State Sen. Robert Brown is making good on his April 18 pledge to pressure at least two local Republican state House members to back the Macon-Bibb County consolidation bill he wrote with Sen. Cecil Staton.

That bill, presented in the last days of the recent legislative session, won support of two Democratic House members from the Bibb County delegation, but not the four Republicans. They generally backed a competing consolidation bill by Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon.

Although Republican House members want to discuss what they see as major flaws in the Senate bill, Brown, D-Macon, is mobilizing local leaders to lobby for the bill’s passage as is.

“It appears to us that the Senate version has the best chance of gaining passage in both houses,” Mayor Robert Reichert said Thursday in a session at The Telegraph.

Brown dominated the discussion, but the group included Reichert; Bibb County Commission Chairman Sam Hart; Macon City Councilwoman Elaine Lucas, wife of state Rep. David Lucas, D-Macon; former Mercer University President Kirby Godsey; Evangelical Ministers Alliance President Clifford Little; Monica Smith, president of the Macon-Bibb County Convention & Visitors Bureau; Mike Ford, NewTown Macon president; the Rev. Ronald Terry, New Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church; the Rev. Donnie Bryant, Swift Creek Baptist Church; Bibb County Attorney Virgil Adams; and Al Tillman, Unity-N-Community chairman.

They met with Telegraph Publisher George McCanless and Executive Editor Sherrie Marshall. An editorial writer, a reporter and an aide to Brown were also present.

The same group of bill supporters is expected to be at a public forum at 6:30 p.m. April 27 at Macon City Hall, called “Consolidation: Unity or Disunity?” The local House and Senate delegations are invited to be panelists.

Godsey said the legislative delegation is made up of good people who should be able to reach agreement but are unlikely to be coerced.

Tillman said House members need to pass the Senate bill as it’s written rather than seek further negotiations.

“We’re saying, ‘The compromising is over,’ ” he said.

Strategy

A mix of conciliation and confrontation mirrored Brown’s own statements. Brown said he made enough negotiating concessions so that in the end Staton, R-Macon, probably wrote more of the bill than he did. Now he’s unwilling to rehash issues with House members.

Little said issues such as whether elections for the unified government should be partisan or nonpartisan -- House Republicans insist upon the latter -- can be worked out once the basic bill is passed by a united front.

Brown said he’s not taking any political risk in backing consolidation; he wouldn’t consider that worthwhile. But about 30 percent of Peake’s constituents are “almost cave people, conservative -- people who are against almost everything,” Brown said. He plans to paint that group as the political “bad guys,” overcoming them with large majorities elsewhere, he said.

Reichert said Peake could vote against the Senate bill as long as it gets support from the other three House Republicans: Reps. Robert Dickey of Musella, Bubber Epps of Dry Branch and Susan Holmes of Monticello. They face less political risk since only small parts of their districts are within Bibb County, Reichert said.

Peake, asked to respond on Friday, said hard-core opposition to consolidation among some of his constituents makes it even more important for any unified government to be well-designed from the start.

“Their mantra of ‘Just sign the bill, we’ll fix it later, just get something out there’ is the absolute wrong way to go,” he said. “If we don’t take the opportunity to do it right, then we might as well not do it at all.”

At Thursday’s meeting, Marshall wondered why the Republican co-sponsor of the Senate bill wasn’t involved in promoting it. “Where is Senator Staton?” she asked. Reichert said Staton did send a representative to an organizing session.

Staton did not respond to requests for comment. Peake and Dickey, however, said Staton has not really urged them to change their votes on the Senate bill.

“He and I have traded messages a couple of times, and he has made it clear that he is willing to compromise with us,” Peake said.

Dickey said Friday that he hasn’t heard directly from Brown since just before the legislative session ended, and that his discussions with Staton have been limited to questions about technical provisions in the Senate bill.

Sticking points

Both the House and Senate bills call for reductions in government cost, but the Senate bill seeks four times more, paid for largely by firing all public employees, rehiring most of them and cutting pension plans for new hires. The House bill would apparently also fire and rehire employees, but it projects a 5 percent total cost savings. The House bill calls for a nine-member legislative body, two fewer than the Senate version. The Senate bill would give a new mayor sweeping powers and increase the job’s pay by about 50 percent. It also would retain both a sheriff and countywide police chief, unlike the House bill which would make the sheriff the top law enforcement official in the new government.

Those from each side of the issue say they’ve conceded enough. Brown said he and Staton have already responded to all “substantive” concerns raised by House members. But Peake said House Republicans had already made significant compromises, too.

“Senator Brown, in the version that he has, still has not addressed many of the significant policy issues that we have a big difference on,” Peake said.

The most prominent difference is whether elections for the new government would be partisan. In the Senate bill, they would be -- as they already are now, Brown said. He said he’s willing to let that be decided in a separate referendum, but that abandoning partisan elections could cost him the support of Democrats, including David Lucas.

Dickey said he wonders if the local leaders now supporting Senate bill approval have thoroughly read it, and if they grasp what a unified government would look like under that plan.

“There’s no need to consolidate if we don’t have a better government than what we’ve got now,” he said. “I think everything’s negotiable in there, but (Brown’s) bill as it is, is not in my mind a good bill.”

Spin control

Reichert said one reason for hurrying to The Telegraph was to seek a “positive spin” on the Senate proposal’s status before unnamed bloggers get a chance to savage it. This fall’s elections could wipe out current progress if enough offices change hands, he said.

Marshall said the paper’s editorial stance has been supportive of consolidation, and that news staff will cover relevant developments.

Brown and Elaine Lucas, however, attacked news coverage as “one-sided,” though they didn’t cite any examples. Marshall said they should contact her if they think coverage is unfair.

Terry told her and McCanless that he wanted the paper to advocate for a referendum on consolidation.

“We wrote that last year,” McCanless told him, referring to the editorial page.

“That’s absolutely not true,” Brown said. Last year, both he and Staton offered rival bills to the House bill, but Telegraph editorials portrayed him as the stumbling block, Brown said.

“I can take it, because you can’t beat me at the polls,” Brown said.

To contact writer Jim Gaines, call 744-4489.