Kalki Yalamanchili told the gathered Republicans on Monday night that he is prepared to start addressing staffing problems in the Western Judicial Circuit District Attorney Office the day after the election.
Yalamanchili said he feels good about his prospects in his challenge of incumbent District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, and he said he has had conversations with a number of persons who are interested in working with him as assistant district attorneys.
Problems keeping the District Attorney Office fully staffed have played a central roll in the campaign between Gonzalez, a Democrat, and Yalamanchili, running as an Independent.
Gonzalez has said she is making progress in fully staffing her office with qualified prosecutors and has blamed salary as the key source of her problems with staffing over the last nearly four years.
Staffing should not be a problem, Yalamanchili said , “because people want to live here.”
Yalamanchili was one of six speakers at the final Oconee County Republican Party meeting before the Nov. 5 election.
All six are on the ballot, but only five have opposition in the election, and in two of those cases, the opposition is from a Democrat who is not being supported by the party.
At the end of the day on Wednesday, with two days of advance in-person voting remaining, 19,904 Oconee County voters had cast a ballot either in-person or via an absentee ballot, or 62.1 percent of the active voters in the county.
First Two Speakers
Incumbent Tax Commissioner Jennifer Riddle, on the ballot as a Republican and without a challenger, used her time to talk about improvements she has implemented in the office. About 35 people attended the meeting at the Oconee County Piedmont campus.
Included in the improvements in her office, Riddle said, is the option to pay the tax bill online through oconeecountypay.com and installation of a kiosk at Kroger on Epps Bridge Parkway.
Riddle said property tax collection is at 18 percent and, historically, will be about 98 percent before a second mailing goes out after the Nov. 15 deadline. In the end, she said “I have it pretty easy. Most everybody in Oconee County pays their taxes.”
Mark Thomas, running for his third four-year term on the Board Of Commissioners Post 1, said he was most satisfied that during his term the county has improved broadband service in the county.
The commissioners voted to use $1.7 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds to subsize a Charter Communications buildout of broadband in underserved areas mostly in the central and southern parts of the county.
Charter, which operates locally as Spectrum, also received a federal grant through the Federal Communications Commission to provide broadband largely in the southern part of the county, where Thomas lives.
“Those who are in the rural areas and the unserved areas have really benefitted from that,” Thomas said.
Thomas is opposed on the ballot by Suzannah Heimel, running as a Democrat. The party actually is campaigning against her and two others running as Democrats, Laura King, for Clerk of Superior Court, and Sheri Ward Long, running for Post 4 on the Board of Education.
Yalamanchili Up Next
Yalamanchili has spoken at Democratic Party events, but he has been strongly embraced by the Oconee County Republican Party. No Republican stepped forward to challenge Gonzalez, who represents both Oconee County and Athens-Clarke County in the Western Judicial Circuit.
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| Yalamanchili 10/28/2024 |
“What we’re being told right now is that you have to have one or the other,” he said. “That’s absolutely a false choice. The community deserves both of those things, and we need to demand both of those things.”
Responding to a question, Yalamanchili addressed staffing, which had played a key role at a forum with Gonzalez on Oct. 15 at Hill Chapel Baptist Church in Athens-Clarke County and on Oct. 22 at Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Services Building in Athens-Clarke County.
“One of the first things I did after I announced my campaign in October of last year was I started calling people that I knew were good prosecutors,” Yalamanchili said.
Some of these people live here in the circuit and work in other circuits, he said.
Some live and work in other circuits “but they are people who would rather be living in Athens than where they are living currently.”
“A lot of these people are people that Ms. Gonzalez has tried to hire, people that used to work for her and left, or they are people who worked under the previous administration,” he said.
“This circuit has never been a difficult place to hire and retain attorneys because people want to live here,” Yalamanchili added.
“I feel like we’ve done a good job running a good campaign,” he said, “so I feel good about where we are. And we’re going to finish strong.”
