Champion Newspaper
By Jay Phillips
June 3, 2020
Tucker Summit Community Improvement District (CID) hosted a pre-election survey for candidates vying for the Georgia State Senate, District 41 seat being vacated by Sen. Steve Henson, and the CID has now released the results to the public.
According to Tucker Summit CID President Emory Morsberger, the survey addresses some of the key points the position impacts. Henson’s office is in the Tucker Summit CID, and Morsberger said Henson was active in many of the CID’s projects.
“We had originally planned to have a public forum for them … COVID-19 came along and shot us out of the water,” Morsberger said. “We decided the next best thing to do was have them online with us on a ZOOM call and ask them questions from our owners [of businesses in the CID] and sent [the candidates] a survey which they completed and we have sent out.”
Morsberger said the work the CID did was unbiased and only consisted of asking the candidates questions.
“We don’t take political positions,” Morsberger said. “We can’t endorse one candidate or other, but we can ask questions and convey their answers to our members. It’s up to the members and the voters to figure that out; we don’t tell them how to vote.”
According to Morsberger, state senators can impact everything from traffic to the structure of county government.
“It’s important for our state senator to know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it,” Morsberger said.
He also said the position could play a vital role in COVID-19 regulations.
“Right now, our CID has a lot of manufacturing operations that are worried about the virus,” Morsberger said. “You have a huge amount of public health policy created at the state level. We want to make sure our businesses are able to function. We have manufacturing operations that read the new rules and basically adopted everything they needed to do to continue operating, and those are state rules.”
Morsberger said questions regarding the Georgia Transportation Infrastructure Bank and DeKalb County’s government structure were two of the most important questions on the survey, because those decisions are made by the delegation from DeKalb County.
“The very last question on the survey, that talks about the form of the DeKalb County commission. There are 159 counties in Georgia, and only one has a structure where there is a county commissioner and a separate CEO,” Morsberger said. “When you have that set up, and two different chains of command, you have two different sets of people you have to go through to get things approved. Right now, this isn’t a big problem because they’re working together.”
According to Morsberger, he hasn’t had trouble with the current government but is afraid of what the structure may cause problems with the wrong people in charge.
“I’m very careful with this question,” Morsberger said. “I’m not pointing at the current people … but, when they’re gone and replaced with somebody else, we could end up with a mess. One of our goals is to try to get our governments set like the other governments … this is decided by DeKalb County people and is very relevant for this senate position.”
The five candidates campaigning to fill the Georgia Senate, District 41 seat are William Park Freeman (R), Gil Freeman (D), Mohammed Jahangir Hossain(D), Kim Jackson (D) and Beverly R. Jones (D).
The responses to the Tucker Summit CID Georgia Senate, District 41 candidates can be found on the Tucker Summit CID website, here: https://tuckersummitcid.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Senate-District-41-Combined-Candidate-Responses-2020.pdf