Schools, housing and the “missing middle” are foremost topics in the race for the Sandy Springs City Council District 2 seat.
Dr. Melody Kelley and Linda Trickey are competing for the seat being vacated by incumbent Steve Soteres. Development has become a major issue in the district over the past four years. During that time, the city has formed committees, ordered a housing study and talked to residents about the best approach to build more commercial development and affordable residential housing, but there’s been little movement in construction.
Kelley and Trickey are of different backgrounds and each has a cause that they say motivates them to run.
Trickey is an attorney with Cox Communications. Cox Communications is a division of Cox Enterprises, which also owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Trickey and her husband moved from California to District 2 of Sandy Springs in 1995. Her husband, Allen Johnson, is program manager for the city’s Transportation Special Local Option Sales Tax funds.
Trickey said she is running with plans to forge a closer relationship between the City Council and Fulton County’s schools. She was part of a small group of mothers who pushed Fulton County Schools in 2018 to approve the rebuilding of North Springs High School, where her daughter is currently a freshman. The school board initially had plans to only renovate North Springs, which was built in 1963.
“We’re all passionate about public education,” Trickey said, adding that North Springs students visit other schools for events and see modern campuses and classrooms.
“We want parity (with other schools) for our kids,” Trickey said. “I want to foster closer relationships between Fulton County Schools and City Council.”
Kelley is a professor of chemistry at Georgia State University. She and her now 15-year-old daughter moved to the District 2 area of Sandy Springs in 2016 after Kelley completed graduate school at the University of Alabama.
Kelley, the daughter of a former police chief in northern Louisiana, is an advocate for affordable workforce housing. She’s on the leadership council of Sandy Springs Together, a nonprofit that supports affordable workforce housing. Kelley said she wants to speak for residents who believe they’re not championed in city government. The candidate said she rents an apartment in Sandy Springs and wants prices to remain affordable so she can save money to buy a home there.
“The people missing from the conversation in the city are the same people not represented by our housing stock,” she said. “They are not at the table where decisions are made, which means they will eventually end up on the menu. I am someone who can speak specifically to our housing needs because they are my needs.”
Last week, Trickey and Kelley took part in four nights of private Q&A sessions with residents in the affluent Huntcliff neighborhood.
District 2 is a blend of homes priced over $1 million as well as older apartment complexes and townhomes that run through the north end of Sandy Springs. The district starts at Roswell and Dalrymple Roads and runs along Roswell Road to the Chattahoochee River Bridge on the west side of the road. On the east side of the street the boundary ends at about North River Parkway.
Residents include high-income empty nesters, households earning less than the city’s median income of nearly $80,000 per year, and senior citizens and families that have turned to the Community Assistance Center for food and financial help.
The candidates are in agreement with a housing study produced by HR&A Advisors for the city in 2020 that showed a gap in housing affordability for residents at different income levels.
“One of the big challenges I see is the population is aging and even though we have a fair number of families moving in, we do not have the missing middle (income) housing,” Trickey said. “I would like to get more people into modest homes and start to build equity.”
Kelley said she believes most residents would welcome a range of housing affordable for a variety of workers as well as other development in District 2.
“We are doing a little bit of development, it’s just not smart or driven by our values,” Kelley said. “The housing is not mixed use, there’s not much greenspace or retail. These are things the community said they wanted (during a city forum) in 2018. It doesn’t accommodate that missing middle gap.”
In Sandy Springs, Mayor Rusty Paul and the six City Council seats are up for election.
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