SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2026 · Issue No. 79 · 18 min read
Fund the paper trail
A note from Ryan as The Inside Lane opens. Plus: the parks contract is back Monday, and a lake that would be drained.
This issue is presented by Amber Kuhn · At Home Property Group |
A Milton resident who has sold more than $80 million in homes. Amber has guided buyers and sellers through more than $80 million in sales since 2018, pairing nearly two decades in corporate talent acquisition with relationship-first real estate. Bolst North Atlanta, top 2% nationally, and a repeat Atlanta Home Magazine All-Star.
404.441.7582 · amberkuhn@athomepg.com Sponsored · Amber Kuhn, At Home Property Group |
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In this issue The Inside Lane opens today. Be one of the first 50 neighbors in the Founding Lane, and help pay for the records behind every story we run. Monday, 6 p.m.: the parks contract is back. Council takes up Tri Scapes’ $691,000-a-year contract, and this time the contract itself is in the documents the city posts before the meeting. The price came down from the company’s first offer. Here’s how to speak. Toll plans to drain a lake. What the Planning Commission said about Brookecrest, Harmony at Highway 9 and a Crabapple preschool. And. Election Day is Tuesday, with hours and ID rules below, and that night the Design Review Board takes up three teardowns on agricultural land, a 1945 log cabin among them. Also: how you planned to spend Halloween, by our poll, Friday’s scores, a correction and the week’s calendar. |
Top of Mind
the one thing to know this morning
Starting today · The Inside Lane | |
Everyone gets a turn | |
In May, I started The Roundabout to keep Milton up on what’s happening around town, three mornings a week, from the farm stands to City Hall. I named it The Roundabout because a roundabout brings traffic from every direction into one circle and keeps it moving. I wanted city government, residents, businesses and the community in that same circle, in conversation with each other.
This fall showed me what the City Hall part takes. The answers that matter are in records, not press releases. Since September we have asked for public records more than 40 times, mostly from the City of Milton, and those records are how you learned about the cameras, the contracts approved after the fact and the decisions no one voted on.
It also showed me what happens next. On Oct. 19, residents stood at the podium in Council Chambers and quoted what they had read here. A contract that wasn’t in the meeting packet got set aside for another day. And every week, neighbors write to our tip line who have been stonewalled, ignored or pushed around, and who don’t know where to turn.
People ask me why I do this. Because nobody else would. I’m surprisingly capable, I’m stubborn and I can’t stop asking questions. I’m not here to tear City Hall down. I’m here for the work: digging up what’s buried, printing the facts and turning on the lights.
So here is what The Roundabout is for. Everyone gets a turn.
In a roundabout, the dump truck yields the same as the minivan. Size doesn’t buy the right of way, and it shouldn’t in Milton, either.
When you bring us something, here is what we do:
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None of that is free to do. Records cost money, meeting transcripts cost money and the reporting takes time. Starting today, you can help pay for it.
40+ records requests since September |
3 mornings a week in your inbox |
$0 to read it, always |
The Inside Lane is The Roundabout’s membership. In a roundabout, the inside lane is for the drivers going all the way around. Pick your lane:
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One membership covers your whole household. You can also give once, from $25, to fill the roundabout.
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Be one of the first 50 The Founding Lane The first 50 members who join by Dec. 31 keep their rate as long as they stay members, and get a founding mark on our wall. |
Here’s the promise:
- →Nothing is gated. Every story, guide and record we publish stays free, whether you join or not.
- →You’ll see where the money goes. Member money pays the records fees first. Anything beyond that keeps the newsletter running. Starting in early December, a public ledger shows each month the requests filed, the fees paid and the stories that came out of them.
- →Members get time with me. Office hours once a month, for help with your own records requests: what to ask for, what a fee or a denial means and what to do next. A call four times a year on how the reporting gets done. A vote in December on which Milton nonprofit gets our year-end house ad.
The Roundabout is a small business, not a nonprofit, so memberships aren’t tax deductible. They’re an investment in a town where everyone gets a turn.
Help me keep asking.
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Ryan Ryan Hall · Publisher, The Roundabout |
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Council Watch
what the city decided, and what it is about to
The parks contract is back on the consent list, and this time the price came with it
Monday at 6, Council takes up the $691,000-a-year Tri Scapes parks contract. Two weeks ago Mayor Peyton Jamison asked Council to move it from the Oct. 19 agenda to Nov. 2, saying the contract had been inadvertently left out of the meeting packet, the set of documents Council reads beforehand. City Attorney Ken Jarrard said then that Council was free to act on it that night anyway, and that putting it off “out of an abundance of goodwill” was fine (our Oct. 20 report). It is on the consent agenda again, the list of routine items Council passes together in a single vote without discussion.
