Georgia House District 121 Rep. Eric Gisler began his ninth Town Hall Meeting at the Bishop Community Center last week saying it would be a little different from the others he had held.
Gisler said “he decided to blur the lines a little bit” between receiving feedback as a representative and receiving feedback as a candidate running for reelection.
He also invited fellow Democrat Ray Smith to join him. Smith is running for the open Senate District 46.
Gisler took more than a dozen questions on a variety of topics from the audience, at least some of whom were not regulars at his earlier Town Hall or Democratic Party meetings.
Many of the questions were directed at the issues Gisler dealt with in the General Assembly this past year or ones both he and Smith are likely to address in January if they are elected.
Gisler mentioned his opponent, Republican Mack “Dutch” Guest IV, only in passing, and Smith did not mention Marc McMain, the Republican candidate for Senate District 46.
The name of President Donald Trump came up only once, when Gisler described some items added to a bill in the Senate, and Gisler’s comments about his Republican colleagues in the House often were more favorable than critical.
Gisler used the opportunity at the end of the meeting to respond to the persistent attack mailers directed at him by a Texas organization that advocates for school choice. Gisler said the mailers misrepresent his legislative record.
Meeting Introduction
Bishop Mayor Drew Kurtz welcomed Gisler and the 32 people in the audience to the Bishop Community Center on Aug. 29, saying a $300,000 renovation of the building is continuing and “we're excited to have a Town Hall here, and we're excited that people came to Bishop.”
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| Kurtz 8/29/2026 |
“We appreciate when our representatives come down here and listen to us,” he said.
Gisler introduced Smith, who said he could spend a lot of time talking about policy, which he enjoys, but he would defer to the questions from the audience.
“The bottom line is I care about the community that I live in.” Smith said. “I care about my family, who's sitting over there. I care about the future that my son is going to have to experience.”
“And I'm running so that the people who don't care about those things aren't going to be in office anymore,” Smith continued. “We need a change of leadership in Georgia to get us back on track and moving in the direction that we know we need to go.”
All of Oconee County is in Senate District 46, which also includes parts of Clarke, Walton, Barrow, and Gwinnett counties.
Smith is from Oconee County. Republican McMain is from Walton County.
Gisler On Town Halls
“I pride myself on being transparent and accessible,” Gisler said before taking questions. “I've had Town Halls every month, two this month.”
Gisler said the Town Halls he has held since being elected last December “are nine more than I'd ever seen before.”
Gisler said he has lived in the district for 23 years, the last 14 in Oconee County, and the nine before that in Clarke County.
Gisler was elected in a special election after Republican Marcus Wiedower stepped down unexpectedly last year. Gisler defeated Guest in that special election by 198 votes.
“I'm doing the job the way that I think it should be done,” Gisler said. “I'm not focused on partisan bickering or anything. I'm really focused on digging into the issues.”
Gisler said he wants to use “real, actual data, apply logic to it.”
“I'm looking for conversations,” he continued. “I want to talk to people. That's why I'm having these Town Halls every month.”
“My mind is open to being changed,” Gisler said. “If you bring me real logic and real data, I'm more than happy to change my mind.”
Question On Partisanship
The first question posed to Gisler asked “what surprised you the most” when he assumed his seat in the General Assembly in January.
“I get that question a lot,” Gisler said.
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| Gisler 8/29/2026 |
“And I'll tell you, from the outside looking in, you think it's cats and dogs up there, Republicans and Democrats just constantly fighting, and it's really not.”
“There's really this sort of camaraderie,” he said.
“And I'll say, this is not a direct calculation, but I estimate maybe 90 percent of the bills that come through the House are quote-unquote bipartisan,” Gisler said. “They're just good policy. They just need to happen.”
“That other 10 percent is where the tensions start to come out a little bit,” he said.
“But it's not constant fighting at the State House like it looks like it is in Washington, D.C.” he said.
“So that was a little bit of a--I wouldn't say shock--but it was kind of an eye-opener,” he said.
“The other one I would say is--and I knew this going in, like on paper, but seeing it in person, it really kind of opened my eyes--is the party that's in power really controls everything,” Gisler said. “And when I say everything, I mean everything, especially in the House.”
Flipping The House
“How many seats would it take for Democrats to take over?” a questioner asked not long after Gisler made that comment.
“When I won my seat in December, that was seat number 81 in the House for the Democrats,” Gisler said. “There's 180 total seats, so it's 81 to 99,” Gisler said.
“So if we get 10 more this year, and I can keep this seat, then we'll see real change in the state,” he said.
“In the House, it is entirely possible this year, given just the political climate around the country,” he said. “Me keeping this seat is going to be tough because it is a gerrymandered Republican seat, but it's absolutely possible.”
Houston Gaines, who represents House District 120 but is running for Congress in November, presented a similar analysis, with a different outcome, to the Oconee County Republican Party on Aug. 24.
