Thursday’s story in The Augusta Press about how Mayor Hardie Davis spent money in his My Brother’s Keeper’s account last year and his failure to provide receipts and invoices for most of the expenditures, despite repeated requests for them, prompted me to write “An Open Letter to the Mayor.”
Dear King Hardie,
Where are the receipts and invoices for the money you spent from your My Brother’s Keeper’s account? The taxpayers who worked hard for the money you spent deserve to know.
You spent much of the $37,500 allocated to you last year that was meant to elevate the young men of color in Augusta on elevating yourself with professional photographs and videos that very few people watch.
You spent more than $4,000 on digital design, websites and computer consulting from the My Brother’s Keeper account last year. And another $9,000 went to “management consultants.” So apparently, you spent a quarter of the My Brother’s Keeper money to try to figure out how to manage the other three-quarters.
And before last year, you paid a political consultant with My Brother’s Keeper’s money to help you get re-elected in 2018 – $5,000 to political consultant Ryan Mahoney. When asked about it in 2017, you said Mahoney was working on the My Brother’s Keeper program, but who believed that? Mahoney was not a youth program coordinator but apolitical consultant.
The Augusta Press has been trying for the past three weeks to get copies of invoices and receipts for charges to your SunTrust credit card, P cards and PayPal with very limited success. Your office is supposed to be able to produce these records in a reasonable amount of time – three days or less or explain why it will take longer, which your Chief of Staff Petula Burks pretty much did, I suppose, when she said they don’t exist or would be hard to dig out.
How can that be in a city you just last week called an “international city whose national star continues to rise.”
You weren’t referring to yourself as the national star, were you, Mr. Mayor?
Come clean, Sir. Why did you spend $5,000 of the money that was supposed to help Augusta’s young men of color on a website created by a Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., company, especially on one that doesn’t even work?
The records we do have indicate that ever since you hired Ms. Burks from Florida, Augusta’s dollars have helped prop up Florida’s economy. Surely there are web designers in this “international city” of Augusta that could do that work. So please tell the business owners and taxpayers of Augusta why you had to go to Fort Lauderdale to hire a company worthy of designing My Brother’s Keeper’s website, a company that, incidentally, is in the same area in the Sunshine state from whence Ms. Burks recently came.
And amazingly, Ms. Burks said she didn’t know anything about what the$5,000 paid for.
In fact, she said she’d have to look into the charges before she could give details about it, which is also amazing, Mr. Mayor, since the $5,000 was spent three months after you hired her?
But the $5,000 paid to the Florida company as “management consultants” was not the only web design promotional money spent from the My Brother’s Keeper account. Another $4,000 spent on web design and consulting included $2,000 paid to RedWolf, a local photography company whose owner, Rhian Swain said she’s taken photos for the mayor’s offices but doesn’t know what MBK is.
And Mr. Mayor, who is Yolanda Rouse – Stroll the Polls? She was paid $522.50 from the account. And what is Stroll the Polls? Spending taxpayers’ money on political recruitment is against the law. I don’t know whether “Stroll the Polls” was a get-out-the-vote endeavor, but it sounds a lot like “Souls to the Polls” which most definitely was. If it was what most people think it was, you should personally be held accountable. After all, you’re a Georgia Tech graduate and former state senator with obviously great political ambitions we’d hate to see dashed over $522.50. So why not tell us what that was all about. At least show us an invoice.
And another thing, we don’t understand how the money you paid to the U.S. Conference of Mayors and “Stroll the Polls” supported the My Brother’s Keeper mission to help underprivileged children, especially since underage children are too young to vote.
We need for you to step forward and explain with that rhetorical flair that was on display at your State of the City address last week. And if you do, please explain the more than $8,000 in other charges against the My Brother’s Keeper account that went to pay credit-card charges that have no explanation, invoices or receipts showing what the money went for.
Kevin Gulledge commented in The Augusta Press that “There is always a paper trail.”
Well yes, unless the paper trail ended at the paper shredder.
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If You Don’t Promote Yourself, Who Will?
While perusing the Augusta Political Watch Facebook page, I saw a post by District 1 Commissioner Jordan Johnson listing 11 things the commission has accomplished his first 100 days in office. My responses to each one are in parentheses:
“As I reflect on my first 100 days in office, I must say that I am really proud of my city,” wrote Johnson, who identifies himself as a Politician on his Facebook page.
“Since January, we have:
1. Passed 6M dollars for a rental assistance program to help stop mass evictions
(Every other city in the country passed a similar ordinance using federal money.)
2. Currently drafting a progressive ordinance to protect people from discrimination
(What we really need is an ordinance to protect people from the Augusta Commission.)
3. Addressing blight by way of local legislation (A first for the city)
(It’s good to have an ordinance with “teeth,” but it doesn’t work unless you are willing to bite. I can’t foresee the Augusta Commission ever taking somebody’s home away from them.)
4. Addressing homelessness via the Augusta Commission homeless task force
(So when you don’t have any real answers, you create a task force.)
5. Passed SPLOST 8, which will give us a new JBA, a water park and much needed infrastructure dollars
(Congratulations! Looks like you were able to pull the wool over citizens’ eyes to get these frivolous things you wanted by tying them to things people actually need. You will do well in Washington when you get there. Maybe you and Hardie can commute together to save taxpayers’ money.)
6. Passed multiple infrastructure improvement allocations
(You’re actually doing the projects you have the tax dollars to pay for. It’s a novel approach in Augusta.)
7. Getting people work ready via the new construction program
(That’s a good idea. Once they’re work ready, I hope they’ll go.)
8. Held Covid 19 Vaccination Pop Ups in our individual districts
(Where else would you have them?)
9. In the process of exploring American Rescue Plan allocations to directly impact the community
(What do you need to figure out? Just look above at the things you said you’re doing – blight, work training, homelessness, infrastructure. Or you could build a giant Ferris wheel downtown.)
10. Funded public art throughout downtown
(Taxpayers funded public art downtown.)
11. And for me personally, we’ve pressed play on the East Augusta Drainage project that will alleviate decade long flooding…finally
(Every District 1 commissioner for the past 30 years has pushed drainage projects in east Augusta. Check how many millions have already been spent on them.)
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Being Blighted is Not the End of the World
Apartment complex owner Nelson Smith complained to commissioners last week that a vacant lot on Wheeler Road in Sand Hills where neighbors gather to cook out and socialize is blighted and bad for the neighborhood. Commissioners didn’t agree and gave him the cold shoulder.
Afterward, Smith said commissioners blighted him.
But Smith shouldn’t feel like he’s the only one the commission has ever blighted. They blight almost everybody.
They blighted city administrators Randy Oliver and George Kolb into seeking other jobs and leaving before they fired them. They blighted city administrator Fred Russell by firing him although he’d agreed to stay on until they hired another administrator and then resign. And they blighted City Administrator Janice Jackson and General Counsel Andrew MacKenzie into resigning or being fired.
So now Smith knows how administrators, department directors and anybody else who works for or deals with the city feels.
Sylvia Cooper is a Columnist with The Augusta Press. Reach her at sylvia.cooper@theaugustapress.com
