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Republican challenging sitting governor
Pennington questions Deal's conservatism
David Pennington
David Pennington is currently mayor of Dalton, but says he'll resign in March to run for governor. - photo by Photo provided.

David Pennington says that if elected, he will be Georgia’s first limited-government, conservative Republican governor.
As mayor of Dalton, Pennington, 61, has cut taxes significantly and wants to do the same as governor. He will challenge Gov. Nathan Deal in the May 20 Republican primary. Of course, Deal’s predecessor, Gov. Sonny Perdue, served eight years in that office as a Republican, but Pennington noted that both Deal and Perdue were Democrats earlier in their careers, and he assailed Deal’s record as a conservative.
“I’ve got a five-way test for Republicans: Do you believe in limited government, less spending, less taxes, less regulations and open and transparent government or do you not, and our current governor and leadership there is (zero) for five,” Pennington said Tuesday during a visit to Statesboro.
Known for its carpet manufacturing, Dalton, with a population of about 33,000, is a northwest Georgia city slightly larger than Statesboro. Pennington has been mayor for more than six years, but will resign the first week of March to qualify as a candidate of governor. Another Republican, State School Superintendent Dr. John Barge, also is campaigning to challenge Deal in the primary.
In Dalton, the city council and Pennington have cut property taxes six times in six years. The total reduction amounts to 28 percent, he said.
Meanwhile, the current state leadership, Pennington alleges, has increased the size and scope of state government and dramatically increased spending. After a $17.4 billion budget approved in 2010, before Deal took office, he has proposed an almost $21 billion budget for fiscal year 2015, Pennington observed.
“At this rate, if he stays eight years, he’ll increase the Georgia budget by 50 percent during that time,” he said.
Among other things, Deal’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2015 restores some state funding to school systems that imposed unpaid furlough days on teachers after previous cuts. Pennington’s projection of a 50 percent rise assumes similar increases would continue through the next four-year term.
Pennington blames Deal and the legislative leadership for tax increases, including the switch from annual property taxes on motor vehicles to an up-front sales tax. The previous property tax was paid with a tag purchase in the owner’s birthday month, and much of the revenue went to counties.
“The birthday tax, which they take credit for eliminating, that was not a state revenue source,” Pennington said. “Mostly, that was a local revenue source, and by doing that and shifting those revenues over to state government, which they’re spending, sooner or later, what’s going to happen with the local governments … they’ll be increasing property taxes to make up for it.”
The state, Pennington said, should never have made this change without consulting and working with local officials.
But a cut in the tax was needed, he said. Pennington wants to cut other taxes.
“We need to cut the income tax immediately from 6 percent to 4 percent, and not by shifting it to a sales tax,” he said. “We need to cut state government by that amount.”
Over time, Pennington added, he thinks the income tax should be cut further, possibly by shifting it to a sales or consumption tax.

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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