With municipal elections in Georgia taking place on November 4 this year, one fast-growing Jackson County town has a three-way race for mayor.
Incumbent Braselton Mayor Kurt Ward is seeking re-election, but he has two opponents in this year’s race. Those challengers are Michael Cronic and Brandon Reed.
Kurt Ward
Ward has served as mayor for Braselton since 2021, with the office being his only political experience to date. Ward said he believes he has helped the city create stronger planning in his time in office.
“We’ve rewritten our development code, we’ve rewritten our comprehensive plan, we’ve set high standards in Braselton, and we feel like we’re carrying out that vision for Braselton that its citizens want,” Ward said.
Ward says he believes those code updates have the town in a prime position for success in the coming years.
“There are some wonderful people in Braselton. There are some wonderful opportunities in Braselton. We’re a model city for many other cities around the state of Georgia,” Ward said.
All three candidates cited rapid residential growth in the town as one of the primary concerns for the coming years. Ward says further growth is inevitable, but he said he wants to see the town focus on higher-quality developments.
“We want to continue with planned growth. We understand growth needs to happen, but we want to move forward with planned growth with high standards and fiscal responsibility,” Ward said. “We’ve actually approved 70 new single-family detached homes in the four years that I was in office. We did approve an exciting multi-use development, but as far as like neighborhoods and all that, we’ve just kind of watched what was already on the books develop and see how that looks, and we haven’t really approved a lot more growth.”
Michael Cronic
Cronic is a fifth-generation native of Braselton, and a former longtime member of the Jackson County Board of Education, where he served three terms. He has also held other public roles, including on the West Jackson Fire Board, the Jackson County SPLOST Appropriations Board, and currently on the Jackson County Sewer and Water Authority.
Cronic said his seeking the mayoral office in Braselton is a matter of community for him.
“I just want to serve our community and bring back a sense of community to Braselton. I feel like we’ve lost that,” Cronic said.
Cronic also said managing residential growth in the town will be a focal point in the coming years, but he also expressed concerns about traffic in the area.
“You’ve just got to rebuild the relationships with local and state (departments of transportation), and have that dialog open so that we’re transparent in each side of what’s going on and when the next road expansion or work is going to be done,” Cronic said. “Everybody has got traffic on their mind.”
Cronic also said he wants to see Braselton continue to not impose a town property tax.
“I’m 100 percent against a town tax from Braselton,” Cronic said. “Braselton has multiple resources for income, we have a balanced budget every year, and we want to keep that going, just like we have in the past.”
Brandon Reed
Reed has lived in Braselton since 2016 and grew up in the nearby Chestnut Mountain community. He is a local business-owner, operating a technical services provider for industrial maintenance and manufacturing.
He is a political newcomer, and he said recent increases in county property taxes made him more interested in local government, leading to his decision to run for mayor. Reed said he believes infrastructure and traffic are the biggest issues facing Braselton.
“Braselton has got two main roads going in and out of it, that’s Ga. 53/Winder Highway and Ga. 211/Old Winder Highway, which branches off to Friendship Road. I frequest both of these roads every single day, and between 1:00 p.m. until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m., it’s bumper-to-bumper,” Reed said. “I’ve seen growth, I’ve seen buildings going up, but I haven’t really seen any improvements to help alleviate the traffic.”
Reed said he wants to work the Georgia Department of Transportation to try to push improvements to some of the busier roadways in the community, and he also proposed working with local industry and businesses to stagger shift times to try to alleviate the traffic issues.
“What I see now is, we’ve got a lot of large warehouses, distribution centers…and they will all empty out at the same time, so you have hundreds of associates leaving and flooding these two streets,” Reed said. “I can sell that idea to these warehouses and factories by increasing their efficiency. You don’t want 500, 600, 700 people standing at the time clocks waiting to clock out, so if we can break those up into 10, 15 people at a time, every 15-minute interval, it would streamline their process.”
Reed also stressed wanting to improve transparency in the town government.
“A lot of our meetings are done at times where the people can’t always show up. We’ve got over 17,000 residents living in Braselton, and at these town hall meetings, we only have about a dozen or so show up,” Reed said. “I do want to live stream and record all of these, post them to YouTube, Facebook, with links to the NextDoor app, so that way we can get more community engagement.”
Election information
The election for Braselton mayor will be Tuesday, November 4. The race is non-partisan, and if no candidate gains at least 50 percent of the vote, the election will go to a runoff later in the year between the top two vote-getters.
Early voting is available at the Jackson County Election Office on Gordon Street in Jefferson.
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