How to speak Monday. General public comment is item 5, near the start of the meeting and before the consent vote, and it covers consent items, the Tri Scapes contract included. Fill out a public comment card and give it to the city clerk before your item is called; once the clerk calls it, no more cards, so turning it in before 6 p.m. is safest. You get five minutes, once. Can’t stay? Send an email marked for the record, 300 words or fewer. The clerk will read out your name, address and position, and the whole email only if you attend or show you can’t. Any council member can move to pull an item off consent for its own discussion and vote; it takes a second and a majority. Have a question the city should answer? Reply to this email and tell us.
Why it matters: Tri Scapes keeps Milton’s parks, trails and ballfields, and this deal could run five years, through September 2031, for about $3.5 million before inflation and extras. It renews itself each fall unless either side gives notice. The contract and Tri Scapes’ price offer are now in the Nov. 2 packet (pages 9 to 98), and they answer some of what the Oct. 19 packet didn’t. One piece is still missing: the scope of work, the attachment (Exhibit A) that spells out the job. The Exhibit A in the packet starts partway through the city’s request for proposals, at its page 33, and the scope isn’t in the pages that are there.
What the contract shows.
- →The price came down from Tri Scapes’ offer, and the crew shrank by one. Tri Scapes offered $777,737.46 a year. The negotiated price is $691,000, about $86,700 or 11 percent less. The city’s request for proposals, its public call for bids, called for eight full-time workers, and Tri Scapes proposed eight. The final deal has seven: one fewer technician for the “active” parks, the sports parks such as Bell Memorial and Legacy. The price also includes a separate $41,456 line for weekend help.
- →Some extras now have a limit. In our Oct. 18 preview, we reported that the city’s memo set no cap on extra staff, equipment and materials. The contract sets one for extra jobs the city orders outside the base contract: $80,000 a year. Emergency call-outs are paid at set hourly rates. Mulch and pine straw are billed at the prices in Tri Scapes’ price list ($44 a cubic yard of colored mulch, $6 a bale of pine straw). Other outside goods and services are billed at cost plus a fee of up to 10 percent. The contract pages in the packet don’t say whether emergency hours or materials count toward the $80,000.
- →The City Manager can approve changes without a Council vote, as long as they don’t “materially” change the terms or the maximum price. Apart from new park land the city builds or buys, no change can move the price more than 10 percent.
- →The contract’s start date has passed. The contract says its term “shall commence on October 1, 2026.” Council hasn’t voted on it yet. In other words, the contract is written to start a month before Council votes on it. The city’s memo says the current agreement was “approaching the end of its term.”
What it doesn’t show. The packet still doesn’t name the other three companies that bid, what they would have charged or how the four were scored. The city said Oct. 16 that Tri Scapes has kept up Milton’s parks “for many years,” and Tri Scapes’ proposal puts the value of its current Milton work at $625,000 a year. The city hasn’t confirmed that figure. It told bidders the old contract was “based on scope of work,” not a set crew like this one, so the old and new prices don’t line up one for one. We asked the city Friday morning who the other bidders were, what they offered, how the four proposals were scored, what the current contract costs and why the item is on the consent agenda. Communications Director Greg Botelho said the city likely wouldn’t get to those questions and suggested an open records request for the bidders and scores.
The city’s case. Staff call it the result of a competitive process: four proposals, interviews with the top-rated firm, then negotiation. Tri Scapes “demonstrated significant municipal parks maintenance experience, familiarity with the City’s park system,” the memo says. A crew assigned only to Milton, staff say, lets the city move workers between ballfields, trails and nature parks as weather and schedules change, without rewriting the contract. If a required job goes unfilled, the city takes 125 percent of that worker’s daily cost off the monthly bill, and the city can end the contract on seven days’ written notice. The money is in this fiscal year’s parks budget, which began Oct. 1.
Correction: Our Oct. 18 issue gave the Tri Scapes contract on the Oct. 19 agenda a sun (a pass) on the test of whether a contract is approved before it takes effect. That made its Sunshine score 2 out of 5 and the meeting average 4.0. The contract, now in the packet, says its term begins Oct. 1, before that meeting, so it should have been a cloud. Its score was 1, and the meeting average was 3.9.
Everything else on Monday’s agenda, scored, with how to speak: Before the Vote →
Planning Commission: Toll plans to drain a lake for Brookecrest, and a preschool gets a yes
The Planning Commission met for more than four hours Wednesday night on the three plans in our Oct. 25 preview. On all of them its vote is a recommendation, not the final word. Here is what it said, from the city’s video; the city hadn’t posted minutes as of Friday.
