March 9, 2010
The Collierville Independent
Gibbons' campaign trail leads to local coffee club
Shelby County District Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Bill Gibbons met with the Collierville Coffee Club at Super D Drug Store Feb. 3 to discuss his goals and the Nov. 2 election.
Joined by his Shelby County campaign coordinator, former Shelby County Mayor Jim Rout, Gibbons noted his need for support in his home base of West Tennessee to roughly 15 people in attendance at the club, which has met for coffee since 1956.
"Our strategy here is simple," he said, adding he wants a landslide victory in his home base of West Tennessee. Shelby County, he said, carries 20 percent of the primary vote with West Tennessee accounting for 25 percent of the total primary vote.
February 4, 2010
Brownsville States-Graphic
Governor hopeful visits Delta Heritage Center
The West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center is probably used to having a variety of visitors come through its doors.
But one has to wonder if they were expecting a visit from Shelby County District Attorney General and state governor hopeful Bill Gibbons last week.
Gibbons stopped by the center last Wednesday afternoon, along with Shelby County Sheriff Mark Luttrell, for a chance to speak and hear from Haywood County’s leaders.
This wasn’t the first time Gibbons visited Haywood County, as he later told the crowd.
January 15, 2010
Jackson Sun
GOP candidate for governor Bill Gibbons speaks to students at Madison Academic
Madison Academic Magnet High School senior Calin Temple liked some of the ideas for education that gubernatorial candidate Bill Gibbons highlighted during a visit to her government and economics class on Thursday.
Temple, 17, who plans to become a teacher, would like to benefit from Gibbons' idea of expanding the Hope Scholarship to give students majoring in education a full scholarship if they choose to teach in Tennessee.
She plans to study English and secondary education.
Temple is deciding whether to attend Freed-Hardeman or Harding University in Arkansas.
"I want to go into education because I believe it's a career that helps people and I have a passion for it," she said.
Temple asked Gibbons why he decided to run for governor.
Gibbons told the students that he wants to make a difference in his three platform areas - creating a climate for more good paying jobs, making sure Tennessee has a good education system and safe communities.
January 12, 2010
The Dickson Herald
Shelby Co. DA makes bid for governor's office
Shelby County District Attorney Bill Gibbons paid a visit to Dickson County to make his bid governor of Tennessee.
Gibbons has been the district attorney for Shelby County for the past 12 years. Before that he was in private law practice, and served on the Memphis City Council, Shelby County Board of Commissioners and was an assistant to former Gov. Lamar Alexander.
Gibbons said he has a plan for the state that will help small and large cities alike.
“I think the challenges facing Dickson County are pretty much the same facing Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville,” he said.
January 9, 2010
The Commercial Appeal
Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Gibbons came to Nashville to propose a six-point governmental openness and accountability platform, and to rail at opponent Bill Haslam's refusal to make public his federal income tax returns.
Gibbons, the Shelby County district attorney, voluntarily released his complete income tax returns for the past five years last month, including schedules, and pledged to continue to do so as governor.
He said during his Nashville visit Thursday that he wants to shift a culture of secrecy to a "culture of openness." He listed steps to make government records and decision-making more accessible and officials' personal finances more transparent.
November 15, 2009
The Mountain Press
Gibbons’ early life overcome with education
It is a story that exemplifies the American spirit and what can be accomplished through hard work, an education, a supportive parent and a little luck. Bill Gibbons, the Republican district attorney general of Shelby County (Memphis), is running for governor of Tennessee. That’s a good story by itself. But his rise to prominence is an even better story. He’s the youngest of six children, raised on a small farm in southern Arkansas. “My father was an alcoholic, and he walked out on us when I was 4,” Gibbons said during a visit last week to The Mountain Press. “It’s one of my earliest memories.” Young Bill watched as his mother tried to keep the family together. But he also saw possessions sold off to generate money for food. It wasn’t long before every piece of furniture in the Gibbons household was sold. Five dollars for a chair, $10 for a table. “We had no car and no phone,” he said. “We had no TV until I was 10 and an older brother got us one. We had no access to medical care.” They lost the farm to foreclosure. But through it all, the one possession Gibbons’ mother would not sell was her collection of books.
