Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism, along with 13WMAZ, The Telegraph and GPB all hosted each candidate running for Mayor of Macon Bibb County. Each were asked the same questions and given 20 minutes to respond.

“How would you address violent crime?”
Well, violent crime is one of the number one issues that we have here in Macon-Bibb County. Back when I decided to run, back in 2018, I identified crime as the most important issue. Violent crime in particular are those that prevent businesses from coming here, people feel unsafe in their homes. So there’s a few ways that we would do that. Number one, is with the education that we have in our school system, I think you have to have a better educated student to teach them those things that you need to teach in school to make sure they have more opportunities to get better jobs, therefore to decrease violence. But the number one issue right now is public safety. We’re 150 officers short in the police department. And I think that’s the number one thing that we have to address to start with. I do have several plans on how to address that issue, but I think it’s going to start there with more community policing and more officers and boots on the ground.

One of those things is what I call “Justice Works”. It’s a program that I created of course by the name of justice works, but it’s something that’s been used for best practices across United States and I’ve been studying it for a long time. What justice works is, is a work release program for nonviolent felonies that people commit that are in jail now. And what they would do, is they would go to work while they’re in jail, incarcerated. And while they’re in jail, they would actually pay to live there each week, pay for their transportation to and from job and the child support, if they have children to take care of would be taken care of from their income tax or from the check that they’re earning there. One of the things that’s worked well in other places is you can keep the family structure together. Also, you have the person learn how to manage their budget and they pay for things as they go along. So how does that help with public safety? It creates a situation where instead of paying $55 a day, we’re paying about $20 a day. Instead of someone getting out and being homeless after they get out of jail, they’ve had 12 months at least they held a job and they’ve had an employment and they have a check stub so they can get a residence. Also, they’re current on their child support and they have a job either they can go back to. The reason this was important for public safety is because instead of having 24 officers stay under lock and key at the jail and we want to take a wing that we’re already paying. You have the least restrictive environment, less restricted environment somewhere nearby where you can actually have eight to 10 officers that are out there working because these inmates will be going to and from work every day. That frees up about 14, 15 police officers that we’re already paying that can be patrolling the streets. That’s just one program that we have that can increase the police presence that we have on the street. Another way we can do that is by bringing back some of the retired deputies who have retired from Bibb County. If you take them on as part time employees, you can put them in jobs and in patrolling, working at the courthouse, maybe guarding at the County government center. And they can work up to 20 hours a week there without getting the natural benefits, that an officer would get and the officers that are presently in this position can be back on the streets and providing safety for our community.

“What would you do to tackle blight?”
Blight is one of those things where I see in my business as an attorney and also I see it every day with our school systems. One thing I proposed earlier to the county is to have our schools system work more closer with the county as a taxing entity. We requested to be a part of the land bank there at Macon-Bibb County to have a permanent board member there. The reason I wanted to do this is because the county doesn’t have a lot of money set aside for blight right now and the way they use blight in the past money’s in the past is they basically gave each commissioner a certain amount of money that they used in their districts and I believe that was a complete waste of time. We don’t see a lot of benefits of it. It’s more of a cork-barrel project, so one thing I proposed is to use some money from these SPLOST’s; the E-SPLOST will be passed with the school system, a couple of million dollars, and we would begin with the neighborhoods that were the most severe. For example, if you go around Pleasant Hill, LH Williams and you go to Central High school area, you’ll notice there’s a lot of burned houses. A lot of houses, they’re dilapidated and those areas. The school system could use the money from the E-SPLOST to tear those houses down or rebuild those houses. Normally, you can’t do that unless you have an educational purpose and the educational purpose would be providing much needed jobs for our students, internships for our students so that they would actually go in there with a contractor, they would help demolish the house; they would actually go get the permits. They learn valuable things like HVAC and plumbing and getting permitted in carpentry, and at the same time they would get a per diem. They’ll get a little money in their pocket. But the whole goal was to teach them a trade to help them get a job and also to restore that neighborhood the way it way it should be restored. At the end of that time, that house would be sold perhaps to a police or prior fighter or veteran or somebody to maintain that neighborhood together. And one of the problems we’ve had in Bibb County, and I see it as an attorney, is we have a lot of heir property out there. They have a certain segment of our community, which was mainly African American segment that’s had a lot of poverty in it. And what happens is someone will pass away and they’ll leave property from heir to heir to heir. And no one would even know how many people own the house, or they owned it; so you couldn’t borrow money on the house, you couldn’t fix it up and you can never gain title to the property. So, one of the things that I’ve done in my law practice for the last several years actually since I started practicing back in 1994, is we do free wills, last will and testaments, for certain groups that we target. So, make sure that they have their proper structure set up so we can take care of some of these problems. The other thing is an enforcement issue. We don’t have enough people out there to enforce it because our government hasn’t prioritized. The people needed to actually make sure that this was taken care of. And the last thing I’ll say is the policy on the school board, we changed every single policy since I’ve been there. We went through and reviewed it and and brought modern the things that we needed to, and got rid of the things we didn’t. And we can be better policy makers down at the government center to make sure that we cut through a lot of the red tape and we speed up the process. Fortunately, Wade McCord with the tax office, a Bibb county tax commissioner, has taken a step to start on some of that and I certainly support him and what he’s doing. I think that’s something that we can expand and we’ve seen successful results from it.

