In 2012, when you made a run for the Republican nomination for the 12th Congressional seat, the radio talker Austin Rhodes immediately attacked you for a long-ago donation to the infamous Champ Walker, a Democrat. I called in that day to defend you, recalling your teen years as a Republican.
Then Brad Owens of the Augusta Today Facebook group wrote a City Stink piece questioning added overhead charges on RW Allen, LLC’s partial bill to Augusta for the TEE Center y’all were building. The contract said those costs were capped. You were incensed and maybe with justification because it wasn’t the final bill.
You and I had a lot of discussions during the 2012 primary season, but there is one worthy of recounting. We reminisced about our frequent childhood gatherings at Uncle Land and Aunt Carols’. I told you that, despite having created constructionaudits.com, I stayed out of Augusta because RW Allen had such a presence there that your company was unavoidable. A warning was that RWA operated in a cloistered environment of Augusta for decades, building complacency. Rising to executive status as you did meant not really knowing what was in the contracts RWA signed, but those would become campaign issues. We talked about the one Augusta project that my firm did at Reid Church, where RWA was contractor, doing an admirable job under tough circumstances. Finally, we got to how the epidemic of financial corruption decimating my retirement savings forced me to use Augusta as a lab to see if the old skills were still good enough to produce.
After two years of stunning results, that question has been answered.
Before that call concluded, this was said and is still meant. You are a very fine man, Rick Allen, and America and Georgia need fine men to step forward. There was an offer to work with you to develop positions that the people truly need, not the old tired Republican Party rhetoric. Finally there was an offer to prepare you for greater things – a run for the US Senate.
The words of warning remain the same. You have long alliances with people in whom you trust, but the people don’t. There is a record of commitments in those RWA contracts that you are oblivious to, but the two Johns, Stone and Barrow, won’t be. You have major contributors with interests in the Augusta TEE Center scam that the Augusta Chronicle can’t hide much longer. You are tied to banking in a state that was and is the epicenter of global bank fraud decimating responsible people. Perhaps the entire 12th is reluctant to yield representation and their children’s futures to the Augusta bluebloods, perhaps the most aggressively greedy plutocrats on Earth.
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My promise was to help you understand and rectify those things. We last talked just before the TEE Center budget meeting in February of last year. You said the political future was undecided. You were going to call before launching another run at the 12th. That call never came.
Good luck Rick. You are going to need it.