Brookecrest, 5 to 1. Toll Brothers’ Toll Southeast wants to divide 53.31 acres off King and Cox roads, near the Roswell line, into 42 lots of at least an acre. Nineteen more lots of at least three acres, to the north, go through a quicker staff review. The site wraps around a lake whose dam the state’s Safe Dams program has found unsafe, city staff said. Toll’s attorney, Ethan Underwood, said the larger lake “cannot be saved.” Its dam will be breached, meaning opened so the water runs out, and the lake drained, he said. The stream beneath it would be restored, as Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division and the city require. Toll’s engineer told the commission that repairing the old earthen dam wasn’t practical, and that when the work is done there will be no lake left, just a concrete wall to control floods and the stream flowing through it. He put the work at six months to a year. A smaller pond off Silver Fox Court stays; Toll has agreed to repair its dam, Underwood said, and the new homeowners association will maintain it.
Several residents who spoke asked the commission to put off a decision. Instead it voted to ask the community development director, who approves these plans herself, for three things. She would weigh the dam work’s effects on neighbors and the new lots. She would require studies of how water will flow (hydrology reports). And she would consider the conditions Toll offered. No public vote follows; the director decides.
Harmony at Highway 9, 4 to 0, one abstaining. Ten homes on 3.79 acres at 265 Five Acre Road, in Deerfield. Staff said the plan meets the code if the director grants a waiver from a rule that no more than one in five lots may face a small park instead of a street. The commission asked her to make sure the code is met and to look favorably on that waiver.
A preschool in Crabapple, unanimous. The Wilds Early Learning Academy would care for up to 20 children per half-day session in a 750-square-foot suite at 12457 Broadwell Road. The commission recommended approval with staff’s conditions. Council decides; the staff report points to its Dec. 7 meeting.
Around Milton
How Milton planned Halloween.
25 readers answered Thursday’s poll on how they were spending Halloween night: 8 were heading out trick-or-treating, 7 handing out candy at home, 4 keeping the porch light off, 1 going to a party or an event and 5 still deciding.
How are you spending Halloween night? | ||||
Out trick-or-treating
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Handing out candy at home
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Still deciding
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Porch light off, staying in
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At a party or an event
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25 readers, one tap each. We left out four taps that hit several answers within three seconds, the mark of email security software, not people. It isn’t a scientific poll, just the readers who tapped. |
We graded our own housing calls. In August we made three predictions for Milton’s fall market. One was right, one was wrong and one held until October. The median asking price just hit $975,000, the lowest in data going back to June 2025, but price per square foot barely moved: the homes for sale got smaller. The scorecard and our three calls for winter are on the updated market report. Wondering what it means for your house? Ask Amber Kuhn of At Home Property Group, our Featured Realtor.
The Scoreboard
every game, both schools, the night it finishes
Football · Friday, Oct. 30 | ||||||
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Flag football · no games since Wednesday | ||||||
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Scores, standings and rankings: MaxPreps, a high school sports site. Rankings as of Oct. 29. Win-loss records are our own count. | ||||||
Football. Milton shut out Riverwood 55-0 on Friday night. Cambridge had the week off, but its next opponent did not. Blessed Trinity, 8-0 and first in Region 6 at 4-0 coming in, beat Chattahoochee 70-7 to go to 9-0, 5-0 in the region. Cambridge, 4-1 in the region and second, visits Blessed Trinity on Nov. 6.
Region 7 down the stretch. Gainesville, 4-1 in the region, beat Lanier 29-14 at Lanier on Friday and finished its region schedule 5-1. Roswell, also 4-1, was idle and comes to Milton on Nov. 6, the last night of the regular season. At 5-0, Milton can finish 6-0 with a win over Roswell. Milton beat Gainesville 49-46 on Oct. 23. The state’s rules send each region champion to the playoffs automatically and give it a home game in the first round, which opens Nov. 13. If two teams finish tied, the default tiebreaker favors the one that won head-to-head, though a region can write its own plan and we have not seen Region 7’s.
Flag football. Neither Milton nor Cambridge has played since Wednesday’s wins (Thursday’s issue had the scores).
- →Milton, Monday: two unbeaten teams, Heard County (14-0) and McEachern (12-0). McEachern was No. 3 in Georgia in MaxPreps’ Oct. 29 rankings, one spot ahead of Milton.
- →Milton, Wednesday: North Paulding (12-3), at home, non-region.
- →Cambridge, Wednesday: Blessed Trinity (13-4), at home, a region game.
- →Milton, Nov. 11: Roswell and Alpharetta, both region games, the last two on its schedule.
Kickoff times are on Milton’s MaxPreps schedule; check them after the clocks change.
