Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the new GOP nominee for mayor of Rutherford County, Tennessee, Joe Carr, to the newsmaker line to talk about his victory and top goals if elected in the general election.
Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmaker line by our good friend Joe Carr. Joe is the GOP nominee for Mayor of Rutherford County and won, pretty handily, the GOP nomination last week. Good morning, Joe.
Carr: Good morning, Michael. How are you this morning?
Leahy: Great. Congratulations on your victory. I have to say, you told me you were going to win. I was skeptical, but you did win.
Carr: You were skeptical and your good friend and political counterpart, Clint Brewer, was dead wrong. But we won’t dance on Clinton’s prognostication too much.
We’re just glad that we can move forward and show Rutherford County that we are going to put a vision together through collaboration and solve some of the big issues that certainly are confronting us.
Leahy: Your polling was right and you talked about it. Of course, we’ve used these fellows before. They’re very good.
Carr: It’s a polling company that’s been around for a very long time, 15 to 20 years. You recommended them back when we started the Beat Lamar campaign in 2013.
Leahy: Exactly.
Carr: You recommended them and we did our due diligence and we did it when we used them this time. And they were correct. Now, are polls absolutely accurate all the time? Of course not.
It’s a snapshot, as you know, and as Clint Brewer knows. But I think Clint and some others outside of Rutherford County who tried to comment on this race didn’t realize just how unpopular Mayor Ketchum was.
He came in with less than 25 percent of the vote. So the election truly was a referendum on his leadership and his leadership style. And we’re glad to be victorious. And our goal now is to pull the party together.
And Mayor Ketchum and Commissioner Allen were very gracious and they reached out to me that evening and congratulated me.
And I hope that we can all come together because both of them have served this county well and I’m grateful for their service.
Leahy: August 4th is the general election for this office. I guess the winner of the August 4th general election then will become the mayor of Rutherford County.
Carr: All that’s correct. It’s kind of like the legislature a little bit. You’re the state representative or state senator the night of the election, but you’re not actually sworn in until January. So I wouldn’t actually be sworn in until after Labor Day. But I’m not sure the exact date.
Leahy: But that chronology sounds like it’s a four-year term, right? Is that right?
Carr: That’s correct. Four years. So there’s no Democrat candidate, no Democrat, but three Independents. So while the opportunity, it looks like for us is good, we at the same time will take absolutely nothing for granted here.
Leahy: Well, yeah. And my guess is probably the Democrat apparatus will be involved in supporting one of those three Independents. And so you got to run through the tape, as they say.
Carr:Â You got to run through the tape. Exactly right. So we’re back to raising money. We’re back to campaigning. We’re back to doing what we did that got us the win in the Republican primary.
So absolutely. Michael, you’ve done this. You’ve been around it for a very long time. You know it as well as anybody, and certainly better than most, that it’s all about blocking and tackling.
It’s about the ground game, which, again, you understand better than most. If you’re not going to go door to door, if you’re not going to reach that voter individually and ask for that vote, you make it hard on yourself to win. You really do.
Leahy: Yes. And it is a lot of blocking and tackling, getting out and talking to people, making your case to them as a candidate. That’s tough, isn’t it, to just do that constantly all the time?
Carr: Michael, it’s a grind. It’s difficult because it’s both physically and emotionally fatiguing, but there’s great satisfaction with doing it, too. So it certainly has its rewards. And it’s not something that I’m not looking forward to doing. I am looking forward to doing it, but it’s hard.
It’s difficult because if you’re going to commit to doing, running that kind of campaign and that being a part of your strategy, you just got to buckle up and realize that at the end of every single day of that type of door-to-door canvassing, door-to -door campaigning, you’re going to be tired. And so you just steel yourself for 90 days of being tired.
Leahy: Exactly. Rutherford County is the fifth-largest county now, going on the fourth, growing like crazy. What’s the population?
Carr: Exactly. It’s the fifth-largest at 350,000. Hamilton County is right at 370,000. In about three years – well, before this term is up – it will be the fourth-largest county. We have the fourth-largest school district in the state already in Rutherford County schools.
And it’s the fastest-growing county in the state. In Williamson County, [it’s] back and forth, but we’re the fastest-growing county in the state and one of the fastest in the country. So we have our opportunities, but we certainly have our challenges.
Leahy: What will be your number one priority if elected?
Carr: There are three things that we’re going to tackle, and the number one is to get a handle on the unrestrained growth that is just as rampant across this county, because there are a number of outside financial interests that we have allowed in because this county’s leadership – specifically, its elected leadership – doesn’t have a vision of what this county wants to be and how it wants to get there.
Unlike Williamson County; Williamson County has a vision. They have a vision of who they are, where they’ve come from and what they want to be, and how they want to get there. Rutherford County lacks that to a great extent.
And as a result, we have a number of outside financial interests that come in here, and they fill that vacuum with their vision. And because of that, I guess we have a vision but it’s not our vision; it’s somebody else’s vision.
And that includes public industries, which is the landfill. And we’ve talked about before, that’s an example of an outside interest coming here, creating a vision for themselves and then overlaying on top of us and saying, oh, by the way, this is your vision, too.
And then the third issue … the landfill is the second issue. The third issue is we’ve got to pay our first responders a competitive wage.
Our first responders – that’s fire, EMS, and police – are being paid much lower in some cases than the surrounding counties that border us and we have to have a competitive, fair wage for our first responders and we do not currently have that.
Listen to the interview:
(6:15)
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
