With NCR, Gwinnett scores again in quiet rivalry with neighbors

The boom of metropolitan Atlanta has always been visible in the tall spires of office complexes sprouting along the city’s traffic-jammed expressways — except in Gwinnett County.

There was a there there in the city’s northeast suburb: sizzling business and residential growth. But also, unlike Cobb and Fulton counties, there was a kind of stealth.

Gwinnett, a county of almost 800,000, the second most populous in the state after Fulton, always seemed to sneak up on people.

It did it again this week when NCR announced it is moving its headquarters to Gwinnett from Ohio, in the process bringing 1,250 jobs on top of the 300 it already has at a facility in Duluth.

“It may sound small, but this is big, this is really big,” said Shirley Lasseter, the former mayor of Duluth and a first term member of the Gwinnett County Commission.

“It’s the extra burst we need to raise our visibility and help us through this recession.”

Another 870 jobs will be created by a new NCR manufacturing plant in Columbus. But Gwinnett boosters said Wednesday snaring NCR’s headquarters gives the county something else to boast about at a time when the downturn in the housing market has slowed a four-decade-long population and development boom.

And it continues Gwinnett’s effort to distinguish itself as more than a mere suburb of Atlanta.

This year the county fielded its own Braves baseball team, the minor league franchise of Atlanta’s major league Braves. And the Gwinnett Arena regularly lures acts — such as rocker Bruce Springsteen — who years earlier might have played downtown in the Georgia Dome or Philips Arena.

“I guess I’d say we have a friendly rivalry with other counties,” said Gwinnett County Commissioner Bert Nasuti, who, as a member of the Gwinnett County Recreation Authority, was the point man in luring the Richmond Braves to Gwinnett.

“But we really shouldn’t be compared because we have our own identity,” said Nasuti. “I think of our relationship to Atlanta as more like Baltimore’s relationship to Washington. You have to remember that half the people who live in Gwinnett also work in Gwinnett.”

Still, as a business rival to The ATL, Gwinnett has a ways to go.

The arrival of NCR, which plans to put the headquarters at the same Satellite Boulevard site as its existing Duluth operation, will make the county home to headquarters of three Fortune 500 Companies. Asbury Automotive Group moved to Gwinnett last year; agricultural equipment company AGCO Corporation is also headquartered in Duluth. But Atlanta is the address of 9 Fortune 500 companies.

Doesn’t matter, said Wayne Hill, the county’s former commission chairman and a man so boosterish he was nicknamed the “Sultan of Sprawl.” In the mind of Hill, now a consultant, Gwinnett has another 30 percent growth to go.

“We haven’t filled out yet,” he said. “If our density was the same as DeKalb County we’d have more than 1 million in population. I foresee us as the premier county in the state.”

Others would like to see the growth tempered just a bit.

“The recession sort of brought the building and the sprawl to a screeching halt,” said Joan Miller, co-president of the Snellville Commerce Club. “I like going back to growth, but I don’t want to go back to sprawl.”