South Fulton City Council Work Session – July 28, 2026

Mayor Carmalitha Gumbs called the City Council work session to order at 4:00 PM (the transcript says 4:01 PM) on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, at South Fulton City Hall. Roll call established a quorum with the Mayor and all seven councilmembers present. The session included a city manager report, two presentations, and no executive session; it adjourned at 6:25 PM by unanimous consent.

City Manager Items

• City Manager Sharon D. Subadan introduced Jill Strickland as interim Public Affairs Director, Bailey Boyd as the newest constituent service representative for District 3, and members of the inaugural intern class.

Community Development and Regulatory Affairs Process Improvement

• Reginald McClendon, Managing Director of CDRA, and Byron Marshall of NFBPA presented an operational assessment of the Community Development and Regulatory Affairs (CDRA) department.
• Marshall reported the assessment included interviews with councilmembers, the mayor, city staff, and developers; a four-day staff workshop; and benchmarking against other jurisdictions.
• Key findings: inconsistent staff communication; no published performance metrics or service-level agreements; insufficient staff capacity and morale concerns; a cumbersome permitting process that can take up to eight months; misalignment between governance and politics; and economic-development equity concerns.
• Marshall noted about 75% of permits in the area go to jurisdictions north of South Fulton; about 50% of CDRA applications come from homeowners and small businesses; and only 11% of developers responded to 250 surveys sent.
• Senate Bill 447 was highlighted as requiring planning departments to act on complete applications within 45 days and on resubmissions within 14 days, with non-response treated as approval. A public-facing permitting dashboard is required by January 1, 2028, and the city is working toward Tyler ERP implementation.
• Recommendations included standardized response protocols, a centralized knowledge base, published performance metrics, concurrent departmental reviews, an express permit desk and permit concierge, a public-facing GIS dashboard, post-permit surveys, and regular development forums.
• Councilmember Pritchett said she did not recall being interviewed and questioned the move away from SAGES; McClendon said the consultant would confirm the interview, and City Manager Subadan said the city had purchased Tyler before her tenure and was working with Johns Creek, Roswell, and Clayton County on lessons learned.
• City Manager Subadan said she still supports the consolidated CDRA model because separated business licensing had led to improperly issued licenses. She also described upcoming business-license compliance sweeps and said short-term rental enforcement would ramp up in stages beginning in the fourth calendar quarter of 2026.
• Councilmember Johnson asked whether an income-gap figure (stated in the transcript as $45,000/$44,000) referred to the city or the region; the presenter said he would confirm the figure.
• Councilmember Sebastian asked about using AI to streamline routine permitting; McClendon said AI is being studied but may need to wait until Tyler is online. Sebastian also suggested that projects changed drastically after staff review should be sent back through the public process.
• Councilmember Williams-Brown asked about low internal trust and when the council would receive the findings; Marshall said the full findings and recommendations report could be available the following Monday, while the implementation plan may take about another 30 days.

Data Center Regulation Discussion

• Interim City Attorney Sara Kelly introduced the discussion as a precursor to the first read of the city’s proposed data center ordinance. Celine Benoit, Principal Planner for Water Efficiency at the Atlanta Regional Commission, presented on data center trends and impacts, and Attorney Brandon L. Bowen of Jenkins, Bowen & Walker, PC, presented legal and siting considerations.
• Benoit reported that Metro Atlanta is second only to Northern Virginia in data center construction capacity; a 50-megawatt data center could serve roughly 32,000 homes; and Georgia Power’s forecasted peak demand increased by nearly 10 gigawatts across 2022, 2023, and 2025 updates, with about 80% of that growth driven by data center proposals.
• She explained that about 30% of data center power use goes to cooling; evaporative cooling can lose up to 80% of water to the atmosphere, while closed-loop or non-evaporative systems use far less. Examples included one proposed site requesting 9 million gallons per day versus another requesting 5,000 to 50,000 gallons per day. She noted Metro Atlanta is about 99% dependent on surface water and is currently in a Level 1 drought.
• Benoit outlined local considerations including tax revenue, limited long-term employment, community benefit agreements, land use and zoning, noise, air quality, wastewater, stranded-asset risk, and heat-island effects. Councilmembers asked about air quality, noise, wastewater/reuse water, parking requirements, water supply, why Metro Atlanta is attractive to data centers, facility lifespan, and whether developers are moving to rural communities.
• Bowen described data centers as warehouses containing servers that require power, fiber, water, and sewer. He said Georgia’s regulated power system, existing fiber routes, and available land make it an attractive location, and that modern data center operators can engineer facilities to meet noise performance standards at the property line.
• Bowen cited potential revenue benefits, including property taxes, personal-property taxes on equipment, and municipal franchise fees, and said Loudoun County, Virginia, receives well over $1 billion a year in data center tax receipts. He noted data center jobs are limited but well paid, with average pay around $118,000. He also noted data centers over 500,000 square feet are developments of regional impact requiring ARC review.
• He said the proposed special use permit approach is an effective way to review data centers case by case. Interim City Attorney Kelly confirmed that the subject-matter experts reviewed the draft ordinance, which includes closed-loop cooling, buffers, landscape performance metrics, and special use permits, and that data centers would not be exempt from impact fees.
• Councilmember Johnson asked whether residents bear power or infrastructure costs; Bowen said the data center projects he has worked on pay their costs, and Georgia Power/PSC arrangements are designed to avoid shifting those costs to ratepayers. Councilmember Johnson also recounted a neighborhood GroupMe complaint attributing spotty cell phone service to a data center under construction, but did not treat it as confirmed.

Key Outcomes

• No formal votes or binding decisions were made during the work session.
• CDRA findings and recommendations were expected to be provided to the City Manager the following Monday, with an implementation plan to follow in about 30 days.
• The proposed data center ordinance was expected to have its first read later in the July 28, 2026 City Council meeting; the work session was held to inform that discussion.
• The work session ended without an executive session and was adjourned at 6:25 PM by unanimous consent.