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Community Corner

Get to Know: Gerald McDowell

Lilburn's Community Improvement District director is part ambassador, part lobbyist.

Forget Gerald McDowell for Congress. He's too accustomed to getting results.

"If I was elected to Congress," the director of Lilburn's Community Improvement District said, "I would run into a wall and not know how to get anything done."

Though accomplished in what his resume categorizes as government relations, McDowell wouldn't see himself succeeding as a politician bound by special interests. Rather, he says freedom from them is what allows him to be effective.

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McDowell heads Lilburn's year-old CID, a self-taxing commercial property district whose goal is capital improvement of the four-mile U.S. Highway 29 corridor from Rockbridge Road to Ronald Reagan Parkway.

Sometimes a diplomat, sometimes a lobbyist, his work included convincing the area's commercial property owners to voluntarily tax themselves five mills to fund streetscapes and transportation infrastructure, hopefully improving perception and business opportunity in the corridor. Likewise, he orchestrated the closely related Lilburn Community Partnership and Gwinnett Village Community Alliance, whose goals are similar.

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"I work without a clock," McDowell said of long hours. "To get things done, you have to be disciplined enough to do what's necessary, regardless of whether it's 3 p.m. in the afternoon or 3 a.m. in the morning."

McDowell spent years developing the 14-square-mile Gwinnett Village CID, among the largest of metro Atlanta's 15 CIDs. That's where colleagues like Doug Stacks, Lilburn's director of planning and economic development, witnessed his persuasive ways with area businesses.

"He's been very successful signing on businesses in a down economy," Stacks said of Lilburn's CID generating an estimated $250,000 annually on $123 million of commercial property. "He's a real go-getter. We need more people like him."

David Adams, Lilburn CID's director of development, admires how McDowell lobbies.

"Gerald moves in and out of [government] circles in ways few can," he said.

Similarly, Gwinnett Village CID Director Chuck Warbington was complementary of McDowell's successes there.

"He continually ran through walls," Warbington said of McDowell's well-known knack for winning over commercial land owners. "He just gets things done.

"He has an entrepreneur spirit in the sense that he tries new things and isn't afraid to fail," Warbington added. "He was the linchpin for us. He was the guy going door to [commercial] door and making it happen."

McDowell, 45, said he draws on 18 years of experience in the information technology industry, part of which he spent implementing business in Central and South America. He estimates business has involved him with some 40 states and 13 countries.

"I discovered people were the same wherever you go," he said. "[Working with Central and South Americans] helped me develop how to communicate solutions to people in a way they understood. That prepared me for the work required to head and lead CID-type work."

McDowell said the work ethic of his father, a general contractor who built some 500 homes, influenced his upbringing in Hope Mills, N.C. The younger McDowell has strived to emulate that ethic through 21 years of marriage to wife Toni and raising daughter Taylor and son Wesley, students at Greater Atlanta Christian School.

And increasingly, there's little time outside of family and work. But McDowell likes it that way. Spare moments typically are spent feeding his veracious appetite for reading biographies and inspirational stories. Currently, he's reading about former president George W. Bush and civil rights activists Booker T. Washington and Steven Biko. He estimates he reads several books a week.

"I'm always in the middle of two or three at all times," McDowell said, joking when asked about hobbies, "I'm going to the bookstore and find me a book on those."

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