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Sunday, Nov. 01, 2009

Campaign for Baldwin area House seat running red hot

The campaign to replace Bobby Parham in the Georgia Legislature has seen some mudslinging as the state Democratic Party tries to hold onto the seat, and the son of a Middle Georgia political legend tries to take it amid questions about his business practices and his past as a lobbyist.

But the No. 1 political issue in Milledgeville and Baldwin County remains clear: jobs.

The area has been hit hard by state job cuts and manufacturing closures, most recently the shutdown of the county’s largest private employer, the Rheem air conditioning plant. Now all four candidates are talking about how they can help stem that tide.

There’s Rusty Kidd, son of Culver “the Silver Fox” Kidd, who represented the area in the Georgia House of Representatives and Senate for about 42 years.

Rusty Kidd said his experience as a longtime lobbyist gives him the ability to “hit the ground running” in Atlanta and reverse a trend of state cuts and an economic slide that threatens to “make Milledgeville a ghost town.”

“I’ve been up there in the Capitol for the last 38 years,” Kidd said. “I know where the power rests in both chambers, and I don’t have to go through a learning curve.”

There’s Darrell Black, who owns the Flooring America store in town. Black is the only declared Democrat in the race, and he has the backing of the state party. He said he has a “heart of service” and that “working with the Democratic Party is the key” when you’re “in a fight with a lot of people (at the Capitol) for whatever there is to have.”

Republicans hold a wide majority in both the state House and Senate, as well as the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s office. But Black said he expects a Democrat to win the governor’s office next year.

There’s Angela Gheesling-McCommon, executive director of the Development Authority of the city of Milledgeville and Baldwin County, who said she decided to run at the behest of Republican leaders in the House. She said she’s been promised good committee assignments, and that her experience working with state leaders will help her immensely.

She said she’d push for bigger tax incentives to bring jobs to Baldwin County and retraining opportunities for people who’ve lost their jobs in the manufacturing industry.

“Jobs and education, they go hand in hand,” she said.

And there’s Casey Tucker, a 22-year-old Chili’s bartender who recently graduated from Georgia College & State University who says “we have to try and cut spending and cut taxes across the board.” Tucker said he’d have a particular focus on corporate and personal taxes and that he’s gotten a positive response from potential voters despite his relative youth.

“If not me, then who?” Tucker asked. “I really want to give people a voice and work towards a better future.”

Voters in Baldwin County and a bit of south Putnam County will chose between these four candidates Tuesday. A Dec. 1 runoff will be in play if no one receives more than 50 percent of the vote.

The four candidates are running to replace Parham, the longtime state representative who retired this year to take a seat on the state transportation board. The winner will serve less than a year in the Georgia House of Representatives before facing re-election in 2010.

Though the race is technically nonpartisan, party politics enter into it. Kidd’s father was a well-known Democrat, but he has declined to give a party affiliation despite pressure to do so. He filed for the office as an independent. Gheesling-McCommon and Tucker filed as Republicans, and Black filed as a Democrat.

The House Democratic Caucus has jumped on the race, supporting Black and targeting Kidd, who is the presumed frontrunner, at least in part because of his family name.

Caucus members want to keep the Republican Party from picking up the seat and further increasing its majority share in state political power, but with Republican leaders asking Gheesling-McCommon to get into the race, it’s not clear who Kidd would fit in with if he wins.

Kidd has said he’d caucus with “whoever invited me,” but it’s hard to see the Democratic Caucus doing that, given the mailers and radio ads it’s paying for in the race. They bring up a 14-year-old scandal involving strippers and call attention to Kidd’s Quick Loans business.

The mailers equate Quick Loans to payday lending, a predatory practice the General Assembly has sought to rein in through legislation in recent years. One mailer calls Kidd “a predatory lender who charges high interest rates ... and takes advantage of our families.”

It has a picture of a cheetah, a great white shark and a man in a suit with the caption: “The world’s most dangerous predators. One of them lives in Milledgeville.”

Kidd said he actually worked to make payday lending illegal in Georgia. He said his company charges 5 percent interest on a 30-day loan, not 600 percent like “the payday loan people that we ran out of Georgia.”

Don Weigel, the staff director for the caucus, said “these lenders have gone to great lengths to hide the actual costs of what their loans are.”

Calls seeking comment on the issue from House Majority Leader DuBose Porter and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Calvin Smyre, two of the caucus’ main elected leaders, were not returned.

Some of the mailers detail a 1995 golf outing for legislators, which Kidd attended as a lobbyist. The trip to upscale Daufuskie Island just north of the Georgia-South Carolina border brewed into a scandal primarily because of the hiring of four strippers from an Atlanta-area club to accompany the group.

Kidd acknowledged paying a portion of the dancers’ costs for the trip in 1995, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But he’s also said that he didn’t know they were being invited until after they had left Atlanta for the island, and it was too late to tell them not to come.

Black said he asked the caucus to tone down the rhetoric on the issues, but he said it’s important to call people’s attention to Kidd’s past. He said he doesn’t think Kidd’s Quick Loans business is illegal “because I’m sure he knows the line” he can’t cross.

To contact writer Travis Fain call 744-4213.