Pennington Preps for Gov Race…Possibly

Did Dalton Mayor David Pennington come to Poole’s BBQ last week simply for pulled pork sandwiches? As good as the food is at Poole’s, probably not. The mayor has notably made several trips to Poole’s in the last few months and, although, he’s made trips and talks to crowds at Poole’s before, last week’s visit certainly had a campaign-feel to it.

Following Karen Handel’s short opener (who’s toying with a Senate bid), Mayor Pennington set the pace by addressing the state’s economy.

“(In) the first eight months of the (fiscal) year,”

he said,

“the state’s gross sales tax and use sales tax collection is up one percent. You adjust that for inflation and population growth and we’re dead in the water, or worse, sinking.”

He went on to say Georgia is good at winning elections (for Republicans), but falls short in governing, citing numerous state agencies that fail audits.

Presenting a platform, Pennington said the way to improve the state is to address three major areas, which he calls the Three Es.

The first E is for Economy. For the mayor, this is first and foremost, the most important of the three-prong system.

“If you don’t get the economy right, the rest of it doesn’t matter because you can’t pay for anything,”

he said. Pennington says homebuilding jobs will never return to Georgia the way these jobs existed previously in the state, explaining the state cannot rebuild its economy back up with these jobs. According to his talk, his plan for economic renewal is two-fold, largely reducing or eliminating state income tax and establishing public-private partnerships. Speaking to the former, he called state income tax the most onerous tax for business owners. He recommended reducing it greatly or eliminating it altogether. Pressure to eliminate the tax seems to be mounting, since Tennessee to the north and Florida to the south have no state income tax. Conventional wisdom dictates that businesses would choose to move to one of these states, rather to one like Georgia with an income tax. As such, Georgia is losing business to the no-income-tax states. He says the other fold of the plan, public-private partnerships, is a way to deal with infrastructure issues, a fundamental component is drawing businesses to any area. He cited Indiana and Virginia as two successful examples of utilizing these partnerships.

Pennington’s second point in his platform is education.

“The more we’ve centralized it (education) in Atlanta,”

he said,

“The worse it gets.”

He advocated decentralizing the education and giving more control back to local school systems. Further, the mayor railed against Legislature’s move to raise the GPA requirement to 3.0 for the HOPE Scholarship for students attending technical colleges. In the aftermath, he said 30,000 students were washed out of technical programs. Here, his argument was students attending technical colleges struggled in an academic setting to begin with. He added that the net cost to students to go to public college in Georgia increased 77 percent over the last five years, an additional obstacle for those seeking college educations. Pennington’s answer is to first fix the K-12 system, citing a program Dalton established called Readers-to-Leaders. The program is funded by Dalton with assistance from UGA and provides a community center with health clinic, where services there provide education from the time children are born. Pennington says this prepares children to enter the first few grades of schooling.

The last E is for Ethics Reform, which the mayor only glossed, saying the state can’t make necessary changes without true ethics reform.

“All the assets are here (in Georgia),”

he said,

“and if we get our economic policies right (and) our education policies right, I assure you, we will be the Empire State of the South again.”

Sources say Pennington is in fact considering a run for the governorship in earnest. According to a recent AJC article, though, so is the incumbent.