I held my feet to fire, basically.
When I first came to know Milton’s plan to run its own municipal election, I didn’t really know what that meant.
I was new to the area — I didn’t know Fulton County’s role, and I was fresh out of grad school with no local government experience to speak of. Before I joined Appen Media, I had never attended, or streamed, a city council meeting.
The process, what it took to pull Milton’s first self-run municipal election off, was obviously beyond me, and initially, beyond city staff. Even with a combined lot of city government experience, operating a municipal election was out of their wheelhouse.
It’s the norm for cities in other counties, like Gwinnett, to do their own thing. But, Milton is the first city, solely in Fulton County, to do it — Palmetto, which straddles Fulton and Coweta counties, also runs its own municipal election.
But, after a lot of hours, a lot of days, a lot of months, we can all probably recite state code. I know very mundane, but vital legal requirements that probably won’t make it to the next episode of Jeopardy.
I got lucky with this story, and I do mean lucky, despite how stressful it was chugging out any and every election bit I could think of so that the community could stay informed — of not only what decisions were being made in public, but what was happening in the background.
So, how did I manage to write more than 40 stories on Milton’s elections, some with observable impact?
First, I’ll answer why.
Eyes on Milton
City councils make pretty big decisions that affect your everyday life — if I wasn’t slated as an outsider looking in, I would surely make civic engagement at City Hall a personal habit. So, the cart before the horse — how city officials are elected is something to report, let alone the hullabaloo of the 2020 presidential election, which…
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