At 81, mayor still works hard for Sandy Springs

For the 81-year-old retired economist, the party is just starting.

Galambos earned a clear mandate in November, capturing an astounding 84 percent of the vote against three challengers.

Her platform — to widen the Roswell Road bridge over I-285; to cut the surcharge residents and businesses pay for water service; and begin redeveloping downtown — is now the agenda for a city closing in on 100,000 residents.

No one doubts that she will get things done.

“Nobody tells Eva no,” said Rusty Paul, who is stepping down from the City Council later this month after working with Galambos on the cityhood issue since the early 1990s.

Galambos never took no for an answer. Armed with a master’s degree in labor and industrial relations, she entered the work force in 1948, when many working women were leaving their jobs to make room for returning World War II soldiers.

The work was often gender-specific. To earn her master’s degree, she had to work on a production line. She spent three months at the Lovable Brassiere factory for that.

One of her first jobs was at the Georgia Merit System, where she designed the state’s first civil-service test for secretaries.

But the work helped put her husband, John, through medical school. The pair met as undergraduates at the University of Georgia. She was an Athens native. He was a Hungarian survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

“He went on to become the head of gastroenterology at Emory and I was at home with our three children,” Galambos said.

Home, since 1960, has been Sandy Springs. They were drawn to the area dominated by single-family homes and other young families.

Home life kept Galambos busy until their children were all in school. With time on her hands, she initially thought she would go to law school.

But since she knew business best, she began pursuing her doctorate in economics. By 1969, she became the second doctor in her home.

Working as an economist and consultant, and for her family, would have been enough. It was the apartments that created Eva the Activist.

Fulton County had begun approving apartments along then-residential Roswell Road. It didn’t take long for small strip malls to follow.

Complaints from residents didn’t sway county officials, but a movement was being born. In 1975, Galambos became a founding member of the Committee for Sandy Springs. The group’s stated goal was cityhood.

“I just figured we’d never get anywhere until we had our own local government and control,” Galambos said. “I think at first people thought it seemed a very strange concept, but it finally happened.”

Galambos shepherded the movement first with an educational push to residents and businesses. Few people knew, it seemed, just what a city could or couldn’t do if it was created.

For 30 years, battles continued between the community and Fulton County. Over zoning. Over roads. Over taxes.

Along the way, the local committee made a promise: A city could deliver better results without raising taxes.

When the Republicans took over the state Legislature in 2004, promoters of the proposed city got their wish: a referendum on whether to incorporate.

A landslide 94 percent said yes in 2005, making Sandy Springs one of Georgia’s largest cities.

“We have had a guiding hand through a lot of the turmoil over the last 35 years,” said Wendell Willard, a state representative who serves as Sandy Springs’ city attorney. “We’ve done it because she has been here on a day-to-day basis, making sure it was all done for the citizens.”

Galambos, who first retired in 1986, kept the promises for better services at the same price in her first term.

But Paul, a former head of the state Republican Party, said that was the easy part. With the bar set so low, he reasoned, residents would be pleased just to see improvement.

The challenges that lie ahead are more mundane: getting residents to support the day-to-day grind of government as it examines zoning issues, use permits and other unglamorous but key issues.

There has been resident pushback, especially on zoning issues. The Sandy Springs Council of Neighborhoods — the city’s largest homeowners association and one Galambos once led — released a report earlier this year that dinged officials for not voting enough to protect neighborhoods from development.

Galambos, who votes only to break a tie, was rated as never casting a vote that was “favorable” to neighborhoods. As a group, the mayor and council cast “favorable” votes just 44 percent of the time, the report concluded.

“Now that the city’s operations are successful, I think the individual neighborhoods would like more one-on-one contact with Eva,” said Trisha Thompson, who heads the Council of Neighborhoods’ zoning committee.

For instance, the city has yet to hold a meeting with the Glenridge-Hammond Homeowners Association despite a looming project to widen Hammond Drive.

“There seem to be a lot of issues that could be resolved through personal contact,” Thompson said.

Galambos — who swims 25 laps every other day in a wave pool in her home — may add such meetings to her plate.

But first, she wants to focus on the campaign pledges.

The city is in talks with the state about widening the Roswell Road bridge. Galambos wants the state to pay for it, too.

And Sandy Springs is in the early stages of a lawsuit with Atlanta, in a bid to cut the 21 percent water surcharge that officials estimate costs users $6 million to $7 million a year.

As for revitalizing the downtown area north of the Perimeter, Galambos wants to get property owners in the area on board before any plans, and payment ideas, are hatched.

The revitalization effort alone could take all four years of this term, which officially begins Jan. 1.

“All in all, I pace myself,” Galambos said. “I think the number of services we’ve added and expanded is astounding. Now we have to steadily improve even more.”