The first ad attack in the Fourth Congressional District GOP primary has hit the airwaves.
Boone County Judge-Executive Gary Moore released the ad district-wide Tuesday. It attacks fellow candidate and Lewis County Judge-Executive Thomas Massie for increasing spending in his county budget. The ad goes on to say Moore has helped his county, by lowering unemployment and giving it one of the best credit ratings in the state.
Check it out:
Moore and Massie are considered the frontrunners in the seven-way primary, along with state Rep. Alecia Webb-Edgington.
The Massie campaign says the ad is misleading.
“Thomas’s first year he found the previous year’s budget was really just an act of fiction. They budgeted 800,000 and overspent by several hundred thousand, so Thomas put a real budget in and made appropriate cuts,” says campaign chairman Phil Moffett.
Moffett further calls the claims regarding Massie's effects on unemployment "absurd."
In response, Moore's campaign said that the Massie campaign is "playing with semantics," saying an increase is an increase. Jonathan Duke, the campaign manager for Moore, says the increases went to Massie's friends, regardless of where the money was spent.
Massie's campaign also released budgetary figures for the two years Massie has been judge-executive, showing Massie reduced his budget by 21 percent from 2010 to 2011. It also makes the claim that Moore has raised his budget 200 percent as judge-executive.
