Candidates Find Little to Argue About

The five Republican candidates running in a special election to replace the late Bobby Franklin in northeast Cobb County’s House District 43 agreed with each other on just about every issue thrown at them during a forum Monday night at Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church.

On the same night that candidates seeking the GOP’s presidential nomination sniped at each other in Tampa during a debate on CNN, the Republicans in Cobb were civil and in accord on such things as immigration, transportation, guns in churches and the need to repeal “Obamacare.”

The candidates are Roy C. Barnes, an 81-year-old real estate agent; John Carson, 39, an accountant at SunTrust; Don Hill, 69, a former Cobb GOP chairman; Robert Lamutt, 55, a former state senator; and Geraldine Wade, 57, a physician.

The election is next Tuesday, Sept. 20. If a runoff is needed it will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 18. The winner will represent northeast Cobb in the 2012 legislative session.

Early voting continues through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., at two locations: the East Cobb Government Service Center, 4400 Lower Roswell Road; and the Cobb Elections Main Office, 736 Whitlock Avenue.

Franklin, 56, who held the seat for 15 years, at his northeast Cobb home July 26 of a suspected heart attack.

Monday night’s forum was sponsored by the Cobb County Republican Party (no Democrats are running). Moderator Jim Galloway, a political columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, directed one of his first questions at Lamutt.

The AJC reported Monday that the Internal Revenue Service filed two liens totaling about $136,500 against Lamutt in 2009 for unpaid taxes. The newspaper’s article quoted Lamutt saying he had worked out a payment plan with the IRS for the debt related to his commercial real estate business.

Galloway asked the candidate to explain the situation. “Like virtually everybody in commercial real estate, we got to the point where we had more taxes than we had income,” Lamutt said, adding that he was advised to “go ahead and bankrupt the company, fire all your employees and start over.”

Lamutt said he had 15 employees at Diversified Assets Management who “were family,” and instead called up the IRS to set up a payment plan, which is ongoing.

Sensing that there were “some tea party fans out there” in the audience of about 75 people, Galloway asked the candidates for a specific area where state government is involved and should not be.

While candidates agreed that less taxes and smaller government would be a good thing, Hill got the most applause when he suggested that corporate income taxes are really “a double taxation on us.” 

The candidates agreed that immigration reform was needed because Washington wasn’t getting the job done. “I have empathy for the [Georgia] farmers because they need someone to harvest these crops,” Barnes said. “But at the same time we need control – federal or state. Control the immigrants coming in.”

All five candidates are against the proposed set to be voted on next year.

“I don’t see the benefit for Cobb, and I definitely don’t see the benefit for northeast Cobb,” Carson said. “It’s too heavily weighted to mass transit.”

Wade worried about “the so-called” matching funds from the federal government. “It’s like getting money from China,” she said.

Lamutt called it “a back door for MARTA,” and added that “Fulton and DeKalb counties, I hate to tell you, don’t have our best interests at heart.”

Barnes said “we should be looking to try to kill this tax,” and Hill ended the discussion by saying: “We’re a bedroom community. Mass transit doesn’t work.”

All the candidates want to repeal President Obama’s health care reform. Wade, the physician, held up a copy of her plan against the legislation which she said she was posting on her website.

The group also agreed that carrying a concealed weapon in a church would be OK if church officials approved.

Lamutt, the only candidate who has held public office, was the only one at the forum who had a firm choice for president. “I want the smartest guy in the room,” he said. “And the smartest guy in the room is Newt Gingrich.”