Gainesville, Georgia

GA INESV I LLE , GEORGI A and is reputed to be the fastest-growing city in Georgia. “We had a 20 percent population growth over the last eight years, so we are a growing place,” says City Manager, Bryan Lackey. “It’s partly because of our geography. We are the closest, separate MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) to the Atlanta area MSA. The spillover of growth from Atlanta is now starting to hit Gainesville. People who are a little tired of living ITP, which is Inside The Perimeter, are now starting to look at this place towards the mountains that maybe isn’t such a bad place to live.” Lackey adds that the city is also a pretty good place to visit. “We’re in between I-85 that runs to South Carolina, and I-985 that runs into the North Carolina mountains, so we’re quite a hub,” he notes. “While we have 44,000 people in our town, we swell to well over 150,000 during the day, because we are the job hub for this area.” The city is also a medical hub; its largest employer, the Northeast Georgia Medical Center, has over 8,300 employees, and that number increases to about 15,000, when you add all the associated medical offices that surround the hospital. “So people come into Gainesville during the day for their medical needs, and they come here for shopping and entertainment. Gainesville is where you come to go to all the big department stores. During the weekends, we see a lot of people coming into our town.” Adjusting to rapid growth has spurred the city’s economic expansion. “Development and redevelopment has been a focus here in Gainesville for the past four or five years,” Lackey reports. “So we’re quite busy. The city council, and previous city councils, have made some strategic investments in certain properties in and around our downtown area; one of them being a former county jail. When the county was looking to change that arrangement, the city made a pretty big investment to purchase it and we’ve been sitting on that for awhile. A year ago, we were able to make another strategic purchase of a six-acre lot to go along with that four-acre jail pictured left to right : City Manager, Bryan Lackey; Assistant City Manager, Angela Sheppard; Community and Economic Development Director, Rusty Ligon