“How would you prioritize spending to improve road conditions, road safety, and traffic concerns?”
I’ve been going neighborhood to neighborhood right now myself and a lot of times particular areas in Macon have been abandoned. If you look at the Jeffersonville road project, it’s been going on for the last 16 years without a completion date. If you look at the Lizella area, most people that live out in Lizella and sub-south, they complain about the potholes and the road errors that we have. Eventually we’re gonna have to consider getting together to do a T-SPLOST. An T-SPLOST is one of those things where it hasn’t been very popular in Bibb County; certainly hasn’t supported in the numbers they needed to for a long time. One of the reasons I believe it has failed is because there’s been a lack of trust in the local government. Most people realize that the school system has passed two different E-SPLOSTs in the last eight years; that we were able to successfully complete. And that 1 cent sales tax makes millions and millions of dollars worth of improvements in our school system. The county government has been unable to put together a T-Splost because people simply don’t trust an additional penny going to where it’s supposed to go. You look at that product, like I said, at Jeffersonville road, we’re already talking about the Bass road expansion that we have out in Bass road. They’re saying it’s going to be six years before you even begin that process, but planning and zoning and other businesses, as you know, they have already developed so much out there then that issue’s already gonna be a problem before it even gets started being built. So what we’ll do is look at the possibility of a T-SPLOST in the near future, but also make sure we’re taking care of the maintenance and improvements as we go along with our employees to make sure that we’re prioritizing the money that’s being spent for those.
I’ve attended the pedestrian review safety boards and I know that there’s a lot of counties outside of Bibb County that have this problem that we have; our infrastructure is way outdated. If you go down to one of the most key areas that I see is Gray highway. Each and every day, if you go to Gray highway, you’ll see four or five people cross the road just on one trip to a restaurant to eat, or one trip to get gas on Gray highway. We need better lighting. That’s something that we can use our SPLOST fund is for. We need better sidewalk and maintenance out in that area. We need better striping out in those areas. I think some of that’s starting to take fruition now because of the number of deaths that we have. We also have to educate the public on what you should be wearing, where you should be going. But I understand that the need for some folks that go to grocery stores, you don’t want to walk a mile and a half of where you can cross the road and we have to be better than that. I think, I think it’s been largely neglected for a long time and it’s something we’re going to have to make improvements on. I think we have the money there to do it without raising taxes.

“What can the county government do to assist with improvements in the Bibb County school system?”
Well, I think the county needs to be a better partner. I think in the last couple of years, we’ve worked together a little bit better, but I think there’s some services that we could work together on to improve our whole community as a whole. The library system is one of those things where we could actually work together better on. I think the land bank, I told you about, by giving them the opportunity there to work together. Too many times we live in our own silos with the county and it’s us against them. And even though we’re separate taxing authorities, we should work together for all of our people. I think that involving board members and board of education, faculty and staff and parents and stakeholders in local government on boards would be one step in the right direction. For instance, when you have a new appointments that come up, not many times do you look at people associated with education on those boards. I think you need an educator’s viewpoint on a lot of the issues that we have. And I think we could work together better as a government and as a school system when we put things like that together. So that’s one of the areas I think we could work better. I think financially we have a lot of services to overlap and I think we could work the better, you know, we could work better together on museums. Quality of life things, museum of arts and sciences comes to mind because, you know, one of the biggest users of that facility from a local standpoint is our students. And I think we can work better with our museums and our school students to make sure we’re getting that benefit and also to be able to help financially on that.

