Newspaper Page Text
4A Sunday, December 30, 2018
The Times, Gainesville, Georgia | gainesvilletimes.com
★ LOCAL
DEAL
■ Continued from 1A
begin in August 2019.
“It’s going to have a very posi
tive effect on our entire region.
Because it does provide a lower cost of
transporting ^manufacturers’) product, it
is going to be a magnet for companies that
want to locate and I think we will see the
effects of that spill over even into adjoining
counties,” Deal said.
Another project in that area of Hall that
Deal’s administration helped bring home
is the new Lanier Technical College cam
pus, which Deal said is the capstone of
workplace development efforts focused on
skilled trades and the state’s technical col
lege system.
“That campus is going to double the
capacity of the current Lanier campus. It’s
going to increase it to 5,000 students,” Deal
said. “The variety of training skills that will
be imparted will be greatly expanded as a
result of the larger space that they will be
operating in.”
The new 95-acre campus
off of Ga. 365 is the state’s first
completely new campus for a
technical college. Deal himself
is honored there, with the Gov.
Nathan Deal Economic Devel
opment Center bearing his
name.
While Hall has reaped the
rewards of having a governor
and lieutenant governor call
the county home, the county
has also served as a model
for statewide criminal justice
reform. Accountability courts,
including drug, DUI, family
and mental health courts, that
started in the Hall County court
rooms of Judge Jason Deal, the
governor’s son, and Judge John
Girardeau, have helped keep
recidivism down and divert
nonviolent offenders from a crowded prison
system, Deal said.
“That’s what prison should be for — those
who are violent and create a danger to soci
ety. We are reclaiming lives,” Deal said.
The state’s prison population has been
reduced from 56,000 to 52,000 despite popu
lation growth that projected Georgia would
need two new prisons, Deal said. Other
efforts like the expansion of GED programs
and a new charter school housed within the
prison system have helped inmates prepare
for life after they leave, with the goal of
keeping them from coming back, Deal said.
“If you take someone who has no educa
tion and in many cases no marketable skills,
you lock them up 10, 15, 20 years and you
turn them loose, and they still don’t have a
high school education and still don’t have a
marketable skill, then you expect them not
to come back? You’re deceiving yourself,”
Deal said.
Deal said that while he is proud of the
progress made with criminal justice reform,
he hopes it is an issue that the administra
tion of Brian Kemp, the governor-elect, con
tinues to make a focus.
“What I hope will be the case is that
the programs we’ve started will continue
to grow, that their outreach will expand,
because many of these are still in the very
early stages,” he said.
As Deal prepares to leave office in Janu
ary, he said he and his wife, Gainesville
native and former educator Sandra Deal,
will move to Habersham County and settle
down in a home along the Chattahoochee
River.
“It will be nice to not have an absolute
busy schedule with everything and having to
keep appointments, but I’ll miss some of it,”
Deal said. “I really will. I’ll miss the people.”
Reflecting on his political career, Deal
said he was thankful for those who supported
him, starting when he and Sandra moved
into an apartment in the Brenau University
area after Deal left the U.S. Army. He took a
job with the late Bob Andrews’ law firm.
Deal was quickly recruited to join the
Gainesville Jaycees, who invited him to
compete in a public speaking competition on
behalf of the group. After winning a national
speaking award, he was able to meet other
Jaycees groups around the
state, getting to know the
people who would one day
vote for him. He also met
Gene Bishop, a state Jaycees
leader who hired him as legal
counsel.
Deal also was assistant dis
trict attorney, covering Hall,
Dawson, Lumpkin and White
counties, a job he said gave
him the opportunity to meet
jurors and become further
ingrained in the community
that would later be influential
in getting him elected.
In 1980, he was elected to
the State Senate. Philip Wil-
heit Sr., his longtime friend,
was his campaign treasurer
and has continued in that
role for all of Deal’s other
campaigns.
Then, Deal was elected to the U.S. House
of Representatives to represent District 9. He
served nine terms in Congress and stepped
down when he decided to run for governor,
a position he won in 2010 with about 80 per
cent of the vote in Hall.
Hall County has occupied the top two state
positions for several years, with Lt. Gov.
Casey Cagle, also from Gainesville, serving
in office since 2006. State Sen. Butch Miller,
R-Gainesville, leads the State Senate as
President Pro Tempore. Miller will be keep
ing that position, but with Deal and Cagle’s
terms coming to an end, the county loses
some of its hold on state politics.
Deal isn’t worried, though.
“Even though we don’t have a governor or
lieutenant governor from Hall County, Butch
Miller is going to play a very important role
as President Pro Tern of the Senate,” he
said. “We have a very good close neighbor,
and that is David Ralston, who’s from Blue
Ridge and the Speaker of the House.... We
have good friends in high places.”
‘It will be nice
to not have an
absolute busy
schedule with
everything and
having to keep
appointments,
but I’ll miss
some of it.’
Gov. Nathan Deal
SCOn ROGERS I The Times
Governor Nathan Deal reflects on his eight years as governor Wednesday, Dec. 19, at the
State Capitol.
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