“The Democrats are nine seats away from flipping the State House, and that's pretty scary because there are 10 seats that were decided by less than 10 points” in the last election, he said.
“The Democrats are going to spend millions of dollars once again to try to flip the state house,” he said. “They're going to fail.”
Flipping The Senate
“We need to flip 10 and keep Eric's, and there are 21 that are within range of flipping,” Smith said in offering his analysis at the Bishop Town Hall meeting. Smith was deeply involved in Gisler's campaign for the December election. “So that 10 sounds like a big number, but in a previous similar election cycle, we flipped 14,” Smith said.
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| Smith 8/29/2026 |
“So it's entirely possible,” he said. “Eric won his seat before the Iran war. So there's a lot of tail winds that are helping us.”
“On the Senate side, it's a little bit more challenging because the Senate seats are, believe it or not, more gerrymandered than the House seats are,” Smith said.
“And so they tend to be a little bit more entrenched,” he said.
“But absolutely, we can flip five seats this year as well,” he said, giving the Democrats the Senate majority.
Redistricting
Gisler said he thinks there is a high likelihood that Gov. Brian Kemp will call the House and Senate back into session after the November elections to redistrict.
He said he thinks some Republicans are going to be leery of redistricting because some of the margins already are thin.
Gisler said he is working with others on legislation to create an independent redistricting commission, and “it'll be ready to go day one” of the January session.
“Independent redistricting commission means independent from the legislature,” he said. “The representatives and the senators don't have any control over what their district lines are going to be.”
“That's what the independent part is,” he said.
Data Centers
“There are a lot of people who just kind of, as a knee-jerk reaction, say we need a moratorium to stop everything,” Gisler said in response to a question on data centers. “And politically this year, that's probably a very easy thing to say.”
“I'm not really one to go to extremes,” he said. “My take on it is the way that we're doing it right now is not sustainable.”
“We have this data center tax credit on the state level that exempts them from sales taxes,” he said. “That even exempts the local portion of the sales tax, too, which people often don't talk about.”
“In addition to that,” he added. “A lot of the local communities that are allowing these data centers to come in are setting up multi-year tax abatement where they're not even getting the revenue. And that's really a local issue, but local officials need to be held to account for that.”
“So that's number one,” Gisler said. “We should stop incentivizing them outright. If local communities want to have them, then I believe in local control, so they need to have the ability to allow them in or regulate them if that's what the community wants to do.”
“And if they don't listen to the citizens locally, then they can pay the price for that,” he said.
Flock Cameras
“What are you guys' experiences on Flock cameras and kind of balancing that public safety with privacy?” another person asked.
Flock Safety is a company that has developed and marketed automatic license plate reader cameras, Smith said in explaining the question, “and there's been an explosion of those cameras appearing on our streets.”
“The data privacy concerns are very real,” Smith said. “There aren't sufficient safeguards on the system to make sure that people are safe. You should not be able to access that system without a warrant signed by a judge.”
“I don't think that this sort of technology should be used to surveil us,” Smith said, “and the arguments to say that the benefits outweigh the costs in terms of public safety, show me the data because everything that I have seen has said that that's not the case.”
“Everybody wants us to apprehend violent criminals as quickly as possible,” Gisler said. “I don't think anybody disagrees with that.”
“But I do share the concerns where we are seeing instances where law enforcement officers are misusing the system for personal reasons,” he said.
“I do think there are regulations that could be put in place to say you can't access the system and run a search unless you're tying it to a specific case that is open and of a certain type,” he said.
Education Funding
In response to a question on funding of education in Georgia, Smith said “I think that we should have decent education in every county in the state, not just the ones who have high-value property taxes.”
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| Smith, Left, And Gisler 8/29/2026 |
Smith said the state has not been contributing enough to education, and “local governments have to pick up the slack by increasing their local property taxes.”
“Georgia likes to talk a lot about how we're the number one state to do business in,” Smith said. “Well, the thing that attracts companies is an educated workforce, is a competent workforce, and if we're not investing in our education, we're undercutting that.”
The state underfunded the Quality Basic Education formula for “15 straight years,” Gisler said.
The state has “shifted a lot of those costs from the state to the local school board level,” Gisler said. “Particularly around transportation, a lot of the costs for buses, bus drivers, maintenance, gas, that kind of stuff has been shifted over to the local level.”
Local school boards have to pick up the cost for insurance for the non-certified personnel, such as custodians and the lunch staff, Gisler added, because the state does not provide funding for those things.
“So then a lot of the costs of public education have shifted to the local level,” Gisler said, “and that's even just outside of the QBE formula being outdated.”
Affordability And Taxes
“Healthcare expenses are one of the main expenses that people are facing right now,” Smith said in response to a question on affordability. Expanding Medicaid is part of the solution, he said.
Smith said he is not in favor of eliminating the state income tax.
