Well-known lawmaker drops out of state House race

Milledgeville’s Rusty Kidd, the man who jokes that his entire caucus could fit in a phone booth, won’t run this year for a return to the state House.

Instead of campaigning over the next few months, the sole independent in the state Legislature said he is going to take care of health problems from a 1999 motorcycle accident that left him with paralysis below the chest.

“If I can’t do it at the 100 percent level I demand of myself, then I need to get well so I can do it at 100 percent,” said Kidd, who was first elected in 2009.

Kidd didn’t rule out running for office again one day or returning to his old job — lobbying at the state Legislature, which he did starting in 1972. He had a wide range of clients over the years, from medical associations to tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, among others.

Asked about his legacy as a legislator, he named state-level spending that brought jobs and public works to the district, which covers all of Baldwin and part of Putnam counties. For example, there’s the new Riverbend Correctional Facility and a new intensive care facility for incarcerated juveniles in the renovated Milledgeville youth lockup.

This fall at the old Central State campus, two new facilities will fully open: a new National Guard-run center for youths who have dropped out of school and a nursing home for parolees who have no place to go.

Those last two will be worth 450 jobs, said Mike Couch, executive director of the Central State Hospital Local Redevelopment Authority.

Kidd carried the bill that created that authority, which is working to find new tenants for the shuttered hospital site. Couch said Kidd was also involved in broader bills that designated that property and others for reuse, and that made it quicker to move those properties onto the market.

“He’s been kind of a go-to for the campus,” Couch said.

Over the past few years state budgets have also included millions for the Georgia War Veterans Home in Milledgeville and works at Georgia Military College and Georgia College.

Left undone is what Kidd calls a “unification” of the city of Milledgeville and Baldwin County, erasing the city line and merging the two governments into Milledgeville-Baldwin County.

But city and county voters disagreed with him on that. In 2015, they overwhelmingly rejected a merger proposal that Kidd carried through the Legislature.

He said that merger charter needs to be redrafted, but it still needs to happen.

State Sen. Burt Jones, R-Jackson, represents a portion of Kidd’s constituents in the state Senate.

“It was always a pleasure working with Rusty. We didn’t always agree, but we always got along real well,” Jones said.

Jones praised Kidd’s institutional knowledge and said he admired Kidd because he never let his physical disability slow him down.

The Kidd name is a renowned one in state politics.

His father, Culver Kidd, served more than 40 years in the Legislature. His sister, Tillie Fowler, represented part of Florida in Congress for nearly a decade. And Kidd’s son, named Culver as well, ran for the South Carolina Legislature last year.

Kidd said public service seems to run in the family.

His departure leaves two candidates in the November election for House District 145. There’s Democrat Floyd Griffin Jr., a former state senator and former Milledgeville mayor. The other is Republican Rick Williams, a former Baldwin County commissioner. Both men are funeral home directors.

This story was originally published August 4, 2016 at 1:06 PM with the headline "Well-known lawmaker drops out of state House race."