Forsyth County explains parked vehicles near new Freedom Park campus

Drivers spotting rows of parked vehicles along Ga. 400 near Freedom Park have had good reason to ask questions. Forsyth County officials say the cars are tied to the new administration campus at 2435 Freedom Parkway, where the county moved its administrative offices on March 30.

The campus sits on 42 acres off Ga. 400 and was selected, county materials say, in part because it offered generous surface parking and room to expand for the next 30 to 40 years. Forsyth County held a ribbon cutting and public open houses for Freedom Park on March 18, and officials said the move was designed to give residents a single place to handle more than a dozen departments and to improve the customer experience.

At the center of the campus is a 135,000-square-foot Administration Building built for what county leaders describe as a one-stop approach to county business. Roughly 335 employees were expected at move-in, and the county has said the site can grow by as much as 75,000 additional square feet as Forsyth continues to expand.

That growth is part of the larger reason the county left its old administration building at 110 E. Main Street in downtown Cumming, where offices had operated since 1996. County materials say Forsyth’s population climbed from about 60,000 to more than 280,000, a jump that strained the old site and helped drive the need for a larger campus with more parking.

Even with the new headquarters in place, not every county meeting has shifted. Forsyth County says commission and committee meetings still take place at 110 E. Main Street because Freedom Park sits outside the county’s official site boundary. Administrative and other business functions, though, are now based at the new campus.

Public-facing county information does not give a precise count of parking spaces at Freedom Park, but a separate county planning document shows one parking-related site plan request that increased required spaces from 450 to 919. That underscores how parking capacity has been a recurring issue in county development discussions, especially as the county has tried to centralize services and move more daily traffic away from the old downtown office.

Freedom Park also includes a one-mile paved multi-use trail and a non-paved nature trail, adding public access to a campus that is meant to serve both county operations and visitors coming to conduct business with Forsyth County.