Nick Newkirk, Republican candidate for Seat 2-C on the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners, holds controlling taxation and growth and increasing transparency to be his and voters’ top concerns.

Now 45, Newkirk grew up in Effingham County but moved to Bulloch in 2003, and so has been a resident here for 21 years. He has owned and operated Crazy Nick’s Inflatables for 15 years and is in the process of opening another business, Little Nicky’s Pizzeria, in Brooklet.

After emerging from the Republican primary in May in the lead over both incumbent Seat 2-C Commissioner Jappy Stringer and fellow Republican challenger Brian Pfund, Newkirk received 64% of the votes in a primary runoff against Stringer to become the Republican nominee.

Meanwhile, Democratic candidate Len Fatica ran unopposed in his party’s primary. So Newkirk and Fatica are now vying in the Nov. 5 general election, for which early voting is well underway.

“I’ve been pretty consistent from the get-go that the big things are the taxes, the growth and the transparency,” Newkirk said this week. “You know I’ve been out there talking with the citizens in everything I’ve been doing here in Brooklet, and we did a lot of water drop-offs in the rural parts of the county whenever Helene came through, and everybody that I’ve talked to it’s the same thing. It’s the taxes, the growth and the transparency.”

Those “drop-offs” were distributions of bottled water that several Republican challenger candidates and Bulloch Action Coalition supporters carried out while power outages persisted after the hurricane.

He and his wife, former Board of Education member April Newkirk, made a trip to Cartersville to pick up five pallets of water donated by police there.  Volunteers collected other donations of water and food and distributed them at locations such as churches.

Controlling growth

Both of the Seat 1-C contenders mentioned the county’s Smart Bulloch 2045 updated comprehensive plan, which the current commissioners formally adopted last spring. This followed the board’s approval, a year earlier, of a new zoning ordinance and Future Land Use Map.

“With the growth, we’ve got this master plan that we’re not using,” Newkirk said. “We need to get back to using what we’ve paid for. We’re developing land outside the growth map, in areas zoned Ag-5 that’s actually farm land right now.”

He noted that a couple of residential subdivision rezoning requests will be coming before the commissioners in November and referred to at least one of them as “outside the growth map.”

“There’s places for that, and I think we’ve got to be proud of the land that we have, because as soon as you starting dropping in half-acre lots here and there, you don’t get a re-do to undo that again,” Newkirk said.

Suggests an audit

In previous interviews, he said newly elected commissioners should begin looking for ways to reduce spending and reduce taxes they arrive on the job. Now he suggests a special audit would help.

“As far as the budget, the taxes, I think we need to talk about possibly getting a forensic auditor in here to figure out where the money is actually going to,” Newkirk. said. “I don’t want to cut emergency services; that’s never been one of my plans. I don’t want to cut the Sheriff’s Department; that’s not anything I want to do, but we need to be taking a long, hard look at the budget and see what we can cut. I mean, we owe that to the citizens.”

Noting a $2.44 million Workforce Housing Grant that the OneGeorgia Authority awarded to the Development Authority of Bulloch County in June, Newkirk observed that the commissioners committed $250,000 in support.

“And I’m not sure why taxpayers are helping a developer make money,” Newkirk said. “That’s just not something I think we need to be doing.”

The county’s $250,000 would go to pave Anderson Cemetery Road between Highway 67 and Clifton Road, according to Chairman Roy Thompson’s letter, quoted in a June 14 story.

In 2023, after a large rise in real estate prices was reflected in tax assessments, the commissioners raised their millage rate from 11.35 mills to 12.85 mills. But they rolled the rate back to 11.35 mills this August. This came with some reduction in the county’s projected year-end balance.

“They did roll it back, but they really didn’t announce that they were pulling $2 million out of the rainy-day fund account to balance the budget,” Newkirk said. “So yeah, they rolled it back, but technically, although they didn’t spend the money from the taxpayers this year, next year … we’re already $2 million in the hole.”

Transparency

“I want to be able to encourage people to stand up at these meetings and talk. …,” he said.  “The last couple of meetings where they’ve had public (comments), I felt like a couple of the commissioners were attacking the public speakers.”

Anger directed by some of the public toward the officials, he suggests, follows from a lack of communication.

“They wouldn’t have to get up there and speak if people were answering phone calls and text messages and emails like they should, and I think there’s just a lot of pent-up anger that the lack of transparency brings on,” Newkirk said. “The voices need to be heard.”

Experience

“My opponent says that I don’t have any experience, but I have plenty of real-world experience working with people and small business owners locally,” said Newkirk. “I don’t think we need any more experienced-government candidates for this job. We have seven commissioners right now that have close to a hundred years of commissioner experience combined, and look where that’s got us.”