Shannon WhitfieldROCK SPRING, Ga. - Last fall, a group of Republicans plotted to take over Walker County politics.
On one side of a room sat Jim Patton, 70, owner of 11 local Wendy's franchises. On the other side sat Shannon Whitfield, 46, CFO of his family's oil company. The two had known each other for years, since Whitfield was a teenager and Patton bought diesel fuel from his father.
The plan was for Patton to step forward and challenge Walker County Commissioner Bebe Heiskell, who had been in office since 2001. Property taxes had gone up 54 percent the year before and now, in 2015, they were about to go up another 8 percent. Critics thought Heiskell was mismanaging the budget, and they wanted her gone.
Patton had emerged as the leading candidate in local Republican circles. Dr. Paul Shaw, who lost to Heiskell by 214 votes in 2012, had recommended Patton, his friend. A group of about 15 people began to discuss and plan how to launch a campaign.
"I was excited," said Whitfield, who wanted to be Patton's financial adviser. "I've known Jim for several years. I went to the meeting as a local business leader, trying to encourage another local business leader [to run]."
But three days before his planned campaign announcement, Patton withdrew. His career was winding down, and he wanted to spend more time traveling. And he didn't think he had the proper temperament to hold elected office.
"I'm not a Donald Trump," he said, "but I do like to say what's on my mind."
Dean Kelley, the former county GOP party chair who recruited Patton, said the group was stymied.
"We didn't think we could replace him," Kelley said. "The truth is, we felt like no one who was qualified to run wanted to run."
But several people lobbied Whitfield to take Patton's place. In November 2015, he announced he would challenge Heiskell.
Since then, the story of how he became the Republican Party's candidate has irked his opponents in the Nov. 8 election. Heiskell and Perry Lamb say the GOP leaders colluded to make Whitfield the chosen candidate, stripping voters of an election on equal footing.
Heiskell, who has run as a Republican since 2000, is an independent candidate this year. She said she wouldn't have had a chance to defeat Whitfield in the primary, insinuating the election was rigged. (She did not provide specific evidence supporting this claim.)
"They wanted to focus on a single candidate," she said during an Oct. 25 debate on UCTV. "I felt like they didn't support me."
Lamb, also an independent, said the Republican leaders chose Whitfield as their favorite candidate, forcing everyone else to run uphill. Last week, Lamb struggled to come up with any specific examples of Whitfield's advantages, though he repeated an attack by Whitfield's Republican Party primary earlier this year.
Before the May 24 election, candidate Mike Peardon said he saw a party officer deliver Whitfield campaign signs to somebody's house. The officer, John Carpenter, has said he delivered the signs to a friend who had requested them, which he is allowed to do.
Lamb said that amounts to the party picking favorites.
"They had determined in the beginning who they were going to push," he said. "Anybody else that tried to run was already getting less support than their chosen candidate."
Walker County GOP Chairman Matt Williamson refuted those arguments, even if several members of the GOP recruited an anti-Heiskell candidate. He said Whitfield and Peardon both received access to the GOP voter database and were invited to the party's debate earlier this year. Peardon elected to skip it, giving Whitfield an open floor.
Heiskell and Lamb would have had the same access if they had competed in the primary, Williamson said.
Whitfield called the arguments "undue criticism."
"Anyone and everyone had the opportunity to step up at any time and run," he said. "This was anybody's race to be had. I was the one that people got the most excited about."
For years, Whitfield was a Heiskell supporter. His company donated $5,000 to her campaigns from 2011-14. In turn, county records show, Heiskell paid Whitfield Oil Company $2.8 million from 2013-15 for fuel for fire trucks, police cars and other county vehicles.
But Whitfield's loyalty ended last summer, he said. A friend gave Whitfield a copy of the county's 2014 audit, and he saw $47.3 million in outstanding debt. (Heiskell has argued much of this debt should not be a concern, as $26.4 million was covered by future sales tax revenue.)
"We had been been so blinded and uninformed of the financial condition for the county," Whitfield said of his family. "We had been supporting Bebe's campaign. We had never slowed down long enough to look at these audits or even think to look at these audits. We felt like we had been deceived."
Around the same time last summer, the group of Republicans began discussing who should compete with Heiskell, first on a conference call and then in a series of meetings. Bobby Teems, a Realtor who became Whitfield's campaign manager, said the anti-Heiskell group knew they needed a strong candidate.
With 15 years in office, Heiskell has loyal voters and donors. According to campaign finance reports, she had raised about $128,000 as of Oct. 25, compared to $83,000 by Whitfield and $2,000 by Lamb.
Last summer, when they recruited Patton, several local Republicans said they hardly knew Whitfield. They thought of him as just another supporter, wanting to help unseat Heiskell.
But when Patton dropped out, the roles reversed. He began meeting with Whitfield, telling him he was suited for the job. He is more aggressive than Patton. And, in his mid-40s, he's at a better age to launch a political career.
"Nobody is going to be able to correct all this in four years," said Patton, though he didn't list specific problems. "It may take 10, 12, 15 years to turn around all the damage that has been done. Shannon's young enough to do that."
Whitfield told Patton he wasn't interested. He and his wife had just adopted a 4 year old. His father was mulling whether to retire as their company's CEO, perhaps leaving Whitfield with more responsibilities.
But his wife urged him to run, Whitfield said. And then his parents did, too. And then on Nov. 1, 2015, he called some of the local Republican, telling them he was launching his campaign.
CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION: Over the course of two summers, Whitfield Oil donated $3,500 to Heiskell's GOP primary campaign - about $1,000 north of the legal limit. Whitfield said this week he was not aware of contribution limits at the time. He said the money went toward participation in two golf tournaments.
"All businesses should know what the limits are any time they go into a political campaign," he said. "That's a lesson we've learned. Going forward, we will be mindful of that."
For this election, Heiskell has received about $20,000 more than the legal limit from 14 contributors, money that her campaign will have to return after the election.
Asked about his company's excess donations, Whitfield said: "Maybe she owes me some money."
Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.