BRYSON CITY – Rick Bryson says he’s running to represent most of Western North Carolina in the U.S. House so the region’s young people won’t have to do what he did: Leave the region to get a job.
“I was one of those kids that got a technical education and there was nothing around here for me,” he said.
Bryson, a Democrat who serves on the town’s Board of Aldermen, recently announced he will run next year for the 11th House District seat now held by Jackson County Republican Mark Meadows.
Meadows, who has not formally stated his intentions for 2016, is serving his second term and unseating him would be an uphill task for any Democrat in the conservative district. Bryson, 71, is the first announced Democratic candidate.
Bryson said boosting the region’s economy would be a top priority if he’s successful. “Let’s bring our kids back to the mountains,” he said.
He grew up in Bryson City and left after high school to go to North Carolina State University, getting a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked in Delaware, Maryland, Ohio and Quebec, primarily as a technical writer, before returning to his hometown in 2009 to live in the house he grew up in. He’s now semi-retired.
Bryson proposes establishing a foundation to provide initial investments and other services to incubate new businesses in the region. He said it could tap existing sources of funds without requiring a tax increase.
Entrepreneurs, he said, are “just waiting for seed money and development money to go to work. If they do this, what happens is a kid like me who goes off to school could come back.”
Bryson said Meadows has few accomplishments to show for his time in the House and cost the region $23 million in tourism and other revenue when he played a leading role in shutting down the federal government for more than two weeks in October 2013.
“Basically, he’s strong on style and short on substance. He quarrels with Democrats. He quarrels with Republicans,” Bryson said.
Meadows filed a resolution last month calling for Republican House Speaker John Boehner to step down.
Bryson called it a publicity stunt, saying, “I think that’s why he gets his face in the newspaper and on the websites.”
He said he would take a less confrontational approach, saying his campaign motto is a phrase from Isaiah: “Let us reason together.”
Congress, he said, is “mired in a condition of do-nothingness. Let’s stop the chaos. Let’s stop the quarreling. Regardless of your party, we’re Americans.”
Bryson’s father was once mayor of Bryson City — the town was named for an ancestor — and he says, “Politics is genetic with me.”
He ran for Swain County Board of Education not long after returning to Bryson City and fared poorly because, he said, “I don’t think a lot of people knew me.”
He resolved to change that when he ran for alderman in 2013. “I knocked on every door here that didn’t have a fence around it. If there’s a fence around it, there’s a dog behind it,” he said.
“Shoe leather trumps money,” Bryson said, but he acknowledged putting that belief in practice in the 11th District will take some work. The district runs from Hickory to the western tip of the state past Murphy. It take in most of WNC but does not include most of Asheville, the southeastern quadrant of Buncombe County or Polk or Rutherford counties.
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