EDITORIAL: Hagler right for Augusta mayor

May 20--With a young family and budding career, Gould Hagler didn't need this.

But Augusta sure does.

The 34-year-old insurance broker and Augusta native is running for mayor on Tuesday's ballot for all the right reasons. Because he wants to serve the city and move it forward. Because the current administration is falling short of its promise. And because he felt an obligation to step up and pitch in -- like the pedestrian who sees trash on the sidewalk and thinks someone should pick it up.

"I was raised to pick that piece of trash up, and do what was needed to be done," he told us. "That's why I made my decision to run for mayor."

He jumped in late because nine months ago he was like many in town, unhappy with the direction of the mayor's office but waiting for someone else to run. "I had to be that person," he says.

"I didn't see where we necessarily had the promise of 'One Augusta' fulfilled," he said, referring to incumbent Mayor Hardie Davis' campaign slogan of four years ago. "In fact, right now we have the entire city fighting over an arena and whether or not we're going to build it in one place or another -- potentially on land we don't even own.

"I see a lot more division now. I thought to myself, 'I think I can do better.'"

From all appearances, he can.

Initially feeling his way around his first political campaign three months ago, in a hour-long interview with The Chronicle last week Hagler was self-assured and buoyant. Clearly comfortable in his own skin, he now has the air of a veteran campaigner.

It appears to flow from a profound belief in the two products he's selling: himself and his hometown.

His family is Augusta through and through -- his father's family with the deeper roots, his mother still living in the house he was raised, and his maternal grandfather having come here from Mexico many years ago.

His Hispanic heritage has always surprised those around him, he notes, recalling his college classmates' wisecrack in front of him about the Mexican groundskeepers. It imbued him with a racial sensitivity that serves him and those around him.

He spent much time in his mother's south Augusta growing up, and so understands that area's fervent desire for economic development. At the same time, he strongly supports a downtown location for a new James Brown Arena, where the current one is and where the audience and amenities are.

If voters back a Regency Mall arena site in the nonbinding referendum Tuesday, he'll try to accommodate that as mayor, he says -- but not if it's a bad deal financially.

"I could not, within good conscience, support a bad real estate deal for Augusta. There's just no way. As an elected official, you do have to listen to what your citizens want. But also you have a great responsibility to do your best by them. No matter what the citizens decide, we've got to do something that's fiscally responsible."

While a first-time candidate, Hagler says he has plenty of leadership experience as a nationally recognized broker running interference for customers with often irascible insurers; a leader in his Mercer College fraternity and student bar association in Boston; and as one of youngest members and youngest vice president ever on the Imperial Theatre board.

As a 30-something, he shares the younger generations' disdain for divisive racial politics, recalling that, at one public forum involving many new residents, "The one common thing they all mentioned to me was, they felt like they had stepped 50 years back in time. While we remember the past and learn from it, we need to move on."

Hagler also espouses his ease working side-by-side with the privileged and the plumber's son -- which stands in stark contrast to the incumbent mayor's response last fall to businessman/civic activist Clay Boardman's opposition to the Regency Mall arena site. Davis wondered in a written communiqué if Boardman had "bothered to speak with anyone outside of the Augusta Country Club 'Breakfast Club,' or the very exclusive, membership-only, Augusta Tomorrow group ..."

Davis' snide comment revealed an odd classist streak for a mayor whose campaign slogan was "One Augusta."

Augustans increasingly have no patience for such divisiveness. They won't have to with Gould Hagler as mayor -- whose focus, rather than on division, will be on addition, subtraction and multiplication: adding jobs, decreasing the mayor office's bloated budget and multiplying the growth of businesses, people and cultural opportunities here.

"I think a lot of people in the community are ready for a change, and ready to see some new leadership," Hagler says. " I firmly believe I'm doing the absolute right thing for Augusta."

Hagler promises to be more accessible as well -- that, with just one assistant and a ready cell phone of his own, "There won't be three people to go through" to talk with the mayor. Nor will there be any overblown puffery exaggerating how much the local government has to do with private-sector progress.

And while the current mayor chafes at being questioned or challenged, the lower-key Hagler says, not even joking, that "I don't get stressed real easily -- and it's a scientific fact." In a study of identical twins that he and his brother Mike have participated in over the years, he points out, doctors found Gould's stress levels way below average, as well as that of his brother.

The only thing he's stressing now is Augusta's opportunity for change on Tuesday. And his readiness for it.

"I already enjoy a good reputation," he said of putting himself out there. "The easy thing for me to do in life would be just to have stayed out of all this and kept doing what I've been doing for 10 years. But life, for me, is not about doing the easy thing. Sometimes it's about doing what you have to do, what you know is right."

We thoroughly believe it's right -- for Augusta, for the future -- to vote for Gould Hager II for mayor on Tuesday.

Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff

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