David Bennett, chairman-elect of the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners, has completed his state-required three-day training, had transitional conversations with all new and continuing commissioners and with outgoing Chairman Roy Thompson, and is scheduled to be sworn-in on Dec. 30.

In an interview Monday, Bennett said that he supports passage of a six-year extension of the SPLOST sales tax set for a March 18 referendum. He indicated that he wants the board to hire a professional search firm for a careful, unhurried search for a new permanent county manager but meanwhile is pleased that Interim County Manager Cindy Steinmann, previously assistant county manager, accepted the interim role. Bennett also emphasized the priority of needs such as fixing and upgrading storm-damaged county roads over ideas such as a special audit or privatizing Splash in the Boro waterpark.

Bennett is arriving in office as part of a ballot-box revolution of sorts. His win in the Republican primary back in May now sends Thompson home from the board after 20 years of service, including the last eight as chair after 12 as a district commissioner. Meanwhile, Commissioner Ray Davis has already replaced former Commissioner Curt Deal, and Nick Newkirk is set to replace Commissioner Jappy Stringer after Republican primary and primary runoff upsets.

Still, this will leave the breakout of district-elected commissioners as two established Republicans, two newly elected Republicans and two established Democrats, not necessarily a formula for sweeping change. Elected county-wide, Bennett as chair has a potentially influential but limited role – in effect that of a county mayor – able to present topics, argue for viewpoints and call for motions, but only getting to vote in case of a tie, when his vote will be decisive.

“I think we’re all going to work for the best of Bulloch County, for the benefit of the people of Bulloch County, and I think that it’s going to require some give-and-take,” he said Monday morning. “Over the last week or so I’ve reached out to all the incoming commissioners, and we’ve all talked, and I think that we will work to build relationships and to work together and to make sure that we are working for the people.”

By “incoming commissioners,” he confirmed, he meant all who will be in office as of January.

“As we talked with every one of them, I think that there’s some things that we don’t necessarily agree on, but there was a whole lot more that we did agree on than we didn’t, and I think that we’ll start by focusing on the things that we agree on, and then we’ll work out the differences on the other things,” Bennett said.

Talks with Thompson

He reports also having “had a really good conversation last week with Roy Thompson.” Thompson had also spoken positively of their Tuesday, Dec. 10, conversation.

“It’s hard to take 20 years of experience and share that it one conversation, but really what is most valuable to me is that he’s willing to be somebody that I can use as a resource, and allow me to pick up the phone when I have questions and say, ‘Hey, what’s the background on these things?’” said Bennett.

He said this “history,” of how certain things got to be the way they are with the county government, has been an area where he is lacking. One example he cited is the intergovernmental agreement whereby the county collects a special property tax and pays the city for service by the Statesboro Fire Department outside the city limits within five miles of its stations.

Bennett thought this “the craziest thing (he’d) ever heard of” at first. But after hearing county Fire Chief Ben Tapley’s explanation, he understands the background in the development of the Bulloch County Fire Department from an all-volunteer service to an increasingly professional one, he said. Now he is on board with the current commissioners’ recent vote to negotiate for a new agreement, letting the current one expire June 30.

“At the time that (agreement) was the best they could do to benefit the people of the county, so that’s what they did,” Bennett said. “Well, things are different now, so in order to benefit more of the people of the county, it’s time to renegotiate that.”

Bennett, 50, originally from Jesup, has been a Bulloch County resident currently since 2020, but first arrived here decades earlier while a student at Georgia Southern University, where he participated in ROTC and graduated in 1998.

He then served in the Army Nurse Corps and later attained a master’s degree and post-master’s certificate from the University of Virginia as an acute-care nurse practitioner and critical care specialist. Since retiring from the Army in 2020, he is working again as a flight nurse, this time with civilian, commercial Air Evac Lifeteam 95, based in Statesboro.

Manager search

Former Bulloch County Manager Tom Couch, who served 20 years in that role, left the last week of November for a job with a county in South Carolina.

Steinmann, assistant Bulloch County manager since 2021 but a member of the county staff since 2014, then signed a contract with the commissioners to serve as interim county manager until they find and hire a permanent manager.

“We will start out the first of the year doing a search,” Bennett said. “We’re looking at actually getting a professional search firm to assist us in doing that. We don’t want to go and try to do this on our own.”

But he added that in conversations with Steinmann, “the first thing I told her is, one, that I’m excited that she’s willing to take on the responsibility as the county manager, and two, I wanted her to know that I have full confidence in her ability to do the job.”

Bennett observed that Steinmann has as much experience as Couch did when he started as Bulloch County manager 20 years ago and was already working for the county.

“So she has several years of institutional knowledge that he didn’t have coming in the door, which is going to help with that transition coming in,” Bennett said. “So I’m excited that she’s willing to take that on. The one thing that I did tell her was that this is not something that I want to make a hasty decision with.”

He said he doesn’t want to hurry the search for a county manager but to “make sure we find somebody who is not only qualified but is a good fit for the job that has a personality that will match well with our commissioners and our constituents here in the county.”

SPLOST support

Anyone who thought that the new commissioners would oppose the proposed extension of the 1% Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or SPLOST, because they are “anti-tax” needs more information. Davis, while serving as vice chair at a recent meeting, wasn’t able to vote on the SPLOST resolution but said, “We need this” and called for voters to support it in the March  referendum so the county can pay for some long-term projects and purchases without increasing property tax.

Bennett also supports passage of the SPLOST referendum.

“Absolutely,” he said. “You know SPLOST is something that’s been here for a long time, and SPLOST is something that will help to fund some major infrastructure projects that we need in the county, particularly a new jail (expansion and renovation) here. These are things that are going to have to be purchased, and if we don’t have a SPLOST, the reality is that in order to fund these things, our property taxes will likely end up having to increase to fund these things.”

He said he doesn’t want anyone to perceive this as a threat to raise property tax but that the alternative would be a long delay in the proposed projects. The SPLOST revenue earmarked for county projects is equal to about 4 mills of property tax, he said.

Not his priorities

A couple of ideas the Statesboro Herald asked Bennett about were suggested by citizens during public comment times at commission meetings or by other commissioners-elect, but turn out not to be his priorities.

One is the possible sale or contracting to private management of Splash in the Boro waterpark, which is owned by the county through its Recreation and Parks Department. Bennett noted that he has heard contradictory reports of whether Splash is really losing money or only looks that way because of technicalities in the accounting.

“I think that Splash is something that we need to take a look at, but I’m going to be real honest with you that I think that we have  a lot bigger issues in the county, and when I look at priorities as far as what’s going on, in the bigger picture Splash in not one of my top priorities right now,” Bennett said.

“But the bigger picture is, we’ve had three big storms that have come through the county in the last year, and we still need to repair roads, we need to see about getting these roads where every time it rains they’re not washing out, to where we’re not constantly having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair them,” he said.

That, and solving staffing issues for the Public Works Department, and upgrading the county Fire Department to better serve all the county outside Statesboro, are  things he sees as top priorities, he said.

It was Newkirk, not Bennett, who previously suggested hiring an auditor to perform a forensic audit of the county’s business operations “to figure out where the money is actually going.”

Bennett noted that the county government’s budgeting and accounts, by law, are audited annually.

“I don’t know if we want to go incurring the expense of doing a forensic audit,” he said. “It’s very expensive to do it. If we saw that there was some kind of malfeasance that we need to look into, absolutely, but just to do it to say that we did it, I don’t know if that’s the right answer.”