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Doug Kidd
The candidates for chairman of the Franklin County Board of Commissioners recently provided written answers to questions submitted by the Franklin County Citizen Leader.
The questions were:
1. Please provide information about your background, education, past service in government or with community organizations, church and family.
2. What experience (professional, personal or service) do you feel best qualifies you and will serve you best as chairman of the Franklin County Board of Commissioners?
3. Do you support the county’s new Unified Development Code and are there any changes you would like to see made to it?
4. Growth has been a big topic in Franklin County of late. What criteria will you use in deciding requests for rezoning, conditional use permits and other applications from developers?
5. How should the county balance resources to address issues in one area – Gumlog, for example – while maintaining needed services in the rest of the county?
6. If you had a chance to speak one-on-one with each registered voter in Franklin County, what would you say to secure his or her vote?
Stories were then written from their answers.
Doug Kidd
By Shane Scoggins
Publisher
LAVONIA – Doug Kidd has spent more than a decade advising local governments as a city attorney, has served as municipal court judge in Lavonia and Canon for four years and as chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections for five more.
Now, Kidd is running for chairman of the Franklin County Board of Commissioners.
“There’s pretty much nothing that I will encounter as chairman that I haven’t seen before in my career,” Kidd said. “I’ve helped draft budgets, negotiate intergovernmental agreements, dealt with state agencies and kept my clients out of legal trouble. We need a steady hand to take over the chairmanship, and my experience in dealing with these types of issues make me ready to lead the county.”
Kidd is a native of McDonough, which was a lot like Franklin County is today back in the 1980s when he grew up.
“I remember my mom having to cash a check on a Sunday night for lunch money the next day for me and my brothers and having to drive 15 minutes away from our house to the closest gas station to do so,” he said. “Then in the 1990s, the area started to grow with industry and warehouses coming in. It looked a lot like how Jackson County looks today. I left in 1999 after I graduated high school, but I know what uncontrolled growth looks like, and it looks like what is currently coming up the I-85 corridor.”
Kidd majored in journalism and graduated in 2002 from Georgia Southern University, where he met his wife, Lavonia native Beth.
The couple married in 2004.
While working as a sportswriter in college, Kidd covered a high school football team that won a state championship and two national championships for Georgia Southern.
Kidd worked as a copy editor at the Chattanooga Times Free Press before deciding to go to law school at Stetson University College of Law in St. Petersburg, Fla.
He graduated from Stetson in 2008 and moved back Lavonia.
“I hung out my shingle for my law practice,” he said. “Since that time, I’ve practiced just about every type of law, and I spend a lot of my time in the courtroom. I focus my practice now mostly on representing local governments and small businesses.”
The Kidds have one son, Henry, who is a sixth grader at Franklin County Middle School. Beth is an insurance agent at Skelton Morris Insurance in Hartwell.
Earlier this year, Kidd began boxing at Contemporary Martial Arts in Hartwell to get in shape hopes to have his first sanctioned fight sometime next year.
Kidd said he supports the county’s new Unified Development Code, calling it “a good start.”
“We need to encourage some growth in the county and it’s a good idea to encourage this growth in the areas most able to accommodate it,” he said. “I like how the UDC allows for more growth near our cities and the interstate corridor, while still respecting the rural nature of our county. We need to keep farm land as farm land, but also allow more housing and commercial industry to be built.”
When considering future development applications, Kidd said he will weigh property rights with the rights of neighbors.
“The main criterion is that private property owners are free to do with their land as they wish, so long as the development doesn’t cause a nuisance to their neighbors,” he said. “So, in my mind, there should be a presumption that the proposed use is allowed, unless it can be shown that the development is going to pollute the air, water or soil, or otherwise disturb the neighbors’ enjoyment of their own property.”
Elected officials need to avoid picking and choosing which developments are built based on “personal connections or outside pressure,” he said.
“Once rules are in place, the county has to follow those rules,” Kidd said. “And if a developer has complied with those rules, then the county has to let them build what they want to build. The county can’t pull the rug out from under an applicant just because of outside pressure. Otherwise, it’s a due process violation and lawsuits occur.”
Taxpayers’ money should be spent on services that benefit the whole county, Kidd said, not defending lawsuits that should have never come to fruition.
“The county has done a poor job of anticipating the problems that are currently at our doorstep,” he said. “We need to revise our ordinances so the next set of problems are taken care of before they even start. I will work hard to be sure the county is following the law so that there will be no basis for these types of lawsuits.”
Kidd said the number one job of government is public safety.
“If we don’t feel safe in our homes or feel our property is protected from thieves, then the other duties of government don’t matter,” he said. “Right now, the northern part of the county is inundated with burglaries, drug dens and nuisance properties. And in the short run, that’s where the focus should be. It’s a law enforcement issue but also a code enforcement issue.”
Kidd suggested that Franklin County work with Stephens County to deal with issues in Gumlog.
“I’d like to see Franklin County and Stephens County come together to fund a joint auxiliary law enforcement building for the Gumlog area,” he said. “Right now, both counties struggle with crime in that area and struggle with response times from Carnesville and Toccoa. A jointly-funded building in the area would allow both counties to have deputies in the area that would cut down on response times and be a deterrent to crime.”
The county also needs to go to court to clean up dilapidated houses in the area, he said.
“Likewise, state law allows counties to use marshals and constables to patrol for code enforcement,” Kidd said. “The county needs to use the legal process to force absentee property owners to clear dilapidated homes that are currently being used for drug dens and burglary safehouses. These moves would make Gumlog safer and would allow the county to get back to providing services equally to all parts of the county sooner.”
Kidd promises taxpayers that he will represent the county “conservatively and with the utmost professionalism.”
“Franklin County is a great place to live, and I will listen to your concerns and work for you so that it remains great,” he said. “I believe the county needs to listen to every resident and make decisions based on the evidence and the law, not on personal connections. That’s my promise to you.”