David Pennington, the mayor of Dalton, Ga., stands inside of the City Hall facility.DALTON, Ga. — The City Charter in Dalton is designed to give the mayor limited powers.
The top elected official doesn’t run the city day to day, and he votes only to break ties among the other four members of the City Council.
Some refer to the setup as a “weak mayor,” but as his first term comes to a close, Dalton Mayor David Pennington has been anything but.
After his January 2008 election, the mayor led the City Council to cut spending by $1 million, eliminate nearly 30 city jobs and evict the Downtown Dalton Authority from City Hall amid a flap over how the entity derives its funding. All of that happened in Pennington’s first eight months as mayor.
The mayor’s image took such a bruising that year that some residents began referring to him as “King David” and at one point his wife asked, “Why did you take this job?”