They refused to release information about their four finalists for the fire chief’s job, except for the one they chose in a closed-door meeting with a wink and a nod instead of a public vote as required by Georgia law.
So, The Augusta Press, The Augusta Chronicle, WJBF-TV and WRDW-TV took them to court under Georgia’s Open Records Act for release of information about the finalists. And on Wednesday Superior Court Judge Jesse Stone ordered them to release three of the four finalists’ resumes.
But the city refused to comply with Stone’s order and instead filed a motion Thursday asking the judge to reconsider and clarify his order. Stone responded by setting a Friday hearing, and after hearing arguments from both sides, he upheld his order for the city to release the resumes of the four finalists who commissioners interviewed in April.
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The city has released the name of only one finalist, DeKalb County Fire-Rescue Deputy Chief Antonio Burden. Augusta General Counsel Wayne Brown argued that’s all Georgia law requires.
Stone disagreed, and his ruling sustained the injunction he imposed Thursday barring the city from hiring Burden until 14 days after turning over the resumes and recruitment material stands.
Burden was chosen in a closed-door commission meeting April 20 by “consensus” instead of with a public vote. And as it turns out, Burden has a somewhat burdensome work and personal history. Information from his DeKalb County personnel file shows he was suspended for five days after his fire department vehicle was seen at a liquor store. As DeKalb Fire Marshal, he was also slack in making fire inspections, according to media reports. He was also found in contempt of court twice and has been taken to court twice more for not paying his bills.
Meanwhile, Augusta commissioners canceled a closed-door meeting that had been scheduled for Friday afternoon, reportedly to discuss an appeal of Stone’s order, which if they end up doing will only shine the light more brightly on their efforts to do the people’s business in the dark. And run up legal fees.
Augusta Commissioner John Clarke, one of only two commissioners to attend the hearing, said afterwards he thought Stone made his ruling based on the statutes and the law.
“Maybe now we will go forward with the hiring process,” he said.
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Commissioner Catherine McKnight, the other commissioner at the hearing, said, “Justice was done right today. This is the fair thing for the citizens of Augusta. What is the problem with starting the process over and doing it right? As a newcomer on the commission, this was my first hiring, and I hope the process for hiring directors in the future will be done differently.”
With regard to the canceled commission meeting, McKnight said she thought some commissioners want to appeal Stone’s ruling.
“If they want to appeal, it would take months and cost a lot of money,” she said.
The Cost of Dark
So how much is it costing us taxpayers to keep ourselves in the dark about something we’d like to know about?
The winners in court often recoup their lawyer’s fees from the losers. And so far the city has lost in court trying to keep everything about the fire chief finalists under wraps. And with legal fees being what they are, $6,000 to $7,000 seems about right for the first round.
So, the next freedom of information request The Augusta Press will likely make will be for copies of the legal bills so we can find out how much it’s costing us to keep ourselves in the dark.
We Want to See What We Bought
Speaking of Freedom of Information requests, The Augusta Press has been trying for the last month to get invoices or receipts for Mayor Hardie Davis’ city accounts. By law it’s supposed to take only three days for a response. His office has submitted some records but not others, despite repeated written and oral requests. And some that were turned over are sketchy. For example, a hotel confirmation does not tell you who the reservation was for. And the public is entitled to have that information under the state’s open records law.
Interestingly enough, every other Augusta government office or department has responded to requests for financial records with complete and thorough documentation.
In an April 8 open records request to the city, one category was for invoices and receipts for “My Brother’s Keeper” account for 2021. The city made no response to that request.
Also, on April 8 requests were made for invoices and receipts related to the Mayor’s Economic Development Public Relations account and credit cards for 2021. These have not been produced.
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The following is a list of expenditures that documentation was requested for and not provided. This is only for the 2020 records. No records were provided for 2021 expenses.
M-O-T-H-E-R
M – is for the million things she gave me
O – means only that she’s growing old
T – is for the tears she shed to save me
H – is for her heart of purest gold
E – is for her eyes with love-light shining
R – means right and right she’ll always be
Put them all together they spell mother
A word that means the world to me.
I’ve already told you about my mother Alice and Alice’s Restaurant, which wasn’t really the name of the restaurant whose fried chicken and biscuits caused Yankees on their way to and from Florida to drive 40 miles out of their way to get to. It was Home Restaurant on old
Highway 41, four miles north of Tifton. Daddy was there too, but it was Mama’s ambition, energy and hard work that elevated our family to what I was to later learn in college was “lower middle-class” status from what could quite possibly have been the share-cropper ranks. So, I appreciate her sacrifices and am so glad to have had such a role model, but there were many other wonderful women role models in my life that I want to pay tribute to this Mother’s Day.
