MARIETTA — As he campaigns for Georgia’s second-highest statewide office, state Sen. Blake Tillery is pitching a platform centered on cutting taxes, tightening spending and advancing conservative priorities.
The Vidalia Republican, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, sat down with the Marietta Daily Journal Wednesday to outline his vision for the lieutenant governor’s office — including plans he says would protect Georgia values, families and pocketbooks.
Tillery is seeking the Republican nomination in a crowded May 19 primary to succeed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is running for governor. He faces several GOP opponents, including Congressman David Clark and state Sens. Steve Gooch, John Kennedy and Greg Dolezal. Three Democratic candidates — former state Sen. Nabilah Parkes, Sen. Josh McLaurin and CPA Richard Wright — are competing on the other side of the ballot.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. A longer version of the interview is online at mdjonline.com.
MDJ: Why do you want to be Georgia’s lieutenant governor?
Blake Tillery: …I’m running for lieutenant governor because I care about Georgia values, Georgia families and Georgia pocketbooks. I want to make sure we protect those. How I first got elected, I ran for the county commission when the Republicans I had helped get elected actually raised the property taxes. I didn’t think that was conservative, so I ended up running against them, and I won. And what I found out was we didn’t have a revenue problem, we had a spending problem. Once we addressed that, we were able to drop property taxes for four years in a row. I took that same mindset to the state Senate, where we’ve now been able to give back over $11 billion to Georgians of their hard earned money. It’s theirs. I think we can do a little bit better though, so I’m championing doing away with the state income tax. That’s protecting the Georgia pocketbooks … and also protecting Georgia values so that my sons don’t have to deal with some of the issues that we’re dealing with now, that I never thought we’d ever have to deal with and vote on in the General Assembly.
Q: What are some of those issues?
A: …When I came to the state Senate in 2017, if you had told me that we’d be voting on whether or not boys could be in girls’ locker rooms, I would have laughed at you. I didn’t think that was ever going to happen. If you told me we would be voting on whether or not state taxpayer dollars would be paying for transgender surgeries, I … think we all would have laughed at that too. Turns out that’s not the case. We actually had to vote on those things. … As I chaired the budget, we saw that and were able to fix those issues. There’s still more that is coming, and what I’ve learned is that what one generation views as acceptable, the next will view as permissive. And if someone doesn’t stand up for conservative values now, … stands up as a dam to the water running downhill, the water will continue to run downhill. And I don’t think that that’s what Georgians want to see.
Q: What are your top three legislative priorities in your first year as lieutenant governor?
A: Protecting Georgia values, what we’ve already mentioned, and protecting Georgia families. Listen, I’m a strong supporter of legal immigration and a strong opponent of illegal immigration. As conservatives, a lot of times, folks try to say that we’re immoral, unethical or wrong for supporting a strong border. I lock my front door in Vidalia at night, and we don’t have a very high crime rate, but I do that because it isn’t that I hate the people outside my door. I actually just love the family and the people inside. It’s the same way for me with the border, we don’t hate the people outside, we just love and understand our duty to the people on the inside.
And then Georgia pocketbooks… I know that affordability is the No. 1 issue on the minds of most Georgians. They’re having a hard time paying for gas, groceries and childcare, and as conservatives, if we don’t offer a plan to help them answer that question, I’m not sure we’re the party and the majority in the room to answer any of the other hard questions.
Q: How would you work with ICE?
A: A lot of folks say, “Hey, we should just deport the criminal illegal aliens.” My position is, remember, coming across the border in the first place is itself a crime, and that’s not very popular, and something that folks won’t stand up and say. But if you don’t support your border, do you truly have a nation?
Q: When people hear Vidalia, most think of onions. Do your constituents tell you anything about how immigration enforcement impacts agriculture? From the labor perspective, is there a place for immigration to help farmers?
A: Many, many immigrants and migrants are incredibly hard workers, and they serve a valuable, valuable place in our economy. I don’t want to discount that at all. Do we have some federal rules that have to be changed to make that work better? Absolutely. Does that mean we should ignore the state rules in the process? My answer to that would be no. And so I support legislation, I’ve actually authored legislation that holds cities and counties responsible when they aren’t following Georgia immigration laws.
Q: You mentioned gas, groceries and child care. What would you do to bring down child care costs specifically?