“Is there a county department besides the sheriff’s office you think is under- or over-staffed, and what changes would you make?”
Well, of course, the sheriff department and the Bibb County fire department. The fire department is understaffed as well. And the same information we’ve talked about with public safety. I’m looking to put more boots on the ground with the fire department as well. They’re understaffed. They’ve gotten less people working on those trucks than they should have on there. They’re not earning the proper money they should be and we’re losing a lot on the outside areas. Other than that, the business development department, it’s been in the news lately. If you talk to some people it’s real understaffed; you talk to other people it’s overstaffed. There’s gotta be a middle ground. What we’ve been doing there has not been working. My first choice was not to bring in the company that they brought in, but I understand that there’s an urgent need and something has to be done. I think we gotta be able to listen to the business folks. One of the things that I want to do is set up a business advisory group of local business men and women who go through these contractors each and every day. We have to do a better job with that division. I think the small business and the economic development part of that and the business development part of that is essential to our economy. And if we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything else right. So we listened to the contractors, we listened to the people who work in all these other counties and they don’t have the issues that we haven’t here in Bibb County. And I think one of the other focuses that we have is to bring that division to be the best that we can make it in Macon-Bibb County. You know, Georgia is the number one place to do business in the United States. Macon should be the number one place to do business in the state of Georgia. And I think that’s something that I look forward to doing as the next mayor of Macon.
Well, overstaffed, I think after consolidation there’s a lot of positions that got eliminated so you’re going to have a hard time having too much staff in one particular area. I think they made a lot of cuts to personnel. I don’t know where we’re top heavy at, at this point, looking at the budget, it looks like everybody’s made significant cuts over the last several years. I think there’s some wasteful spending and there’s a more efficient way we can do things, but I think we’ve got to quit relying on the taxpayers to bail us out and we had to come up with additional money streams that I’ve been looking at to make sure we can come up with money outside of the tax payers to help balance his budget.
Sure. One example I posted on my social media a while back is Bibb County doesn’t tax the increment on billboards and cell towers like other counties do. It’s a simple tax evaluation of rent that’s made off of those different towers. I own a billboard here in Macon and I receive rental income every month on that billboard. Well, it doesn’t tax me based on the rental that I make off there, only for the pure property value of the billboard itself. When we ran the numbers with a couple of other jurisdictions that I reached out to, including some tax assessors that left Bibb County went to these areas and we figured out there were about $500,000 that should be taxed to those people. Most of them are out of town and they’re just going to pass the few dollars it would be per billboard onto the person doing the advertising there. So it’s not local home, homeowners that we’re talking about $500,000 alone just on that revenue stream that we have there that we don’t even collect. That $500,000 could be used to get 10 blight, you know, mediation contractors out there looking at all these abandoned houses and making sure people are taking all these houses and keeping them in good repair and making sure that people, if they get fined, that they actually go to court and go through that process to eliminate blight. So these are some of the areas that we have and there’s a lot of franchise fees that Bibb County is not currently getting the other counties are getting. I think there’s many ways that we can make money and be more efficient. Uh, but that’s just one example that I can give you today.

