New Kent Capital

04/11/2022

Congrats to our friends at Carpe Data. It’s a pleasure working with you folks.

09/23/2021

Congrats to The team at for snagging a spot on this list. Some pretty strong names here.

It's a great time to love beer.

07/02/2021

Per today's BLS Employment Report the average hourly wage for a non-supervisory or production worker in the US was $25.68/hour - $30.40/hour including supervisors. The lowest paying verticals were Hospitality/Entertainment ($18.23), Retail ($21.92) then it jumps to ($26.75/hour) for warehousing and transportation.

Everybody below the mean wants more $/hour.

04/02/2021

Honoring the opening of the 2021 MLB season, The Athletic published a list of the best new local brews in every MLB city. Congrats to for taking the “win”

03/17/2021

- as the City sees new proposals for two large Historic District redevelopment sites (Skillet and old Wells Fargo) don’t lose sight of our desperate need for free downtown public parking - a shortage the merchants have been complaining about for nearly a decade only to see more of it disappear every year.

Paid parking is NOT equal to free parking consumer preference wise and we seemingly roll over and look the other way when folks pretend it is. It’s not.

Free public parking is THE City service businesses need most and use most. Businesses pay more taxes and licensing fees per location than residents and use less City services. Free public parking is their oxygen and we keep starving them off. We’re the only local City that pretends not to understand that.

02/27/2021

Hello Roswell. Remember a couple of months ago when Councilman Palermo was yapping (using decade old IRS data) about how profitable Commercial Real Estate was and how the City should raise license fees & taxes on them? At the time I (and a couple of better informed Councilmembers) were quick to point out how - once again - he was spinning nonsense.

Note “Real Estate” as in commercial Real Estate was THE hardest hit industry. Which makes sense as all tenant financial struggles rollup to their landlords. Data not dummies.

Experts warn that because bankruptcies lag other signals of economic distress, a mountain of filings may be to come. New data show what industries might be most at risk.

02/24/2021

People before Pavement.

Thanks to Mayor Henry and Councilmembers Marie Freeman Willsey, Matt Judy and Matt Tyser.

Maybe we need more Councilmembers with actual experience “making payroll” to avoid embarrassing votes like this.

Service to the City
A Fair Wage for our Employees

On Monday night we accepted a sobering compensation study conducted by a professional firm. It indicated that the city was on average 9.2% below our peer cities in fair compensation to Roswell’s more than 600 employees.

By a 4-3 vote we set on a path to fix the compensation gap over a two-year timeframe. Hard working, hourly employees makeup 70% of our workforce.

These are the people who pick up your trash, maintain your streets, staff our parks and respond to emergencies. It is extremely important that we do not lose our employees to neighboring cities. If an employee could make more money doing the same job with another local government, I couldn’t blame them for taking it. We have lost good employees to other cities because of our pay scale. That is a fact. I want to stop it from happening in the future. The cost of employee turnover in any organization is high. I want to avoid that expense.

During the discussion one of my fellow Councilmembers suggested that a new turn lane was more important than a fair wage for our hardest working employees. He suggested that a sidewalk or a light pole was more important too. While these are capital projects that will eventually go forward, it is more important at this time to pay our employees in line with our neighboring cities, so they don’t leave and so that we can attract top talent to Roswell. Without great employees, our services to you will suffer, and I am doing everything I can to make sure that does not happen.

Our hardest working employees are the heartbeat of our city. They are our greatest asset because they are the people who deliver the services directly to you. We really should not compare them to asphalt, cement or other building products. They deserve our respect and gratitude. They deserve a fair wage. A fair wage or a light pole?

01/29/2021

Business Travel and Officing comments from a FICO NYSE quarterly earnings call yesterday:

“Some travel reduction expenses that are COVID related are going to persist. Obviously some travel will resume but I think we all have learned how to do business with less travel than we had before. I’m sure some of our experience is not unique”.

“I’ll add to that, when everything comes back, we won’t see our real estate facilities expense go back to the same model. Those restructuring actions and footprint reductions - we consider those to be permanent”.

Will Lansing (CEO and Mike McLaughlin (CFO)

01/18/2021

Hello Roswell - Commercial Real Estate outlook 2021-2025

Sat in on a presentation yesterday from a large consulting firm hired to do an assessment of the Commercial Real Estate (CRE) market for a NYSE client. 180 pages. Several hours.

Here’s three takeaways for Roswell:

1). All 5 segments of CRE market will be materially down from 2019 levels in 2021.

Two segments - Multi-Family and Industrial are expected to return to 2019 levels by 2022. Retail not until 2025 and Office and Hotel not until 2026 or later. Want redevelopment? It’s going to be in these two areas (Multi-Family or Industrial) for at least the next several years - or not at all.

2) Investment dollars are shifting rapidly with funding for Office and Hotels dropping the most. Increases in investments in Multi Family and Industrial (particularly warehouses) is taking the funding. Hotel funding has all but dried up (2% of investments now vs 6% in 2019).

3). Roswell has had some recent success with industrial (old Whole Foods now Amazon warehouse) but the NIMBY’s led by CRDR and Palermo torture and kill off Multi-Family (eg, two recent “ideas” were requiring new mixed use projects to be 75% retail/office vs 25% multi family (no examples available) and requiring mixed use developers to get 100% of the Commercial CO’s before granting residential CO’s (no examples anywhere in the US could be found by City staff).

——————

Our plethora of old abandoned retail isn’t going to magically turn into stuff the markets don’t want so our redevelopment prospects are not good. This will have budget implications on Roswell as neighboring cities continue to attract hundreds of millions of dollars of investments while we allow the howling at the moon to steer investors away from Roswell (have you checked out downtown Crabapple, Duluth and Alpharetta?)

As we watch our split Council relentlessly rewrite zoning codes - and di**le with every project and every developer that comes forward - we’re officially the City investors left behind. And we deserve it. And the next few years don’t favor the twisted dreamlike priorities the NIMBY’s want but the investors don’t.

Guess what this all means to your property taxes and the vibrancy of our community. It’s not a win.

You can’t fight the markets - they just take their investment $$ elsewhere.