A: We have several programs at the state level we already do this with, it’s something called the Childcare and Parent Services (CAPS) program. We’ve also worked with some of the incentives that we offer that are tax credits. Instead of doing tax credits to the business, why would we not allow those credits to serve families directly? That’s one of the things I’ve actually been championing. Folks say, how do you do away with Georgia state income tax? We bring in $16.2 billion on the personal income tax … but we give out over $30 billion in corporate welfare and credits. Some of those credits, if you were to buy yacht parts in Georgia, you don’t pay sales tax. … How is that helping any family in Cobb County pay for the gas, groceries and child care that we already mentioned? The answer is it isn’t. And how many yachts are we floating down the Chattahoochee today? Just not that many. So why does that special break exist? It ends up being multimillion dollars that don’t come into Georgia’s income tax that could and sales tax that could and that can be used to offset the income tax. How do you make the income tax go to zero? Well, if you’re giving out $30 billion in corporate credits, you just have to cut those in half, because all I need is $16 billion. Another one, … everyone goes to the film credit first, but that’s not the biggest. The biggest is the data center credit. … If you have a student here,… that you buy a laptop for to go to Kennesaw State University next semester, you’re gonna pay sales tax on that laptop…. If you buy $15 million worth of computers tonight because you’re building a data center, you don’t pay any sales tax at all. It’s a $1.5 billion sales tax exemption that goes to some of the largest companies in America. On the local level, it’s $1.3 billion…, almost $3 billion together. … Well, the plan I laid out in the Senate … and ended up being House Bill 463, for $3 billion you could do away with the state income tax on 64% of Georgians and … those who don’t see their income tax eliminated get a $5,180 credit essentially, a lessening. That’s what I would rather see. … Instead of taking the credits and using them for business, what if we took those credits instead and used them to offset the income tax? Because what we’ve seen is that doesn’t hurt business either. The states that are growing the fastest are the ones that don’t have a personal income tax, … nine states … and they’re not all red states. … This isn’t just a conservative Republican idea. It’s something that folks have seen works for business across the board.
Q: Would you support getting rid of all the tax breaks data centers see?
A: The short answer is yes, and it’s just getting rid of the credits. … I’m not anti data center, they just shouldn’t get a break that the average Georgian is not getting. They should pay their fair share. And the fair share cost is not building the power line from the data center back to the transmission line. It’s not just paying for the data center transmission line and then building the substation in between. Remember that one reactor now at Plant Vogel … It was going to provide the next 20 years of power that we needed. We ended up using one whole reactor on one data center. … We underwrote the cost of that because we paid the interest on it for about 15 years, at $17 billion per reactor. So the full cost of the data center is not the transmission line. It’s the cost that you’ve already paid for that reactor that’s already there. … As long as they’re paying their full freight and cost, great. Remember this too, the entire state right now is in a Level 1 drought. What are your biggest users of water? It’s data centers. So we just need to be thinking consciously. Are they coming? Yes. … If they are coming anyway, why would you incentivize them? And if they’re going to be using your resources, you’ve got to make sure that the tax on that resource is being covered by the person who’s using it.
Q: And on doing away with the income tax — are you saying you can do that without raising sales tax or other taxes?
A: Yes, I am. If I need $16 billion, but I’ve got $30 billion that I’m giving away, how do I get that $16 billion? I just quit giving away the $30 billion.
Q: Does it also, though, require cuts to the budget?
A: I think it requires holding the budget steady. … It requires maintaining fiscal conservatism and fiscal sanity. But no, I don’t think it requires you to see drastic cuts to current levels of spending. You just have to maintain the same level of per capita spending that you are now, while at the same time stop doing some of the corporate giveaways that keep those numbers from ever showing up in our budget to begin with. … The bill that I authored this year cut 29 special interest credits and used that money instead to do away with the income tax on the first $100,000 for every Georgian. The House didn’t adopt that bill. They instead cut nine credits and reduced the top end rate down. … Just because it’s only 40% of what I wanted doesn’t mean it’s a 60% enemy. Take the win, come back next year and make the next move to do it again.
Q: How would you address rising property taxes and cost of living, especially in fast growing areas across the state?
A: … Remember the state charges zero on property taxes. Those all go to your cities, your counties and your schools, so let me put back on the hat that I wore when I was a county commissioner. … I came into office and we reduced property taxes for four years in a row. We also passed something called a floating homestead exemption. What that did is lock the homestead value at the value it was the year after purchase, and we resolved 90% of our assessment issues after we did that. Because think about who the sympathetic people are. It’s folks on fixed income, it’s the elderly, the widows, et cetera, and it’s on their home. Folks are not complaining or really advocating for lowering the taxes on commercial properties or industrial properties. We’re talking about residential properties. So for homesteads, you can lock that. It still allows the flexibility for a local government, a school, to do what they need to do on the other properties, and it provides some certainty for those who are on fixed incomes. And it’s not a theoretical thing. I already did it.
… We could also do that statewide … on homesteads only. … It makes tons of sense for local counties, and it’s something that we’ve done in other counties already, and it didn’t bankrupt them.
Q: What’s your plan for improving public safety without overburdening local governments?