“I don't want people that are struggling to have to pay more in income tax,” he said. “But there are so many people in the state that could afford to pay more in tax, and we can use that money to help everyone else that's struggling.”
“I was raised here in Georgia,” Smith said, “and I was taught that if you have the ability to help, if you have the resources to help, you have an obligation to help. And government, to me, is part of it.”
In the last session of the General Assembly, Gisler said, “the only thing that they (Republicans) offered to try to address affordability was eliminating property taxes and eliminating income taxes.”
“Eliminating income tax, that's $16 billion a year in general revenue,” Gisler said. “You've got to make that up somehow, or you've just got to cut all the services. Same sort of thing with property taxes at the local level.”
One way to offset some of those loses from cuts in the income tax, Gisler said, is to eliminate the data center tax credit.
“That is an easy way to generate more money for the state,” he said, “and it doesn't cost us a dime. That's very easy. That's a no-brainer.”
Legislation to do just that didn’t pass in the General Assembly this year, Gisler noted.
Attack Mailers
No one asked Gisler during the session in Bishop about the mailers from Texas attacking him, so he brought it up himself at the end of the meeting.
“Anybody get that mailer they sent out last week or two?” Gisler asked. “There was one with my face on it. It was dark and in the shadow. It said I was against schools for kids.”
“I get one every day,” someone shouted out.
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| One Of Mailers Attacking Gisler |
The mailers, which seem to be targeting voters labeled as Republican based on their selection of ballots in party primaries, say Gisler has voted against property tax relief, public safety, and education.
The mailers say they are paid for by American Federation for Children, Inc., with an address in Dallas. According to its web site, American Federation for Children is an advocate of School Choice.
The mailers don’t make reference to specific legislation, but Gisler said he assumed they were talking about his votes on three bills, HB 1116 (and accompanying HR 1114), HB 1076, and HB 328, all of which he voted against.
Gisler said he voted against HB1116 and HR 1114 because they were designed to eliminate property taxes for homeowners, but property taxes are paid to county and city governments and to school boards, and the largest expense for city and county government is public safety, and the largest expense for local schools boards is salaries.
“Had this bill passed, it would have defunded the police and public education,” Gisler said in a statement he created to respond to the advertisements.
HB 1076 “created a new felony in Georgia code if your car obstructs either state, local, federal police from their job,” Gisler said at the Bishop meeting.
“It was a five-year prison term, up to a $100,000 fine,” he said. “And we already have obstruction of justice laws in the state, so there's no reason to add a new one.” That bill also did not pass.
HB 328 “siphons even more money away from public education and diverts it to private school scholarships,” Gisler said in his rebuttal. “I am a strong supporter of public education, and I do not believe that public dollars should fund private education, especially at the expense of public schools.”
HB 328 passed the House and Senate and was signed by Gov. Kemp.
Mailer Source
“It's dark money, basically,” Gisler said when asked at the Town Hall meeting about American Federation For Children. “It's called an independent expenditure, so they're not coordinating with Dutch (Guest) or anything. They're just sending their own message out and saying it.”
“I'm the number one target for Republicans in the House this year because I flipped a seat that was supposed to be safe for them,” Gisler said earlier in the meeting.
At the Oconee County Republican Party meeting on Aug. 24, Party Chair Kathy Hurley pretty much agreed with that.
“The only thing that was worse than having Deborah Gonzalez as our district attorney was to see the final results in December where House District 121 went into the hands of Democrats,” she said.
Gonzalez, a Democrat, served as district attorney for Oconee and Clarke counties for four years.
“If there is any doubt in anyone's mind that the Democrat that currently holds that seat is moderate, we're going to make sure you know how not moderate he is,” she said. “Not at all. Not at all. Not even close.”
“The laundry list of people who endorsed him prior to and during that run, and the people he has affiliated, associated himself with since, it'll curl your hair,” she said.
“We have three goals,” she said. “House District 121, House District 120, and State Senate 46. All of those seats impact Oconee County in a very big way, and we’ve got to make sure that those stay in Republican hands and 121 goes back into Republican hands.”
Oconee Northeast Precinct is in House District 120, currently represent by Gaines. The Democratic candidate in the Nov. 3 election is Suzanna Karatassos. The Republican in Ward Black.
All six of the candidates for Senate District 46, House District 120, and House District 121 have agreed to participate in a candidate forum scheduled for 5:30 to 8 p.m. on Sept. 24 at the Community Center in Oconee Veterans Park, 3500A Hog Mountain Road.
Democrat Pam DeLancy, running for Congress for District 10, also has agreed to attend. Gaines said he is trying to manage his scheduled to attend as well.
Video
The video below is of the entire Town Hall Meeting on Aug. 29.
The room had a lot of background noise, and the audio is sometimes hard to follow.
To see the mechanically generated closed caption, click the CC button at the bottom, right of the screen.
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