Hale
“This election for me,” Hale said when he came to the front of the room to speak, “is just one of those things that I have to go through.”
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| Hale 10/28/2024 |
Hale said his Democratic challenger Reginald Wade “may have grown up here in Oconee County, but he hasn’t been here in over 40 years.”
“He came back in 2021,” Hale said, “but the thing is that there’s a whole lot of things going on here in Oconee County that have been going on for the last 20 plus years that I’ve been a part of the Sheriff’s Office.”
“These things that we worked on for all of these years as a Sheriff’s Office are starting to come to fruition for me,” he said.
Hale cited his work as sheriff for the least nearly four years with Oconee County Schools as an example. He noted that his office currently is working with the schools to develop a school resource officer program.
“I can tell you we’ve got a great relationship with our county government,” he said. “We’ve got a great relationship with our county school system. We’ve got a great working relationship with all of our cities.”
Hale says he does need more people in his office. At present, he has 99 employees, he said, including 36 patrol car deputies.
Hale said that “most of the clientele that we have to deal with on a daily basis, most of that doesn’t live here...We only police about 10 percent of our (Oconee County) population...There’s 90 percent of you all that are pretty good people.”
Hammond And Gaines
Hammond said he is executive director of the Georgia 4H Foundation and “I have a passion for youth development, and I want to bring that to the School Board.”
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| Hammond 10/28/2024 |
“My whole campaign is really built around a few principles,” he said, “and that's communication and transparency.’
He said he worked in broadcast journalism for 15 years “and I know first-hand how to look into things, how to research things, really how to hold people accountable and shine that spot light where it needs to be shown.”
Hammond said he also was concerned about school security and that he wants to make sure Oconee County Schools serves students who want “to go to Harvard or UGA, Athens Tech, or the military, or straight into the work force.”
Post 4 on the Board of Education is open with incumbent Tim Burgess stepping down. Post 5 also is open, and Republican Brock Toole, who did not attend the meeting on Monday, is competing with Democrat Katie Green for that post.
Houston Gaines, who arrived at the meeting late because he was in Atlanta, where former President Donald Trump was on Monday, spoke very briefly.
Gaines represents the 120th House District, which includes Marswood Hall and Bogart precincts in Oconee County, told the Republicans that Democrats are making a serious challenge for control of the House. He is being challenged by Democrat Andrew Ferguson.
“If we lose the House,” he said, “It is nearly as bad as losing the governor.”
Gaines said his “number one issue is public safety,” but he also is focused on the cost of living.
Other Posts On Elections
Ransom, Hammond, and Toole spoke at the August Republican Party meeting. The Oconee County Republican Party does not allow video or audio recording of its meetings, but I posted a summary of that meeting here.
Hale and Angela Elder-Johnson, incumbent Republican Clerk of Superior Court, spoke at the September meeting of the Oconee County Republican Party and I posted a summary of the comments they made in a post I made after attending that meeting.
The party also held a candidate forum in March leading up to the May Party Primary.
Again, no recording of the meeting was allowed by the party leadership, but I did post a summary of the comments of the candidates after the forum.
The Oconee County Democratic Party gave Wade and Green an opportunity to speak at its meeting on Oct. 17, and a summary of those comments as well as a video of the meeting is in a post I did after the meeting.
I also covered and video recorded the forums for Gonzalez and Yalamanchili on Oct. 15 at Hill Chapel Baptist Church in Athens-Clarke County and on Oct. 22 at Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Services Building in Athens-Clarke County.
I conducted interviews with Hammond and his challenger Sheri Ward Long, and with Green and Toole. The stories I wrote include links to those video interviews.
I interviewed Michael Ransom, running unopposed for Post 1 Chair of the Board of Education, and asked him about the referendum the Board of Education put on the ballot to change how the chair of the Board is elected. That video interview is with that post.
Finally, I reported on how the two statewide Constitutional Amendments and one statewide referendum on the ballot will affect Oconee County.
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