A: … We’ve already been endorsed by over 75 sheriffs statewide, and the reason we were able to earn their endorsements is because I listened to them, and they told me that their biggest issue was mental health. Their jails were becoming our state’s mental health hospitals, and that wasn’t good for mental health, nor was it good for the jail itself, for public safety. We were able to address that this year. We were under something called the Olmstead decision. … When Sonny Perdue was governor, we entered into a settlement decision with the federal government because of how we had done things at Milledgeville, the state mental health hospitals. … We had to close a lot of them, … one in Augusta, … Thomasville, Rome, even Milledgeville to the most extent. The Olmstead decision said we had to do a lot of other things related to community services, … mental health and really provide those services in the community. And we’ve been under that for probably close to, approaching 20 years, 15 years at least. We came out from underneath that decision in February on a Thursday. By the time we got to the budget that next Wednesday, we had already included $409 million to build the state’s first mental health hospital since the 1960s. … We couldn’t congregately care under Olmstead. … We really need three such hospitals, not just one, so you’re looking at having to do this again. But the sheriffs saw that as a huge win. Instead of providing that care in their jails, now we can be able to do it where we need to again, the state mental health hospitals, and that’s going to provide relief, not just to jails, but the tent cities…, the folks you see who sleep on the Square. A lot of them are there because of mental health reasons, and we’ll be able to provide them the services they need in a state facility, instead of them having to live in tents under bridges and sleep on our city park squares.
Q: With those mental health hospitals, how would you address the very issues that led them to close years ago, like low staffing and poor conditions?
A: There are only two cities in our state who have the medical staffing necessary to actually staff such a hospital. … Atlanta and Augusta. … There’s not enough people in Milledgeville to staff it. Thomasville stood up like, “We want our hospital back.” Can’t do it. Rome, not enough staff. … So the first one will be built back, most likely, in Atlanta, near the Panthersville campus, where we already have land. We can staff it there. The second one will most likely be in Augusta where we have a medical community that can do it. And then the third one, you’re probably looking north metro Atlanta, but we do need three.
Q: Do you support expanding healthcare access? Medicaid expansion?
A: I live with … this healthcare issue, my wife being a physician. She’s an OB-GYN. We calculated it up, she’s delivered, I think, over 2,000 babies since I’ve been in the Senate, down in southeast Georgia. So we live it. We understand it. I don’t support expanding Medicaid, and here’s why. We hear from providers now that Medicaid doesn’t cover their costs, so why would we expand a system that doesn’t cover the cost that they’re spending right now? Why would we dig them further into the hole? Sometimes their immediate response is, well, at least we get part of our money instead of none of it. No, what’s going to happen then is you’re going to end up back at the state level saying we need provider rate increases. We’re going to be in a hamster wheel that just continues to spin. … Until we can get to a position where the provider is able to negotiate directly with the patient. Again, I do not see our costs getting lower, so I’m supportive of anything that allows the patient to negotiate directly with the provider.
Q: Your wife being an OB-GYN, what changes, if any, would you support to Georgia’s abortion laws, which critics say have led to the deaths of women with pregnancy complications?
A: The death, remember, was about a lady who actually got an abortion pill from North Carolina and was supposed to proceed visits on and didn’t. That story, I think, has been skewed greatly. But no, we’re pro-life, and I support the heartbeat bill. I’m glad to have the endorsement of Sen. Ed Setzler, who was the author of the bill and is a Cobb County senator. We also support life more than just at birth. We’re foster parents. We have our 16-year-old foster son. We’ve had probably a dozen foster children come through our family. As a conservative, as a Christian, do I think that Christians and conservatives have to do more if we want the government to be smaller? Yes, I do. And I remind my colleagues and friends all the time that we have 13,000 churches and we have 9,500 children in foster care. If each house of faith could wrap its hand around a family or a foster child, we can resolve this issue a whole lot more effectively and efficiently than the government.
Q: You’ve spoken against woke ideology. What concrete policies would you pursue in schools and universities?
A: I don’t think that parents co-parent with the government, so I fully support a parent’s right to choose the education and the educational format that they feel is best, whether that be public schools, private schools, home schools, … learning pods where folks are doing things differently. I fully support that. One of the areas that I think has probably, because of administrative bureaucracy, not moved along as fast with technology would be education. The workplace, manufacturing environments look much different now than they did in the 1960s and 70s. But many times, except for the smart board on the wall, classrooms look ultimately the same. Are we going to have to meet each student where they are and provide tailored education to their needs? Yes, we are. But are parents in the best position to choose what that tailored education would be? I truly believe that.
Q: How should Georgia fund transportation and infrastructure as it continues to grow, in metro Atlanta and other parts of the state?
