, Juneteenth. So there is a lot of pop-ups that are happening, and we have been hearing a lot from the community members.