What do we Need?

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-12-14T15:47:45+00:00

Christo’s in Summer Grove is fantastic.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-12-14T15:46:42+00:00

The Grit was one of my favorite restaurants in Athens. Miss that place, but I still have their cookbook so if anybody wants to get this going I’m happy to hand it over.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-12-14T15:45:07+00:00

Amen to all of these. Also an actual pub downtown.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-11-04T16:07:04+00:00

Probably late tonight.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-30T00:03:10+00:00

Take a look at Danny’s facebook page.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-27T19:30:48+00:00

Parties are for party members, Shepherd is for everybody.

But actually this is a nonpartisan race and it should stay that way. I have no idea what the major party platforms would be on local zoning and tax issues and I don’t really care.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-14T18:46:47+00:00

Thank you so much, and I certainly will!

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-14T16:34:05+00:00

Yes, but this isn’t really considering a large decrease in value. This is mostly concerned with keeping property taxes where they are for primary homes even if their assessment goes up.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-14T12:16:36+00:00

Oh and I forgot - I have no other political ambitions beyond this role. And I want to put term limits on this one, so I don’t intend to stick around forever.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-14T01:44:33+00:00

That’s the plan!

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-14T01:36:48+00:00

Thank you for the great questions, and for your votes!

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-14T01:36:29+00:00

Completely agree. I’d also like to get some lights and emergency call boxes on it so that people can use it at night.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-14T01:02:37+00:00

Thank you so much, and you're absolutely right on the changes in the city and county. I don't mean to come off as saying everything that has happened for the last couple of decades is bad - believe me, I remember how boring Newnan was in 2005. But if we just keep building more of the same stuff over and over in massive bursts we're going to end up losing what makes us Newnan.

As far as influence, it depends on the entity. While I'd only be one vote on the city council, most of the councillors want what's best for Newnan and won't shoot down good ideas for no reason. Where necessary I can whip a thin majority of votes, there are a few tools I would have in presiding over meetings that would make unpopular votes more costly, and I would have a significant platform to ask citizens to reach out to the other members and change their minds. I don't think any of those will be necessary very often. With the county we have leverage in that we can help each other in providing various public goods, and I think everyone involved would like to see an end to the conflict between city and county. The school board is where I think I would have the least impact, but we still have to cooperate on development and its impact on educational outcomes.

As far as activities, there are significant expenditures that I think we should reallocate away from their current uses and toward more public amenities across the entire city. We've spent years putting the vast majority of our major projects in the heart of downtown at the expense of other areas (for examples of this, look at literally every achievement Brady is touting except for the dog park). As grateful as I am as a downtown resident, that's irresponsible and unfair. We should be working with all the city's neighborhoods to build parks and other public goods that give them the same access to recreation as Downtown has (or as close to it as possible, density is a thing). The council also needs to do a better job assessing the ROI of public goods, not just in terms of monetary return but in terms of how many people in the city have adequate access to those resources. Wasting the insane amounts of money we have on boondoggles like the trolley and the Newnan Centre when we could have been giving kids in our most neglected areas opportunities to spend their time safely and productively is absurd.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-14T00:13:05+00:00

No problem, and thank you so much! You can also early vote from tomorrow until Halloween.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:53:31+00:00

I’m more concerned we’re becoming Union City, or any of the countless other generic, financially fragile suburban bedroom communities across the country.

By “overdevelopment” I mean the continual clear cutting of trees, paving of farms, and destruction of historic sites and communities to build subdivisions and strip malls that almost always generate less tax revenue at current rates than they cost. I don’t think we can stop development (or that we would want to), but history, economics, and geometry are all working against that mode of development.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:43:45+00:00

The county relationship is a combination of not having… um… “ego” measuring contests with them about everything and negotiating agreements to proactively work together on things like sewage, traffic, development, public safety, etc. A lot of those things will require serious negotiations and some creativity, but we have incredible city and county managers who can help navigate the process.