A: …We do it through the motor fuel tax right now. And we’ve been able to, because of state general revenues, supplement that and give counties and cities double their local maintenance improvement grants for the past three years, letting the local community decide where their bottlenecks were and what needed to be improved there quickest. I support general state funds being used for infrastructure improvements, whether those be water, sewer, roads and now, honestly, the biggest one we have an issue with is natural gas. That’s the new emerging issue. We’ve been able to solve our broadband issue, mostly statewide, everywhere, places in rural areas now have faster internet sometimes than downtown cities. But the natural gas issue is the one that’s on the horizon. … It does not overshadow, though, the biggest infrastructure issue that we currently still face and will face for the next 15 to 20 years, and that’s going to be the provision of water.
Q: A hot topic of a lot of debate here in Cobb is transit, public transportation, whether it should be expanded, whether it should be cut. Where do you stand?
A: Listen, I use public transportation. It doesn’t scare me, but I do understand where the safety concerns that have come up do cause concerns for folks who aren’t 6’2 and weigh 230 pounds. So local communities are going to make those decisions best, but there’s just too many people in Georgia for us to not realize that some folks are going to have to move in congregate settings.
… There’s some regional overlay that’s gonna have to be done. Georgia has 159 counties, … the most of any state besides Texas, so those local counties are smaller here than they would be in some other states where the county can make a decision for a 100-mile-wide swath. Georgia doesn’t work that way.
Q: What would you do to make it more affordable to rent or buy a home?
A: I authored a bill this year that — through working with the Georgia realtors and working with builders … and local communities — limited the number of corporately owned homes, not necessarily for commercial and residential, but for single-family homes, limited the amounts that could be owned by any single company. … An individual family, a 30 year old coming out of college with a graduate degree, they can’t bid against Wall Street for their home. Wall Street can pay cash. Wall Street does not have to go through an inspection period, or make sure that they’ve got their loan lined up. … So I think that is going to be an issue moving forward.
Q: It’s a crowded field in the primary. What sets you apart from other Republicans running for lieutenant governor?
A: …I’m a true conservative. I believe what I’m telling you. I do believe that we’ve got to answer these questions on protecting Georgia values, protecting Georgia families and protecting Georgia pocketbooks. And I’ve done it. I’ve shown leadership in the past where we’ve reduced local property taxes, … where we’ve been able to reduce state taxes … and return that money instead to Georgia taxpayers. And I’ve stood up and fought against what I consider to be woke ideology, state taxpayer dollars paying for transgender surgeries and boys being in girls locker rooms.
Q: Looking at your legislative record, what votes best define your leadership?
A: … I typically vote for the small business against the large business, and I vote for the individual against big corporatism. I think I’ve done that on almost every level. Some of the bills that I’m proud that I was able to author, or … did really early on: one saying you can’t run for office if you owe taxpayer dollars. Just simple legislation. … I authored a bill to strengthen and put more teeth in the Do Not Call list and stop telemarketer calls. And while those seem like small, nuanced topics, they matter to those groups. I’ve also been involved in really, really big legislation. Thirteen state budgets that I had to author and pass, including the ones during COVID and other larger legislation that dealt with, right now, a way to eliminate Georgia’s income tax. I hope that folks will look at my legislative record and see while I’m not afraid to tackle the big topics, I’ve also not forgotten about the smaller issues along the way that just make life easier and simple for everyday Georgians.
Q: How would you continue Georgia’s record as being the top place to do business?
A: I’m really, really proud of that, but what I want to see is, do everyday Georgians feel that that ranking for 12 years in a row is benefiting them and their family? … The pretty girl doesn’t have to ask for many partners at the dance. We’ve been the No. 1 state to do business for 12 years in a row, so why do we have to continue to throw out incentive after incentive to bring business to Georgia? We don’t. So let’s now take the fact that we are the No. 1 state for doing business, use those incentives instead to take Georgia’s income tax down on everyday, hard working Georgians, eliminate the first $100,000 of tax on everybody’s income. That means if you made a million dollars, you’re only paying taxes on $900,000… but if you’re a Marietta fireman making $76,000 and maybe you’re married to a parapro who’s making $23,000, well all of a sudden your income tax is zero, because we’ve eliminated the first $100,000 in income tax liability. I want to see that No. 1 state for doing business be used to benefit everyday Georgians. Not saying it hasn’t, I appreciate what the governors have done in the past, but let’s turn that now and use it for what we think we’re supposed to be using it for — the 11 million people that we represent.
Q: Your past includes a widely reported fatal traffic incident. What did you learn from that experience, and how has it shaped your judgment today?
A: There’s not a single day that I don’t think about that. It was absolutely the worst day in my life, and I’m sure it was the worst day in that family’s life.
Q: What else would you like to tell voters? Why should they vote for you as lieutenant governor?
A: … I’m a true conservative. I’m not afraid to stand up and fight for you and for your family, whether it be against big foes or just be for everyday, nuanced issues that help make life better. I’m going to continue to fight for Georgia values, for Georgia families, Georgia pocketbooks. And if you want a true conservative who has a track record of reducing taxes and fighting for conservative values, I’d love to win your vote for lieutenant governor.