Hoover resident Dom Gentile announces bid for U.S. Senate
A 51-year-old businessman from Hoover on Tuesday said he is joining the race for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions and now held by Luther Strange.
Dom Gentile, the franchise developer for the Jan-Pro commercial cleaning company in the Birmingham and Huntsville markets, describes himself as a political outsider who wants to take the state back from politicians who have done their best to mess it up.
Gentile said he considered running for governor in next year’s gubernatorial election but decided, once Gov. Kay Ivey moved up the special election for the Senate seat to August, that he had a better chance to win the Senate seat because corruption is still fresh on the minds of Alabamians.
“I truly believe the people in this state are ready for somebody to lead in the U.S. Senate who doesn’t have any baggage,” Gentile said. “I don’t have any baggage. I owe nobody.”
Gentile said he won’t take campaign contributions from any special interests or big groups — only small donations from individuals. And he pledges, if elected, to only stay in office for one full six-year term following the completion of Sessions’ term, which ends in January 2019.
He believes in term limits but doesn’t think Congress will ever set them, he said. If he wins this year and again in the regular 2018 Senate election, he can focus his time and energy on governing rather than trying to raise money for re-election in 2024, he said.
Gentile said skyrocketing health care costs is one of the most important issues that spurred him to run. When he started his franchising company for Jan-Pro in Alabama in late 2004, his family’s health care premiums were $700 a month, he said. Now, they are $2,200 per month, he said.
“As a small business, it’s very difficult for us, and it’s very difficult on normal folks,” he said.
Gentile also said he’s going to fight to end the monopoly that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama has on the insurance industry in the state. “Blue Cross Blue Shield is going to have to compete,” he said.
Gentile also favors a 20 percent flat income tax for individuals and allowing corporations to repatriate their overseas profits without being taxed. These policies would put more money in people’s pockets and provide incentive for businesses to invest, creating millions of new jobs, he said on his campaign website.
He also wants to dramatically reduce the size of the Internal Revenue Service.
“As an entrepreneur, I know firsthand that government regulation kills job growth,” Gentile wrote on his website. “Red tape is a job killer and must be rooted out of government.”
Gentile said he wants to ensure that programs such as Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits are not reduced, pass a balanced budget amendment, protect the lives of unborn babies, build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out of the country, deport criminal immigrants, support local government decision-making for education, and expand innovative, economically feasible and environmentally responsible energy sources.
Background
Gentile grew up in Miami and moved to Alabama in 1984 to attend college at the University of Alabama, where he was the backup walk-on kicker to Van Tiffin on the Alabama football team. After graduating from Alabama with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1987, he worked 10 years in sales for the Duracell battery company. Gillette bought out Duracell, and after two years with Gillette, he joined Sara Lee.
Gentile said his work took him all over the United States and to more than 25 countries. He lived in Asia for a while and describes himself as an internationalist with a global perspective.
His wife wanted to move closer to her parents in Huntsville, so he took on the Jan-Pro franchising for Birmingham and Huntsville and has spent the past 13 years growing that business to 50 franchise owners who clean about 7.5 million square feet of office space each month, he said. The company has multi-million-dollar revenues each year, he said.
He and his wife, Karen, have lived in Hoover’s Lake Cyrus community since 2005. They have three sons: a 23-year-old who is a U.S. Air Force officer, a 22-year-old who is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte and a 16-year-old sophomore at Hoover High School.
Gentile served several years on the Hoover City Schools Foundation and has been an adjunct marketing instructor, previously at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and for the past eight or nine years at Huntington College, he said.
Gentile is running as a Republican. Other Republican candidates who have announced they are running for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Sessions are: Strange, Dr. Randy Brinson, president of the Christian Coalition of Alabama; state Rep. Ed Henry, R-Hartselle; and Roy Moore, former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.
Ron Crumpton, the executive director for the Alabama Patients’ Rights Coalition, is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate seat.
The primary election is scheduled for Aug. 15, while the primary runoff is set for Sept. 26 and the general election for Dec. 12. The last day to qualify to run is May 17.
Find out more about Gentile on his website at gentileforsenate.com. He also is on Facebook under Dom Gentile and on Instagram and Twitter under @DomForSenate.