Alpharetta Councilman David Belle Isle (R) is running for the Ga. State Senate in 2010. To capture the seat of the retiring Sen. Dan Moody (D-56), Belle Isle must first win the GOP primary in July of next year. Belle Isle is facing three opponents to date so far for that coveted nomination: GNFCC CEO and GDOT Board member Brandon Beach, Roswell community activist John Albers and House Judiciary Chairman Wendell Willard, from Sandy Springs. Roswell represents about two-thirds of the district. The official filing deadline is not until April of next year.

David Belle Isle is a very nice guy, with a great family and a thriving local law practice in Alpharetta. He is an attractive and articulate candidate, passionate in his beliefs with a reputation for candor and forthrightness. He is a very effective retail campaigner with a warm and friendly personality that resonates on a personal level. All good.

He is also relatively new to politics, and political naivety may be his ultimate undoing this go around.

Belle Isle has some real peccadilloes looming in his senate race, which are very likely to mar his campaign. Whether he can successfully dance around these is speculative at best. We’ll call them Belle Isle’s four bugaboos.

One: Judgment.

The Alpharetta City Center $25 million bond fiasco has turned into a debacle for Belle Isle. He was the unabashed pitchman for the failed caper, making presentation after presentation to the community on its behalf. The problem is that his gung-ho support was one-sided. He never gave both sides of the equation and he didn’t do his homework. His numbers were flawed, outdated and suspect from the start. When two of his colleagues on City Council, Doug DeRito and D.C. Aiken, demanded that Alpharetta city staffers verify the numbers Belle Isle was claiming, the project collapsed from within. They couldn’t produce the documentation DeRito and Aiken wanted, because it didn’t exist. Worse, his support of bringing in one developer to oversee the construction of the project was pure folly. The chosen company had what looked like a sweetheart deal, pawned off as Public Private Partnership (PPP), yet they had no financial skin in the game, save $195,000 toward the parking garage. The whole thing looked like a back-room developer deal. Worse, a popular website, www.chateaualpharetta.com, mercilessly harpooned the project, which deftly used humor to poke at the project’s weak spots.

Two: Inconsistency.

Belle Isle has made fiscal responsibility a centerpiece of his senate campaign. One of his policy lynchpins is not to accept any federal stimulus money, on ideological grounds. He has made numerous speeches on the council dais opposing the acceptance of any stimulus funds, and voted against nearly all of them. Fair enough. But his conundrum is this: how do you position yourself as the ultimate fiscal conservative and then support a $25 million loan that would have been dumped on Alpharetta taxpayers? Borrowing money you don’t have from the taxpayers you represent for a project you don’t need is not what we’d call prudent fiscal conservative policy. Belle Isle’s response to this, while cogent, is not convincing.

Three: Politics.

While several of Belle Isle’s votes against the acceptance of stimulus funding for Alpharetta were philosophically defensible, his most recent rejection vote, along with that of embattled City Councilman John Monson, made no sense. The federal government allocated money to commission studies for energy conservation and Alpharetta was eligible for a grant of $250,000. The money was already dispersed to Fulton County, and Alpharetta just had to verify how it would use the funds to cash the check. If they refused, it would simply go back to Fulton County. Belle Isle defended his “no” vote by saying, among other things, that China was becoming our primary debtor and the dollar would soon be de-valued. While this may be true, it has nothing to do with Alpharetta. Belle Isle may have been leveraging his fierce opposition to the Fed’s stimulus program to gain conservative votes in his senate race at the expense of the Alpharetta taxpayers he was elected to represent. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and the City Council voted to accept the check, before someone else did.

Four: Hedging.

Belle Isle says he is unequivocally staying in the senate race, and after a successful opening fund-raiser, we have no reason to doubt his authenticity. On the other hand, he refuses to give up his Alpharetta City Council seat in time for the August filing deadline. He says he plans to remain on City Council until the actual filing deadline for the state senate primary, which is April of next year. By law, the day he submits the necessary paperwork to run for senate he has to resign his council seat. That creates three challenges for Alpharetta. First, they have to go without one elected council representative until his open seat is filled. Second, the City would have to hold a special municipal election, to fill his seat, in conjunction with the July primary. Third, according to City Clerk Sue Rainwater, it will cost Alpharetta taxpayers roughly $40,000. If Belle Isle resigns his post by August, the candidates who file for the open seat would be on the municipal ballot along with everyone else, costing the city’s taxpayers nothing extra. Perhaps Belle Isle is hedging his bet, or maybe he thinks that a special Alpharetta municipal election on the July primary ballot will drive turnout, benefiting his senate campaign, as Alpharetta is his base. Regardless, the city’s taxpayers get zinged for forty grand – by Mr. fiscal conservative himself.

No doubt the Belle Isle campaign will have responses for these concerns. Whether or not they resonate with the district’s voters are why we have elections in the first place. On this we do agree with Belle Isle: we’re not China.