Three candidates run for U.S. Representative
Incumbent Mark Meadows, R-Cashiers, will face a challenger in next year’s election to represent the 11th District of North Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Two Democratic candidates — Rick Bryson and Tom Hill — will face off in the March primary.
Meadows is currently serving his second consecutive two-year term in Congress since first being elected in 2012. Meadows ran unopposed in the 2014 primary before defeating Hill in the general election.
This time around Hill will have to go up against fellow Democrat Bryson in a March 15 primary election. This will be the third time Hill, D-Zirconia, has run for the seat. He has a Ph.D. in physics from UNC-Chapel Hill and worked in the aerospace field with the U.S. Department of Defense.
This is the first time Rick Bryson of Bryson City has sought a congressional seat. He is currently a first-term alderman in his hometown of Bryson City and had a long career as an industrial public relations writer in Cleveland, Ohio, before returning to Bryson City.
Bryson has said he’s been instrumental in getting important projects done in Bryson City and feels like he can be just as effective in Washington, D.C. If elected, he said, he would push for a major new industrial complex in the district that would incubate clean industries in fields like biomedicine, solar energy, recreation and agribusinesses. He said sites could be spread all across the district and all manufacturing would have to be done in the U.S.
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During the 2014 election, Hill said his top priorities would be to close offshore tax loopholes and introduce an immigration reform bill. He was also in favor of increasing minimum wage and higher taxes for corporations.
Meadows has drawn some good and bad publicity during his two terms. He came under fire during his first term for his role in advocating for the federal government shutdown. During his current term, he was ousted from his chairmanship on the Government Operations Subcommittee for voting against a party-line motion. Not one to play “political games,” Meadows said he would always vote in the best interest of his district over party lines — something his constituency seems to appreciate.
