Deal cements hometown legacy with sparkling new Hall County campus

The ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday in Gov. Nathan Deal's hometown will celebrate the completion of one of the costliest state building projects in recent Georgia history. It will also mark a signature achievement for the Gainesville Republican.

The event will commemorate the opening of the Hall County campus of Lanier Technical College, the first newly-constructed tech college in the history of technical education in Georgia.

All told, the state borrowed more than $130 million to move the college from an outdated cluster of buildings on the south end of Hall County to sparkling new facilities about 10 miles to the north.

The construction, one of the costliest state projects this decade, sparked controversy earlier in the governor's second term. Even some Gainesville poohbahs said they were surprised when Deal first broached the idea of the move in late 2015. One former legislator complained of a lack of public input.

But the governor cast the project as a way to hone a focus on manufacturing jobs and prepare Georgians to work at new plants that have located to the area, such as the Kubota factory that announced a major expansion in 2014.

“I’m always proud of anything we do positive in the state of Georgia. Just the fact that it happens to be in the county where I have lived for many years, I suppose there’s some satisfaction to that,” he said in 2015 of the project. “But it is a growing part of the state. That’s one of the driving forces.”

With the completion of the campus, the governor follows in the footsteps of predecessors who pushed for hometown projects in office.

Gov. Marvin Griffin was instrumental in building an inland port in his hometown in Bainbridge, while Gov. George Busbee was responsible for completing a freeway from I-75 to Albany, where he lived.

Our AJC colleague James Salzer offers a few more recent examples in this 2015 piece:

Gov. Zell Miller championed a taxpayer-financed mountain retreat in his hometown of Young Harris. Gov. Roy Barnes backed a state-funded amphitheater project in his hometown of Mableton, and money to study a revamp of the Cobb hamlet.

Sonny Perdue, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, retired from office with a last-minute, costly purchase of woods adjacent to his Houston County property and the Go Fish Center down the road from his home. The state still owes $13 million in debt payments on Go Fish, and will be paying it off until December 2027.