“What would you do to improve race relations in our community?”
TRT 3:23
Well, I think race is always the elephant in the room. I will tell you that when I came on the school board back in 2013, I came to a divided board, and that divided board had four African Americans and four Caucasians on that board. For the very first meeting we had, we couldn’t even elect a president or vice president or treasurer on that board. So I think it’s something we have to have open and honest conversations about. You’ve got to find a common ground. And when I talk about common ground, if you go to North Macon or South Macon, East Macon, West Macon or you’re black or white or Brown, you have to find common ground. And so what do you look at? I think everybody appreciates a good education. That’s a good common ground that we can find between everybody of every race. Everybody wants to have a good job and have the opportunities to do better in life by educating themselves and getting a good paying job. So if we focused on those things, those are things we can find common ground. And I talked about the justice works. That’s one of the things I use as an example on how to find common ground. If you’re looking at somebody who’s tired of paying $55 a day to house an inmate on one area and neighborhood, and most of the people that are in jail and in Bibb County are African Americans. So if you look at that person in jail, they’re not talking about the $55 a day. They’re talking about the fact that this father is not home with his child or not paying child support, not contributing to the income of the family. So that mother, that’s usually there is having to make a choice between do I provide childcare for that child, or do I even work, or I just stay home; and they’re giving up. She’s given up valuable education and money that she could be earning for her future when this gentleman’s in jail. So when you look at the black, white issue, just surrounding that one thing there, you start looking at a common ground. We can find the person who may be predominantly white in North Macon is paying $55 a day. And the person who may be African American, who’s in jail that has a family member. You’ve got that common ground that you want that person to do better and not be back in jail over and over again and taking care of the child like they’re supposed to be taking care of the child. At the same time, you got that interest, just one there. Everybody has common ground. What I learned on the school board is you don’t go out there and you don’t try to solve all the world’s problems at one time. You build trust and you have relationships. We haven’t had a tied vote since that first day, first month I was on the board. We have eight people. It’s not easy to do. You have to make concessions. You make compromises and you listen to folks. And that’s what I found: the more we listen, the more we find common ground, the more we make sacrifices and make compromises and we get things done for all the community. And I think that is the main thing that to do. Quit living the silo. The (“On the Table”) open table was, was pretty good. But it isn’t bringing everybody from all the community on to the table. It gets the same people that we talk all the time, you’re going to have to break bread with each other and you have to learn about each other and you have to learn the differences and what you have in common. But the more you can find common ground and just fight the little battles over time. Don’t fight the whole war at one time. Just tackle the little things and the more you build trust and build a relationship, then you’re gonna be able to solve those heavy problems when you get there. So we’ve got to start somewhere. My campaign has been about positive, not negative. I want to bring people together. I believe I’m the only candidate that can bring people together because I’ve lived here my entire life in each segment from Unionville to Hillcrest to Bloomfield to all those different parts of Macon and going to the schools. I’ve lived around a different variety of people with different backgrounds and I think that’s the kind of person who can bring this community together.

“You were instrumental in bringing that trial and acquitted, uh, Dallemand. He [another candidate] was very much in favor of him. Is that going to be an issue?”
TRT 1:51
I don’t think it’s going to be an issue for me. I did come and I got elected at a time when Dr. Dallemand was the superintendent. I took office January the first or January the third of 2013 and he left in February of 2013. UDr. Dallemand saw very quickly that he was not going to have the simple majority that he had before when we were elected. I think the other thing Dr Dallemand learned is that when you have an attorney like myself who got on the school board, you’re going to ask the right questions. You’re going to look in the right places and you’re going to find the right type of things that they were trying to hide. It only took me about 60 days to realize that from the technology issues that we had involved in corruption then was rarely available. And I think, is it going to be an issue here? I don’t think it’s an issue for me. I don’t plan on running my race based on things that happened in the past. But the facts are the facts. You can’t take away the fact that the school system lost millions of dollars as a result of some corruption that happened. I was one of the person who came in and we turned that system around both financially and educationally. So what I want to talk about is not necessarily about who got charged or who didn’t get charged, but I want to talk about Bibb County presently having the highest graduation rate it’s ever had in our history. Bibb County has the highest CCPR score we’ve ever had in our history. Bibb County has the highest child reading on grade level than we ever had in our history. That doesn’t happen in a vacuum, that happens because of hard work and dedication of our staff and our teachers. And it also happens by having the right leadership in place. Those things with the court system, we bring it to their attention, they do their job and whatever happens, I don’t have any invested interests in that except for the fact that 80% or 75, 80% of our kids are African American. And a large part of the folks that were charged in this case happened to be African-American. That’s where it opens and closes and ends for me on that situation.