Cross country. All four teams ran at Saturday’s sectionals, the round before state. Milton’s region raced at Foxhall Resort in Douglasville, and both Milton teams made state: the boys finished 5th of 28 teams and the girls 6th of 24. The top 12 teams advance. Cambridge’s raced at One Church in Fayetteville, and both Cambridge teams made it too: the boys finished 3rd of 25 and the girls 5th of 21. The state meet is in Carrollton, with Cambridge’s class running first (Friday, Nov. 6) and Milton’s a day later. Every schedule and score →
The Agenda
public meetings this week and next
Monday: City Council. Council convenes Monday, Nov. 2, at 6 p.m. at City Hall, in the Council Chambers. Our coverage is in Council Watch above; the city’s own copies of the agenda and packet are on Municode.
Tuesday: Election Day. You can vote at your assigned polling place between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. (find yours). Bring a valid photo ID: a Georgia license, passport, military ID or a free Georgia voter ID card. Every race on the ballot is in our 2026 voter guide, with the House District 47 candidates’ answers word for word.
Tuesday: Design Review Board. The board meets Tuesday, Nov. 3, which is Election Day. It starts at 6 p.m. in the Council Chambers, and its agenda is three requests to tear down buildings on land zoned for agriculture. The city’s planning staff recommends approval of all three:
- →16335 Henderson Road: a one-story log cabin home built in 1945, a carport and a shop building, on 2.96 acres.
- →Rowe Road, at 15500, 15580 and 15655: six structures, among them houses from about 1940 and a brick house from about 1975, spread over 135.5 acres.
- →2395 Birmingham Road: a covered riding arena of about 19,800 square feet, built in 2004, and a detached garage or shed, on 40.5 acres.
Staff’s reports say none of the buildings has a historic designation from the city, the state or the federal government, and list the plans for the land afterward as “unknown at this time.” Each recommendation comes with the same three conditions: file for a demolition permit, level and grass the disturbed ground and take down no trees without a permit. The board’s agenda and packet →
This Week in Milton
the calendar, day by day
Thursday, slow going at two roundabouts. Crews return to the Hopewell-Thompson roundabout about 9 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, then move to Hopewell and Bethany Bend, to stain the new stamped concrete so it matches the old. Expect delays but no full closures; the work should be done by 4 p.m. Most of the work at both roundabouts was finished this summer, and the city plans to try the same safety changes elsewhere once it sees how these work.
Give food and coats, starting this week. The city is collecting non-perishable food and winter clothes (jackets, gloves, hats, sweaters) for North Fulton Community Charities, the Roswell nonprofit that serves families here too, through Nov. 20. Anything that keeps at room temperature counts: canned food, cereal, boxed mac and cheese, dried goods, coffee, tea, spices, honey, peanut butter. Drop it off at:
- →Any of the four fire stations, most any time, when the crew isn’t out on a call: Station 41, 12670 Arnold Mill Road; Station 42, 15240 Thompson Road; Station 43, 750 Hickory Flat Road; Station 44, 13690 Highway 9 (the front building, closest to the highway).
- →City Hall (2006 Heritage Walk) or the police station (13690 Highway 9, the back building nearer Cambridge High, through the Municipal Court entrance), weekdays during business hours starting Monday, Nov. 2, at 8:30 a.m. Not on weekends or Veterans Day, Nov. 11.
The city will take everything to the charity before Thanksgiving.
Tuesday, November 3
- →7:00 AM · Election Day · your assigned polling place, until 7 p.m.
- →1:00 PM · Friends of the Milton Library Tuesday Afternoon Book Sale · Milton Branch Library, until 5:30 p.m.
- →6:30 PM · Trivia · Six Bridges Crabapple, until 8:30 p.m.
Wednesday, November 4
- →6:30 PM · Music Bingo · Six Bridges Crabapple, until 8 p.m.
Thursday, November 5
- →6:00 PM · Acoustic Tom · Hyde Brewing, until 9 p.m.
Friday, November 6
- →5:00 PM · Live music · Six Bridges Crabapple, until 8 p.m.
Saturday, November 7
- →9:00 AM · Veterans Breakfast (veterans and their loved ones; RSVP required) · Council Chambers, City Hall, until 10:30 a.m. (free)
- →11:30 AM · Badger & Fox Book Club (kids 9 to 11; email the library to join) · Milton Branch Library, until 12:30 p.m. (free)
- →12:00 PM · RPG Alliance: Teen D&D (teens 15 to 17; one spot left as of Friday; register) · Milton Branch Library, until 4 p.m. (free)
- →1:00 PM · CRAFTernoon (ages 10 to 17) · Milton Branch Library, until 2 p.m. (free)
- →5:00 PM · Live music · Six Bridges Crabapple, until 8 p.m.
See the full Milton calendar → · Got an event? Submit it
Spot something we missed? Just reply. Every correction we have run is on our corrections page.