November 17, 2009
KnoxNews.com
Lamar, Gibbons Lead in Prisoner Release Concern
Sen. Lamar Alexander, who as governor in the 1980s oversaw early release of prison inmates as mandated by a federal court because of state government foulups, and Bill Gibbons, who is running for governor on an anti-crime platform, both declared themselves concerned about the possibility of early inmate releases as part of state budget-cutting.
November 14, 2009
The Daily Times
Gibbons emphasizes safety, economic develop...
Stopping in Blount County on Friday during a tour of East Tennessee, Gibbons emphasized his commitment to public safety, saying he wants violent offenders to serve more of their sentences in jail. “Of the candidates for governor, I’m the only one who talks about making public safety a top priority,” he said. “I have proposed toughening up our laws with regard to the manufacture of meth. It is a very serious problem. The number of meth lab seizures in Tennessee is going up. That’s a disturbing trend. We need to up the penalties for the manufacture of meth. At the same time we have also go to do a better job of addressing the addiction to meth.”
October 22, 2009
Cleveland Daily Banner
Fight against meth part of Gibbons’ campaign
Tennessee Republican Bill Gibbons recently outlined an aggressive plan of attack on meth makers and users and pledged to enhance education to promote the dangers of meth if elected governor.
In a speech to the Bradley County Pachyderm Club, Gibbons provided details of his plan to reduce the manufacture and use of methamphetamine and to expand educational efforts, particularly to young people, to highlight the devastating affects the highly addictive drug has on lives, families and communities.
“Meth is a terrible plague in Tennessee — it is destructive and very costly to our state in many ways,” said Gibbons, the Shelby County District Attorney General. “If I am governor, we will take a very aggressive position so that meth is harder to make and distribute within our state, and step up our efforts to capture drugs coming into Tennessee.”
September 4, 2009
Jackson Sun
Gibbons talks jobs, crime, schools
Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Gibbons touts the location of the Haywood County megasite and says he would work to make firing bad teachers easier and toughen sentencing for more troubling offenders. Gibbons, the district attorney general for Memphis and Shelby County, visited The Jackson Sun on Thursday. He emphasized the Haywood site's close proximity to Interstate 40, Jackson and Memphis and praised Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen's work in maintaining funding and building support for the site. He said if he is elected he would make infrastructure work priming the site for construction and recruiting industry among his top priorities if neither had happened by the time he takes office.
August 21, 2009
The Daily Post-Athenian
Shelby DA Gibbons campaigns here
Shelby County District Attorney and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Gibbons said he realizes he has a lot of work to do in creating a following in East Tennessee with opponents like Rep. Zach Wamp and Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam. But Gibbons said he believes he is the most qualified of the Republican candidates because of his "clear focus and agenda" and past political work in the municipal government of Memphis and in the administration of former Gov. Lamar Alexander. He also said his job as a district attorney constantly forces him to make difficult decisions. "I feel like I've spent my entire political career preparing for the (job of governor)," he said during a campaign visit to Athens this week.
August 21, 2009
Columbia Daily Herald
Memphis native and Republican Bill Gibbons has served as Shelby County’s district attorney since 1996. He is a former member of the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission, and former vice president of the National D.A.’s Association. A candidate for governor, Gibbons visited Columbia recently and answered questions from Daily Herald staff. Following are brief excerpts from that conversation. Where does Bill Gibbons stand on ... Creating jobs in Maury County: “I think that one of the most important things the next governor can do is create the kind of climate that will encourage economic growth. That involves providing the basic infrastructure for growth: the roads, bridges, water lines, sewer lines, industrial sites. That will be one of my top priorities in order to bring more good-paying jobs into Maury County, as well as other parts of the state. Positioning Tennessee as a place where the growth industries of the future want to locate, and I include in that everything from industries related to solar energy to the biomedical field, to the car manufacturing plants of the future.”
August 20, 2009
Monroe Co. Advocate
Gibbons makes campaign stop in Sweetwater
Tennessee Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Gibbons said he already has one very tough job and is looking for another, he told those who came out to greet him at his campaign stop at the gazebo in Sweetwater Monday afternoon. The candidate was in town to meet citizens at an event hosted by Bill and June Landrum of Sweetwater. The Landrums represent Knox, Loudon, Monroe and Anderson counties for the Tennessee Republican Party State Executive Committee. Gibbons has served as district attorney general for Shelby County since 1996. Gibbons made his way up from humble beginnings, he said, and now he wants to put that same work ethic to good use for Tennesseans in Nashville.