“Two or three sessions in and it looks like this current session is going to end without anything happening. What, as mayor, could you do to get that moving or do you think it needs to be moving?”
TRT 3:13
Well, I think if I want the OLOST (Other Local Option Sales Tax) to pass, I could have it passed. Uh, and the reason I say this is, in three successful attempts to have the OLOST passed and it’s basically dropped because of not partisan support. When you have a local delegation that’s comprised of a certain amount of Democrats or Republicans, they can’t set aside their differences to do what’s right for the community. But also the local delegates are realizing that the county government doesn’t have the full faith and support of the community. The difference, I believe when you have a new administration, number one, is there going to be a honeymoon period and they’re going to understand that we’re going to try to do what’s right. And I think with me having a record of doing what’s right in the school system and having successfully passed two E-Splosts, even after the problems we had with Romaine Dallemand and the issue they had financially there, I think it’s going to be a lot easier to pass. But what we have to remember is we can’t backdoor the taxpayers on getting other things done with the OIs in the intended purpose. What most people don’t understand is law requires a a hundred percent rollback of the OLOST. 50/50 is never going to pass legally because it would involve them changing the whole structure for all the consolidated governments in Georgia. That’s just not going to happen without local delegation, especially when you have three local delegations that the majority of the constituency lives outside of Bibb County, not in Bibb County. So they’re actually be paying more taxes and not getting the tax break. So people tell me that, oh, lots of revenue’s neutral and understand what that concept means. But the fact of the matter is we’ve been taxed to death in Bibb County. We’ve had consecutive tax increases of three mills and three mills from the County alone and we need some tax relief. One of the ways to do that is the OLOST, but we made sure we do what we say with the money. I have put up put across the idea of possibly having a one mil, a designation for the public safety. It’s different from the 80 20 that they were talking about now. You can’t do that in the whole sense of a one meal designation, but what you can do is have a net result. You can say we’re going to roll taxes 100% back, but you go ahead and let the taxpayers know ahead that we’re also going to increase the tax about one mil at the same time. So they know that the net result is going to be a six mil rollback instead of a seven mil. So you’ve accomplished a same goal bu you’ve also fully funded that public safety department, both police and fire and first responders. So I think we can do that, but we have to get all the people on board. We’re going to have to get Republicans and Democrats to put aside their differences and we’re gonna have to have a 100% rollback. And I think that’s the only way the people are going to do it. If you get it on the ballot is one thing. But getting the people to support it, it’s going to be the other thing. And I think I can do that. I’ve already met with each and every one of or spoken with the local delegation. Uh, not the ones that may have challenged it this time, but I spoke with him in the past. I know why they failed and I know what the politics was behind it. Simply together. We have to start this, the next mayor, if they’re elected in may or July this year, has to begin to work on that immediately. Not wait till the session starts next January, February. You’ve got to put together a committee and a plan now on how it’s going to be done. And you got to work out all the details before you even get to the next legislature. So you know, you don’t have to worry about is it going to cross over on crossover day because it’s going to be one of the first things on the menu when you start, and that’s something I do plan on doing this summer if I’m elected to be mayor.

“Randall brought up your opponent who bend through the corpses feminine. Um, one of the minority newspapers in town has also written a story last fall about um, questioning I guess your motive and cause junction with uh, Dr. Dolman. How would you answer people who say that this community is, um, unfairly targeting or scrutinizing minority leaders or trying to take them down?
TRT 1:55
A couple of things I can say. Number one is our school system, 75% African American. So what our school board did was prevent people from stealing money from African American students. And I say that because it’s the facts. When we decided to look at numbers to see why we were losing money, why we were paying $3.2 million for a server that’s worth $150,000l we didn’t know if the company was red, yellow, black or white, we had no idea the makeup of that company. What we knew was that Bibb county students were suffering and our staff and our students and our administration was suffering because we lost that kind of money. So what we did is we went out there following the money to find out whoever it was, it was but all we did is reveal the facts. That’s all we did. The Bibb County school board cannot charge anybody. I can’t make the decision to charge anyone. We filed a civil action to recover money. We sued 16 people and we recovered money from 15 separate companies, businesses and individuals and received a large verdict against Romaine Dallemand. So we did our part. The U S government has the part to do with involving who to charge. They decided based on the evidence, who they were going to charge. And that was a totally separate case. So, I think most people that I’ve talked to that understand the situation that had the true facts, they/you can look at. You can look at the decision there. And in our case, if you look at this vision by Judge Treadwell, you’ll see what happened in that case. You know, everybody’s entitled to a right to have a jury trial and whatever happens with that, we respect that verdict. As an attorney, I respect every verdict we, we have when we come out of there. That’s just part of the process. So what I’ll say is the process was open. We wanted it to go to court. In our case, we revealed everything through transparency and you can get everything in our case that was revealed, you can see on, on federal pacer account right now. So in our case was resolved. It’s resolved successfully for our staff, our students and our school system. So I think that’s how you get around that issue with there. If it becomes an issue, then we’ll just hit them with the facts.

