It is official. Laurel resident and state senator Stacey Pickering has decided to make a run for the state auditor’s position. He announced his intentions before a group of supporters at the Laurel Hotel Monday evening.
Pickering will vie for the position left open by Phil Bryant, who is pursuing the lieutenant governor’s position in this season’s elections.
“To me the state auditor’s position is one of the most critical statewide elected officials. It ensures the integrity of all public taxpayer funds,” Pickering told the Laurel Leader-Call editorial board earlier in the day.
He believes that the present time is crucial to have an effective state auditor’s office with the amount of aid coming in for Hurricane Katrina relief.
“Right now we’ve got over $40 billion in federal aid flowing through our state agencies to Mississippi,” Pickering said. “We have to have even more diligence and more accountability in spending the national taxpayers’ dollars to prevent there from being any fraud, to prevent there from being any corruption to disenfranchise the national view of Mississippi.”
He also said he wanted to be more proactive by dealing with the local public officials in the early stages of spending instead of only being an “enforcer” at the end of the process.
“Let’s not have honest mistakes take place that we could correct with public training and education,” Pickering said.
Pickering said he also wanted to see the use of performance audits. “A performance audit helps to identify our best practices and ways we can make government more efficient and more effective while at the same time identifying wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars that’s taking place,” Pickering said.
After some early campaigning that he has been able to schedule around senate committee meetings, Pickering said he will put campaigning on the back burner for the most part until the Mississippi legislative session ends in a few months.
Pickering said, “We’ve had an extremely warm and gracious reception statewide from the Tennessee state line to the Gulf Coast.”
Pickering currently does not have a challenger in the Republican primary. Candidates can register to run until March 1, though.
According to the Mississippi Democratic Party website, one Democrat, Mike Sumrall of Covington County, has registered to run for state auditor.
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