August 5, 2009
Tennessean
Gibbons' campaign turns to social networking...
Backers of Shelby County Attorney General Bill Gibbons said Tuesday that they would launch their own networking site tied to the Republican candidate for governor. The Gibbons Grassroots Network was to launch at midnight on Gibbons' Web site. Modeled after sites set up in last year's presidential race by President Barack Obama and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the network is meant to tie together supporters and connect them with messages sent out over established social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. "What President Obama did … is he energized the grassroots," said Josh Thomas, Gibbons' campaign manager. "This can be a pretty effective communications tool."
August 2, 2009
Tennessean
Gubernatorial candidate promises cleanup of THP
Gubernatorial races and the Tennessee Highway Patrol are time-honored partners in state politics, and a scandal involving two THP criminal investigators last week prompted one candidate to come out vowing to clean up the agency. Shelby County District Attorney Bill Gibbons issued a statement saying he would restore professionalism to the agency. He said in a release on his Web site that politics has been a part of the agency for far too long and the public has lost confidence. “I mentioned the need to make changes in the Highway Patrol on the day I announced back in January,” Gibbons told The Tennessean. “I’ve been talking about it pretty consistently ever since. It’s something I’m very concerned about. I talked to a lot of troopers about this. What I want to do as governor is restore the level of professionalism to the Highway Patrol that the troopers and the public deserve.”
July 27, 2009
Morristown Citizen Tribune
Gibbons puts in bid for governor
Often thought — in East Tennessee anyway — as the fourth man in the race for the Republican nomination for Tennessee governor, Bill Gibbons is used to long odds. By the age of 4, Gibbons and his mother were abandoned by his alcoholic father and left to battle on their own in rural Southern Arkansas in the early ‘60s. Gibbons overcame his impoverished upbringing, earned a scholarship to Vanderbilt and in 1996 became the Shelby County district attorney — a job he says prepared him for life in the Governor’s Mansion.
July 23, 2009
Knoxville News-Sentinel
GOP candidate Gibbons stumps on anti-crime...
KNOXVILLE - Shelby County District Attorney General and GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Gibbons argued today that improving Tennessee's economic outlook should be as much about reducing the state's crime rate as job growth and education. The prosecutor's comments came over breakfast at Long's Drug Store in Bearden with Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols, a Democrat who has crossed party lines to serve Gibbons' campaign as one of 12 vice chairmen, nine of whom are fellow DAs.
May 21, 2009
Memphis Flyer
Bill Gibbons, the district attorney general for Shelby County and a candidate for governor of Tennessee, is the head of the largest single prosecutorial unit in state government, first named to that job by former Governor Don Sundquist and reelected twice since. He is a well-groomed, soft-spoken congenial man whose shock of pure-white hair gives him, at late 50-something, a paradoxically youthful look. If you didn't know he was a lawman, you might take him for a high school math teacher or a stockbroker. Yet last Friday, in the course of a one-day run through East Tennessee, home of all three of his opponents for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2010, Gibbons could and did boast offhandedly to a meet-and-greet audience in small-town Athens, "Got a death penalty decision yesterday," talk about the hard necessity of referring intractable juvenile offenders to the harsh justice of state prison, and note that his office handles no fewer than 100,000 cases a year with a work force that has been progressively trimmed for budgetary reasons.
April 15, 2009
Maryville Daily Times
Gibbons brings early lessons to candidacy
The man from El Dorado, Ark., didn't have a golden childhood. But the lessons Bill Gibbons learned are shaping his gubernatorial campaign. Gibbons is running against U.S. Congressman Zach Wamp, Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam and Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey for the Republican nomination for Tennessee governor. He took a few minutes to talk with The Daily Times on Tuesday before attending the Knox County Lincoln Day Dinner. "I grew up in Arkansas," Gibbons said. "My family had a small farm. When I was 4 years of age, my father walked out on us. I was the youngest of six kids. It is one of my earliest memories. I remember the day he left."
