BRACK: New mayor of Dacula already has 10 years on city council

By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum

FEB. 1, 2019  |  When the Dacula City Council voted to name a replacement for the late Mayor Jim Wilbanks, they picked someone not an elected city councilman. However, he was the present chair of the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals.

Not only that, but new Mayor Trey King, 55, had served for 2.5 terms on the city council previously, for a total of 10 years.

So he was no rookie coming to the job.  As he says, being a city official will be for him: “Not entirely something new.”

Trey King’s full-time vocation is as a chemistry teacher at Mill Creek High, now in his 20th year in that position.

However, he’s also a pharmacist, as is his wife, the former Mary Dawn Holcombe, a Dacula native. She works as a pharmacist in Winder. The couple attend Ebenezer Baptist Church in the Harbins community.

King

King is originally from Stephens County in northeast Georgia, who spent his first two years after high school at Young Harris College. Then it was to the University of Georgia where he studied pharmacy. While there, he found he enjoyed teaching students and interns.

After graduation, he went to work as a pharmacist in Macon with K-Mart, and later moved back to Atlanta to work for Kroger Pharmacy. He was working 40-60 hours a week. He even put in some part time work at the Prescription Shop in Lawrenceville.

Eventually, he remembered enjoying teaching, and began his chemistry teaching.  “I really do enjoy serving the people and working with the students.”

King and his wife have three boys, Isaac, 27; Jacob, 24, and Joseph, 21, who all have been or are at Kennesaw State College. Isaac is currently a certified technician for Public Pharmacy; Jacob and Joseph are current Kennesaw students. The family enjoys fishing, going to the lake, water skiing and camping.

Now you know something about Gwinnett’s newest public official, Trey King, the mayor of Dacula.

Every now and then you get a happy story. A recent New York Times story out of Atlanta showed a picture of a man and a woman.  It read:

“It was 2000. I was a sad, middle-aged social worker nervously attending a divorce support group at an Episcopal Church in Atlanta. Only one other person was there, a man my age, talkative. We purged our agony for hours and I thought, ‘Geez, this facilitator is so self-disclosing.’  Then he said, ‘How long have you been running this group?’ The real leader never came that day we shared our heartache and felt the first frisson of love. We laughed all the way to the parking lot, and never went back to the group.”

Being efficient: the City of Snellville is holding an election to fill the seat of Councilwoman Barbara Bender, who was elevated recently to become mayor. Hurrah for the city scheduling it on March 19, the same day that Gwinnett County is holding the referendum on MARTA. Perhaps Snellville will get out more voters that way.  But as it works, Snellville citizens will have to go to two different locations to vote in both these elections on March 19, their own county precinct and the Snellville City Hall to vote in the city elections.

Hurrah, Hurrah: We’ve just learned that the Netflix series, Greenleaf, is now lining up filming of its fourth season. We’ve just finished viewing its third season, and got the feeling the way it ended that there might be another season. It’s one of the best dramatic and entertaining series that Netflix offers.

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