The Roundabout — Milton, GA

TUESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2026 · Issue No. 49 · 8 min read

Milton settles the Chang case, unanimously

Plus: a council member floats naming something after Joshua Chang, and Milton hosts Cambridge tonight.

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Top of Mind

The Chang case is over, and the last thing said about it was not about money. Milton's City Council voted unanimously Monday night to approve the $10 million settlement, agenda item 26-247, in a special called meeting at City Hall. Nine years and nine months after Joshua Chang died on Batesville Road, the largest legal threat in the city's history ends by consent rather than by verdict.

The terms are the ones we reported Friday. Milton pays $3,333,333.33 out of fund balance. GIRMA, the insurance pool that covers the city, pays $6,666,666.67. There is no admission of wrongdoing by anyone. Against that, the city had put its potential exposure at about $44.09 million, the $32.55 million judgment plus roughly $11.54 million in interest accruing since 2023. One resident spoke during the public comment period. The vote that followed was unanimous.

Then, during council discussion, Councilmember Carol Cookerly raised something the settlement documents do not mention: naming something in Milton after Joshua Chang. A bridge, or a right of way. No location was named and the idea is early. It is not a condition of the agreement and it holds nothing up.

Which is what makes it worth reporting. The vote was the expected end of a legal process. The naming is a council member saying out loud, in open session, that closing the financial file is not the same as closing the human one.

Joshua Chang would be 31 this year. He was a Yale senior on full scholarship, a Woodstock High salutatorian, an engineer who once built a bicycle out of bamboo, driving home to Canton for Thanksgiving. For nine years his name has appeared in this city's business almost entirely inside a case caption. A road sign would be a different kind of appearance. We will follow where it goes.

The agreement takes effect once every party signs, after which the parties jointly ask the Court of Appeals to take no further action. You can watch the full meeting on the city's YouTube channel, and our complete account of the case is here.

Letter from the Publisher

 

Thursday’s issue is number fifty.

We sent the first one back in May. Since then this has turned into something I did not entirely expect: a real paper for one small city, three mornings a week. Hard news. Fun news. Everything in between. Free.

The result I am happiest about is also the least glamorous one. City hall produces a mountain of dense material, and almost nobody has a spare Monday night to sit in council chambers working out what any of it means for their street, their taxes, or their kid’s school. So we go. We read the packets, we ask the follow up questions, and we hand you the part that matters in a few minutes, with the source linked and a correction printed whenever we get something wrong. Wonky civic news, made short and made trustworthy. That was the idea, and it is working.

Thank you to the readers who open it, forward it, and write back when something is off. To the businesses that sponsor it, which is the entire reason it costs you nothing. To the city staff who pick up the phone. And to the neighbors who send tips at odd hours because they saw something and figured somebody ought to write it down.

One word on the free part, because free is not the same as costless. We are a small operation. Open records fees, the technology that puts this in your inbox at seven in the morning, the tools behind the directories: all of it costs real money. Sponsors carry that today, and we are still figuring out the business of it as we go.

Fifty issues in, we are still the only roundabout in Milton nobody has complained about. Give it time.

Ryan Hall
Publisher, The Roundabout

Just Outside Milton

Alpharetta is going to tear down North Point Mall. The City Council voted 4-3 Monday night to rezone the 99-acre site for an arena and entertainment district, clearing the hurdle that had been standing between the plan and a shovel. Supporters packed City Hall, where a display of foam hockey sticks and pucks stamped “North Point” was waiting for them.

The developer is Jamestown, the firm behind Ponce City Market. Most of the mall comes down. What replaces it is closer to The Battery at Truist Park than to anything with a food court: a roughly 20,000-seat arena, an entertainment district around it, and nearly 1,400 apartments.

All of it hinges on hockey. The arena gets built only if the NHL awards the Atlanta area an expansion team, and the apartments are tied to the same condition. Monday’s vote does not put a team in Alpharetta. It puts Alpharetta in a position to ask.

This is not Milton, and we are running it anyway. North Point is the mall Milton drives to, it sits off GA 400 where our commute already lives, and twenty thousand people arriving for a game is a Milton traffic story whether the arena is inside our city limits or not.

It is also the closest thing to this that Milton has ever had next door. This city has spent its whole existence working out how much density is too much: AG-1 zoning, a data center moratorium it keeps extending, a comprehensive plan it has worked on all year. Just south of the Milton line, Alpharetta has answered that same question at the largest scale North Fulton has attempted. Whatever Milton decides about its own growth from here, it will be deciding it next to that.

A project this size also moves the land around it. We will be paying attention to what that does on our side of the line. Watch this space.

The Scoreboard

Milton hosts Cambridge in softball tonight at 6:15. This is the crosstown game we told you to circle, and it is the appetizer for the football version on September 4.

One thing we left out of Sunday's issue, because a final score does not carry it: Friday's one-point win over North Cobb was Milton football's sixteenth in a row. MaxPreps now ranks the Eagles ninth in Georgia and forty-fourth in the country.

Elsewhere: Cambridge volleyball had a hard Monday, losing to Whitefield Academy 2 to 1 and to Kell 2 to 0. Friday night is football: Milton travels to Blessed Trinity and Cambridge hosts Woodstock.

Every game, both schools, updated the night it finishes: our sports page.

Worth Your Monday Night

On Monday, August 31, three levels of government sit in one room on Cogburn Road and take questions on data centers, Highway 9, and taxes. Mayor Peyton Jamison, State Senator Jason Dickerson, and Fulton County Commissioner Bob Ellis are all appearing at a public forum from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on August 31, in the parish hall at St. Aidan's Episcopal Church, 13560 Cogburn Road.

One thing worth knowing going in: this is not a City of Milton event. It is not organized by the city, so it is not a council meeting, there is no agenda to follow, and nothing gets decided. It is a chance to ask three officials a question in person and hear the answer without a three-minute timer.

Those three topics are not filler either. Data centers are why the council has now twice extended a development freeze, Highway 9 is the corridor most likely to change what the drive through town feels like, and taxes are moving at both the county and the school board right now.

Calendar

Every meeting below is at City Hall and open to the public.

This Week in Milton

Tuesday, August 25

Wednesday, August 26

Friday, August 28

Saturday, August 29

Sunday, August 30

Monday, August 31

See the full Milton calendar → · Got an event? Submit it

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