The Libertarian Party of Georgia will have at least one candidate it supports on the ballot this November, with the state party endorsing Zane Placie in his bid for Fulton County Soil and Water Conservation supervisor.
The party announced its support earlier this month, joining the Libertarian Party of Fulton County in backing Placie, who also chairs the local organization. Placie is challenging incumbent supervisors Jason Ulseth and Walter Rekuc Jr., both of whom have held their seats for multiple terms. The race is nonpartisan with voters allowed to choose two candidates.
The party said Placie is running in part to educate the public on the existence of the office as well as to draw attention to how the district operates. It also drew attention to the difficulty in following the current work of the supervisors, pointing to the district’s website, which it said has not been updated in more than two years and features broken links, including for things such as supervisor meeting minutes.
“It’s literally easier to run for this office than to find out what they do,” Placie said in the statement.
Each Georgia county is represented by both elected and appointed Soil and Water Conservation District supervisors, with Fulton County operating as its own five-member district. Supervisors are responsible for local soil and water conservation work, including erosion and sediment control. The districts also review erosion control plans, though they are ultimately still state agencies without regulatory authority.
Placie originally qualified for the ballot earlier this year, where he faced a much simpler path than the statewide Libertarian candidates the Libertarian Party of Georgia initially sought to run. In order to qualify, he only needed to be a registered voter in Fulton County and submit at least 25 signatures from other county voters.
The state party had wanted to field Chase Oliver for governor, Allen Buckley for U.S. Senate, and Tom Blooming for the Public Service Commission; however, whether they would appear on the general election ballot depended on the party completing a statewide petition following the 2024 election. With Public Service Commission races delayed that year due to litigation, Oliver, who was also the national Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, was the Georgia party’s only statewide candidate whose vote total could preserve that ballot access. He ultimately fell short of the required 1 percent.
In the year following, the party began organizing the new petition effort, but ultimately ended it in July after reportedly collecting only a few hundred of the more than 70,000 valid signatures it needed. Party leadership said afterward that they would turn their attention toward local elections and continue pursuing changes to Georgia’s ballot access laws.
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