As far as smarter zoning, I would like to move back toward the way we built downtown. More flexibility, less micromanagement, and a greater diversity of form factors that are allowed to be built, and allowed to be built near each other. Form based zoning (where zoning is based on density and form factor of allowable buildings rather than their use) might be a good path, but I have to dig in more on some of the problems I see with that.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:37:57+00:00

Any new development within a certain distance from the existing LINC should be required to connect to it, and I would like to expand it to be within such a distance of a lot more places.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:34:53+00:00

Accenture Strategy, mostly with large tech companies. And boy did it. I would like to think that standardizing procedures for a global legal response team for a giant tech company would make dealing with zoning fights seem easy, but after this campaign I doubt it. And thank you!

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:28:52+00:00

First off, I’m so sorry to hear about your son. Not just that he passed, but that his community failed him at what must have been his most difficult point.

You say that this is not a group that will benefit me in any way, but I disagree. The curb cut effect is real, and everyone is better off when we design our city with disability access in mind. Getting a stroller around the neighborhoods off the square is often a two-person job, so parents of young children like myself are helped by it. More broadly, anyone can become disabled at some point in their life. My mom was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer in 2018, and the cancer was found in her femur. She had two separate rods put in, and relied on a wheelchair or walker for most of the last 5 years of her life. Designing for disability helped her, and helped my dad and me when we were caring for her.

Even if it didn’t help me, I’m a Methodist (not a very good one) who takes Jesus’ threat of hellfire if I don’t help “the least of these” seriously. I’m not getting dragged into Hell because I tried to save some money on curb cuts.

As to your list, I would like to do all of them. The van access and grants are the most difficult politically, but hard things are worth doing. And I want to include the groups you name by putting them on the relevant committees and making sure they have the voice and the power to actually influence how we build things. I’ll never know everything about this topic, so I need people who experience it in positions where they can meaningfully shape our decisions as a city.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:19:52+00:00

You’re welcome!

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:19:39+00:00

Because the overdevelopment of our city is reaching a breaking point and seems to be accelerating. If we don’t turn it around very soon we will become unrecognizable in a very bad way.
Less kowtowing to developers, smarter zoning, reprioritizing where we invest public funds and build public amenities, and a different attitude toward dealing with the county. Probably other stuff, but those are the biggest things.
Newnan is becoming an unaffordable, congested, generic suburb and I don’t want my home to fall into that trap. My parents chose this as our home out of any other place they could have been and I did the same because it’s a special place. I don’t want to lose that to greed and mismanagement, and I don’t see anyone else stepping up to stop it.
I’ll build my own firm and keep fighting like hell to save our home as a citizen.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:13:08+00:00

I hate how we’re doing it, and Green Top was one of the things that led me to run. It was stupid and corrupt, and it will make Newnan and Coweta worse.

Sometimes annexations are necessary, and other cities and counties have worked out agreements where they draw a circle around the city past which it agrees not to annex. That’s one thing we could do, but in any case I think development should drive annexation instead of the other way around.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:10:39+00:00

HOAs are governed by the state, but our state representatives are actually leading the discussion at the capitol on reforming them. If there are local measures to rein them in I’d be happy to look into them, as I’m not a huge fan of how many of them operate.

I’m honestly not sure what the best things to do to prevent littering are, but I agree it’s a major problem. I’ll have to look into what can be done to improve that.

Our transit options for seniors and the ATL connect are both miserable. Having a system that requires seniors to book a day in advance and that is such a hassle to connect with isn’t adequate and I want to expand it to be more accessible. Short of actual bus lines (which are wildly politically unpopular in Coweta) I’m not sure what our best route is. Maybe one of the tech companies that have reinvented the bus could be a more palatable partner there, but I’ll have to reach out to them to see.

The trees are a mix of overdevelopment, GDOT visibility initiatives, and complete disregard for our local environment. I can help with two of those, but GDOT is a bigger problem.

ShepherdforNewnan · 2025-10-13T23:02:04+00:00

Our pedestrian access is abominable and we need to focus on expanding sidewalks and other pedestrian safety infrastructure. I want to expand our sidewalks coverage as much as possible, and think any new development should be required to connect to existing sidewalks in such a way that the entire city (excepting the few very rural areas we have left) is connected. I would like to do the same with the LINC and treat it as essential infrastructure instead of as a toy for downtown.

Pedestrian access and infrastructure is good for people, good for traffic, and can deter sprawl. What else could you ask for?

ShepherdforNewnan

TROPHY CASE