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Tennant attacks Brown, wants spending cuts

Candidate urges settlement of bank lawsuit, sale of tennis center

By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizen.com

Dan Tennant may have been the last candidate to sign up to run against Steve Brown.

But the former City Councilman isn’t about to be the one who lets Brown cruise to victory. Tennant is critical of Brown’s style in office and claims that his full-time presence at City Hall has caused employee morale problems with city employees.

“The role of mayor and council is to set and establish policy,” Tennant said. “It’s the role of the city manager to implement those policies, and Steve is just meddling and interfering with administration tasks. He gets in the way.”

Although the job is officially listed as a part-time role, Brown spends “full-time” hours being mayor, Tennant said.

Tennant said if elected mayor, he would let the city manager do his job, which he argues Brown is not doing.

Tennant also says Brown has developed a style of attacking persons who disagree with him.

“He’s given us a black eye in terms of business and the Chamber of Commerce,” Tennant said of Brown, adding that the mayor has harmed relations with the Georgia Department of Transportation and other nearby governments including the Fayette County Commission. “The people I talk to are tired of it, and I definitely am tired of it.”

On the other side of the coin, however, Tennant credited Brown for being a good Christian person.

Tennant says the city should get an appraisal of the city-owned tennis center and then put it on the market for sale. The proceeds could be used to build the expansion of the city’s Gathering Place senior citizen’s center and build a place for young people to go have fun, he added.

The city could also use the proceeds of selling the tennis center to reach a negotiated settlement with Peachtree National Bank for the outstanding $1.5 million in loans left unpaid by the Development Authority after management of the venues, and the associated hotel-motel tax revenue, was transferred to the Tourism Association.

A private company could do a much better job of operating the tennis center, and tennis center members probably wouldn’t be disaffected by such a change, he said. Also, the city has plenty of public tennis courts that have been underused, Tennant added.

“I don’t know of too many things that a city can do better than a private company,” Tennant said.

Tennant said he thinks the bank would be willing to accept a lower figure in order to settle the lawsuit, which is pending in Fayette County Superior Court. The case has been in discovery for an extended length of time, leaving open the possibility that any newly elected council members could vote to change course in the suit and settle the case.

Although he admits the venues could have been managed better, Tennant argues that the city has a moral obligation to pay the loans because they were incurred to benefit the tennis center and amphitheater.

Tennant says he will also propose a 7 percent reduction in city spending, noting that property taxes have increased about 40 percent in the past five years. A reduction would be appropriate considering the cuts in spending that Delta employees have faced with the company’s reorganization under bankruptcy protection, he said, adding that he wants to make sure the police and fire departments have enough support to do their jobs in protecting the community.

“Public safety, to me, that’s priority number one,” Tennant said.

Tennant said he is also strongly against annexation in general, and that no annexation proposals benefit existing city residents.

“We don’t need more traffic, we don’t need more density, we don’t need crowded schools,” he said.

A 12-year resident of Peachtree City, Tennant currently lives in the Ardenlee subdivision. He is married to Robin Tennant and has two sons and one stepson, who happens to have developed Tennant’s campaign web site: www.tennantformayor.com.