Larry O’Neal wants to be speaker of the House
Macon Telegraph
Travis Fain, 12/09/2009

State Rep. Larry O’Neal, R-Warner Robins, will run for Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives in the wake of a sex scandal that has rocked the House leadership.

O’Neal said he e-mailed his colleagues in the House today to tell them “I intend to seek the speakership.” His announcement comes on the heels of current Speaker of the House Glenn Richardson’s pending resignation, which he announced after a suicide attempt and confirmation of an affair he carried on with a Capitol lobbyist.

Speaker Pro Tempore Mark Burkhalter may succeed Richardson on a temporary basis, but Burkhalter announced this week that he didn’t want the post in any permanent way. Burkhalter announced he would call for an open election among the Republican caucus, which holds a majority in the House.

“What we need the most right now is somebody to calm things down,” O’Neal, chairman of the House’s tax-code-writing Ways and Means Committee, said this afternoon. “We can’t have any distractions. We’re facing (an economic) situation I’ve not known in my lifetime, and I’m a pretty old guy.”

O’Neal promised a different style than Richardson’s boisterous and often confrontational ways. O’Neal acknowledged that Richardson’s affair was common knowledge at the Capitol following Richardson’s divorce in early 2008. But he said it was the stunning interview Richardson’s ex-wife gave to an Atlanta TV station late last month that turned a problem into “too much of a distraction.”

O’Neal said he didn’t know why Burkhalter is stepping away from the speaker’s office and described himself as “a judge-not and I-won’t-be-judged kind of guy, as long as the work gets done.”

O’Neal is close to Gov. Sonny Perdue — who also is from Houston County — and some feel their friendship will hurt his candidacy among the GOP legislators who will vote in the speaker’s race. O’Neal also authored legislation that gave Perdue a retroactive tax break several years ago, and that bit of controversy may dog O’Neal as the House looks to sweep recent scandals into the past and move on.

O’Neal has addressed that issue many times, though, saying he didn’t know the governor would benefit from the tax break, though he probably should have. The bill in question was meant to bring Georgia’s tax code in line with federal codes, he has said.

“I didn’t think of (the governor’s tax situation) at all,” O’Neal told The Telegraph in 2007, as an ethics complaint that was eventually dismissed was making headlines. “This was not even on the radar screen. This was a smaller part of a huge bill.”

Though he appears to be popular in the House of Representatives and his position as chairman of Ways and Means has made him a power broker at the Capitol, O’Neal will have to line up support. State Rep. Tommy Smith, R-Nicholls, has announced his own candidacy for speaker, and state Rep. David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, briefly mounted his own candidacy before the start of the 2008 legislative session before stepping aside as Richardson held onto the speaker’s gavel.

Speaker of the house is one of the most powerful positions in state government because the speaker exercises a lot of control over the legislation that moves forward at the Capitol. The job pays about $99,000 a year.

(Original URL: www.macon.com/149/story/947356.html)

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