PENDERGRASS — Republican gubernatorial candidate Eric Johnson promised Wednesday to give the state’s manufacturers a reprieve on certain sales taxes.

Johnson, a former state Senator and Senate president pro tempore, says, if elected, he will introduce legislation to abolish sales tax on energy use for the state’s manufacturers. He said the proposal is part of his promise to be the “jobs governor.”

Standing in front of TenCate Nicolon in Pendergrass in Jackson County, Johnson called for a comprehensive review of the state’s tax code, adding such a review had not been done since 1965.

“We need to make sure that (the code is) encouraging hard work and not discouraging it, and encouraging expansion of jobs and not outsourcing it,” Johnson said.

He said Georgia is the only state in the Southeast that taxes manufacturers for their energy use.

“It makes us noncompetitive,” Johnson said. “... I want to protect the jobs we have; we need to make sure we stop the job loss, and I want to be able to start growing. In this economy, we need to make things. We can’t just be a service industry. We need to make things in Georgia.”

Relieving manufacturers of the burden of energy use sales taxes, Johnson said, would save TenCate, a manufacturer of geosynthetic materials with three facilities in Georgia, about $175,000 to $200,000 a year.

“That lowers costs to consumers and it improves their ability to compete with their neighbors and potentially allows them to expand and hire three or four or five more people and grow as the need comes back,” Johnson said.

It will also mean losing about $144 million in revenue for the state, Johnson said.

“We’ll do just what families and just what businesses are doing across this state right now and tighten our belt,” Johnson said of the effect of the tax cuts to the state budget.

However, Johnson, an architect from Savannah, believes lower taxes eventually would encourage manufacturers to come to Georgia and protect jobs at existing plants.

“It will create the jobs. The jobs will create the revenue, which will then come back in and more than make up for the tax cuts,” Johnson said. “And cutting income taxes creates jobs. New jobs create new revenue, and new revenue allows us to stop furloughing teachers and stop cutting our education system.”

In a campaign that follows the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, gubernatorial candidates in Georgia have not been able to avoid the issue of how to improve the state’s economy.

Former U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, R-Gainesville, revealed a plan last week that would lower corporate income taxes by one-third, and completely exempt businesses from the tax in their startup years. Deal’s plan would also allow local governments to exempt business’ inventory from taxation.

Democrat David Poythress has pledged not to take a paycheck as governor until unemployment levels in the state drop below 7 percent.

Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, has said he supports giving startup businesses in the state the opportunity to defer paying taxes for the first two years.

And while Republican John Oxendine has called for completely scrapping the current tax code in Georgia, Johnson said he would wait for a report from a newly-formed group, the Special Council on Tax Reform and Fairness for Georgians, to make further recommendations on changes to the state’s tax code.

Gov. Sonny Perdue signed legislation Tuesday that forms the council from a group of the state’s economists and business leaders to study the state’s current revenue structure.

Voters will choose party nominees for governor in the July 20 state primary, with early voting getting under way Monday.