“Do you have a plan or ideas of how you might alleviate [homelessness]?”
TRT 2:09
One of the things I will be doing in the realm of homelessness is making sure that we have a liaison that’s appointed by the mayor to handle all the nonprofits, so we get all the nonprofits on one page, pulling in the right direction. We have some great nonprofits, great foundations in Macon-Bibb County. But a lot of times they’re not on the same page. And I think we need to have somebody that can lead them through that area to make sure we get what needed to be done. For example, we have Daybreak down there and that’s a fabulous model that we can use and we can support. And I think Navicent supports that. And a lot of times when people say, you know, why do you give Navicent or don’t give Navicent money … which way you end up on that spectrum, that is one of the services that they help provide. And that’s one thing we can deal with our homelessness. The “justice works” that I talked about, you’ll be surprised on how many people that we see that are homeless now in Macon. They had issues with employment and issues with crime that if a justice works program was created and it was actually utilized properly, they wouldn’t be homeless. They would be in an apartment somewhere. But if you don’t have a a check stub saying that you’ve been employed for 12 months, you can’t get a legitimate apartment. So you ended up being homeless. Or if we have some systematic steps going on where it says, you can’t live with this woman because you are not married, therefore we encourage them not to live together to hold that family structure together. Uh, by making those policy changes and allowing that man perhaps to live there, that house to have a two party income, you wouldn’t have a homeless person there. We’re going to have to get back instead of having our jails from being mental health facilities to properly fund mental health. And if you look at what great job that that River Edge is doing out there, um, and we can make sure that we get the direct financing there or support that we can get there, you’re going to decrease the homelessness. Uh, there’s many things that we can do on that, but it’s going to take a holistic approach. It’s going to take people working together and it’s going to take people that, um, that have a heart and a passion for it. And I think we have those people here in Macon, Georgia. I just think that we’re not on the same page right now. And I think we have to start with, with the jail over there, you know, unfortunately that, you know, it’s cheaper for the jail to let them out because they can’t afford all the medications and the hospital visits a lot of times and they’ll let them out. But it becomes our society’s problem out there as a whole. And it’s something that we’re going to have to address. But I think we address them through those kinds of issues and those kind of ways.

“About the funding of Navicent, some people say the county shouldn’t. How do you feel about that?”
TRT 2:26
Well, we had a forum at Navicent already with several of the mayoral candidates and I, specifically told Navicent that I could not forsee, at least during my initial time as mayor, that I would give Navicent any money. We have to get our house in order first and get financially stable first. You know, the person that lives out in Lizella, who’s worked a full day at work and they go home and sit back on the couch, watch Andy Griffith and that’s exact same plot I gave them, they don’t understand that Navicent may have these millions of dollars of retained earnings with what they do for the community. And you can’t educate them when we’re getting a three mil tax increase here every day. So until we get out of the kitchen, as far as that’s concerned, and able to lower taxes and buy better services, we’re not gonna be able to give the Navicent some money. Navicent has foundation. It does wonderful things for our community and perhaps we can give some money to Navicent that’s used for purposes that Bibb County needs to provide, like the homelessness situation. So it’s an indirect way we could, we could fund some money for Navicent so they can actually let the state know that Hey, they are supported by us. They do provide money for us. But you can’t do that when you get a 3 million tax increase every year. And I certainly haven’t promised Navicent anything. I was the only candidate there at that forum that said, I would not give you any money. And I think they respect me for that because the mayor wanted to give money and the county commission said no. So you have to have people that are going to work with you. And that, that’s one thing I will say, and I know we’ve gone over our time, but as mayor, I want to have five to six people that are going to be working with me. It’s not going to be a situation where I have to worry about doing a veto or having somebody to overriding a veto because we’re gonna work together. There are people that are running out there that I think have the same vision and the same mindset that I have. And I think you’re going to see a new day with people working together. Uh, you’re not gonna see a divided County commission like you’ve had with this mayor for the last term at least. Uh, but people doing political posture, and I think you’re going to have five or six going to work together and hopefully the other two or three, are going to come on board and have a lot more input there.