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My paternal grandmother Mama Ross could call up the hoot owls in Little River Swamp and carry on a conversation with them. She could go to sleep doing the Dead Man’s Float on Whiddon Millpond, her dress spreading out on the water like a giant lily pad. And she could tell the most thrilling bedtime stories as we snuggled close beside her on her featherbed. Kidnapping and murder were her specialties, meant to entertain and edify. A favorite was about little Mary Phagan who went to the pencil factory to collect some wages and never came home because an evil man called Leo Frank strangled her to death. Another
little girl had to cross a bridge on her way to the store, and she never came back either. When they went to look for her, they found her because somebody saw three little fingers sticking up out of the water.
Almost every Sunday, the entire Ross clan would congregate at her and Big Daddy’s house for dinner, and nobody ever wanted to go home. Aunt Elizabeth would play the piano (by ear); Aunt Ruth would sing and the grandchildren would run wild.
Everybody loved to be around Mama Ross because she had such a great personality. She was generous too. If you took a liking to something she had, even if it was in her curio cabinet she’d give it to you.
It seems incredible in this day and age, but Mama Ross let me drive her Ford around the country dirt roads when I was only 13. I didn’t know how to drive, of course, much less change gears, so I put the car in the gear it started rolling and galloping in and drove around like that the whole way. One day I ran out of gas by Little River bridge and had to walk back to her house. She wasn’t upset a bit. She just told the boys to go get some gasoline and bring the car home.
Mama Ross was famous for her fishing skill too. She went fishing every day of her adult life, barring deaths, births, weddings and funerals. She’d even slip off on Sunday afternoons to go fishing although that was supposed to be a sin. She wasn’t too much into sin.
She lived to be 97 and spent the last year of her life in a nursing home. When I went to see her, she’d beg me not to leave, but you know, I was sooo busy. If only I could go back, I’d stay until she ran me off and make her tell me one more time about walking up to the railroad tracks in 1910 to see Halley’s Comet.
Miami Heat
My maternal grandmother, Emmie Anna Sheftall, was the exact opposite of Mama Ross. She was strict, pious and frugal. But it was the strangest thing, I loved her just as much as I did Mama Ross.
Her prospects as a young girl were not good, and she married a railroad man, John Armand Sheftall of Jewish/Italian parentage. As it turned out, he was a descendant of one of the first Jews to settle in Savannah. Jewish aristocracy, so to speak.
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Anyway, John went more to the side of the Italians and was a Roman Catholic, which Grandma became. And as you probably know, the converts are often more devout than those born into the faith, which describes them to a T. Grandpa was a tippler. Grandma was truly devout. What I remember most about her is that every night after she’d read the
newspaper, she’d get down on her knees and pray. And it was from her I heard, “If you waste food, you will burn in hell!” And as you can imagine, that has had a devastating effect on my ability to throw out leftovers which might be the reason I’m overweight and have so many dogs. What I can’t eat, they do, which relieves me of that fear of hellfire.
And there was no eating between meals at Grandma’s. Sometimes I’d get so hungry at night, I’d slip out of bed and creep down the hall toward the kitchen to see if there was anything in the breadbox, but she always heard me and told me to go back to bed.
Once a week, she’d crank up that old Model T and go to the A&P for groceries. We children stayed in the car, and she’d bring us a vanilla ice cream cone to keep us entertained while she shopped. Today, she’d be arrested, and we’d all be sent to foster homes.
When I say she was strict, I mean she made you do what she told you to do, and she made you work, even if was just handing her the wet clothes to pin onto the clothesline or holding the dustpan for her to sweep the kitchen crumbs into. Looking back on the way things were then as opposed to now, children did not sass or backtalk to their parents and grandparents. I tried it one time with her, and she slapped me good.
At Grandma’s house nobody was catered to. There was no entertainment and no scheduled activities, except church, and no adult felt compelled to provide any. The only thing to do was sit on the floor beside Grandma as she sewed on her treadle sewing machine, stopping
only long enough to show me how to do the next crochet stitch. Still, I loved going there for the summer.
Grandpa Sheftall worked at the ice plant, and Grandma took in sewing. Every day she’d get up and put on a corset. The kind with steel stays in them; then put on stockings, knotting them up at her knees and a housedress. Then after cleaning house and cooking, she’d sit down at that sewing machine and start pedaling away. Looking back on it, I don’t know how she stood it. This was in Miami, Fla., in the summertime. There was no air conditioning. Only a small rotating fan to blow the hot air around. I think now she must have been doing penance for some imagined sin or something.
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As for Grandpa, he must have gotten chilled from working in the ice plant all day, so at night he’d head off to the juke joint down the road to warm himself up a little. When it started getting late, Grandma would send me down to tell him to come home. I loved going
there, seeing the neon lights and smelling the beer.
Grandpa was only 49 when he died, six weeks after he’d stopped drinking. It had not been the happiest of marriages to say the least, but they had four children. And when he died, Grandma cried and moaned and carried on at his casket something awful. I’ve never heard anybody cry like that since. And that was a long time ago.
Sylvia Cooper is a Columnist with The Augusta Press. Reach her at sylvia.cooper@theaugustapress.com.
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