Longoria Eager To Join Milton City Council

By Rachel Kellogg; Neighbor Newspapers

Joe Longoria, music lover, tennis player and software designer, will join Milton’s city council in January when he takes over the District 5 seat.

Longoria and his family moved from Dallas, Texas to Milton in 1998 when he sold his software company to a local tech firm.

“As part of the sale, I moved here to help the company integrate the software,” he said.

Now Longoria works as the regional director and product manager for Actimize, a software company in Alpharetta, but software and computers are more than a job for the father of three.

When his children, Joe, Jason and Jennifer, were young, Longoria would play computer games with them.

“We used to play a game called King’s Quest every night,” he said. “I would kind of spin it into a bedtime story for them.”

Longoria also reads techno-thriller novels by Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, but his involvement in the Boy Scouts takes up most of his free time.

“I’ve served as a commissioner and a district chairman,” he said. “Both my sons were Boy Scouts and got to be Eagle Scouts.”

Longoria said he and his wife of 25 years, Brenda, love to dance to live music.

“I enjoy country and western dancing, but I listen to rock and roll stations on the radio,” said the music fan who listens to everything from Green Day and Third Eye Blind to Boston and Kansas.

“The beauty of having three kids is that you get exposed to a wide variety of things,” he said.

Before joining the football team in high school, Longoria played in the marching band, and he is still musically inclined.

“People might be surprised to know I have a drum kit in my basement,” he said. “On a stressful day, I’ll put on my headphones and bang on the drums.”

In his spare time, Longoria also plays doubles tennis matches at Crooked Creek, the subdivision where he lives.

“There’s always something going on in my community,” he said. “The reasons I became interested in city council parallel the reasons I got involved in the homeowners association at Crooked Creek.”

Longoria said his position as treasurer for the homeowners association at a time when the community was going through renovations helped him see the kinds of challenges the city faces.

In January, Longoria said he is looking forward to helping Milton build up parks and green space and helping with the city’s revenue challenges.