Editor’s note: This week, we welcome columnist emerita Sylvia Cooper back to weight in on recent news.
Hello! I hope you haven’t forgotten me. I’m Sylvia. Sylvia Cooper. Sylvia Cooper-Rogers on legal documents. I used to write a column for The Augusta Press before I retired a month or so ago to vegetate on the farm and sink into old age. Oh wait! I already have. Sunk into old age, I mean. It’s next to the worst thing that can happen to a woman. Not sinking into old age is the worst, so I shouldn’t fuss that my doctors don’t take my complaints seriously and everybody does a double-take when I have to give them my date of birth.
Anyway, this retirement is for the birds. Every weekend my fingers start itching to type something. So, this weekend I am. I had to brush up on the local news stories first, though, because along with retirement, you get lazy and don’t care what’s going on in the world because you know you won’t be here that much longer.
The most bizarre local news was the story about the woman being sentenced to 20 years in prison for killing her husband by sticking a pole through his head and burying him in their yard. Even bizzarrer, if that’s a word, is that the police didn’t investigate although the smell of death was blowing in the wind.
Remember the old adage, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?” Apparently, that shouldn’t apply to dead husbands.
Who Wants to Look Out Their Front Door and See a Stockade?
Another story that caught my eye in catching up on the news was about a case that came before the Board of Zoning Appeals. Richard and Gwendolyn Bakeman wanted a variance at their home on Wheeler Road to put up an eight-foot fence at the rear of their property. The city’s zoning ordinance restricts such fences to six feet in rear and side yards, and Paul and Carolyn Simon, who own the adjacent property, objected because the eight-foot fence would be along the front corner of their house.
Simon said the eight-foot fence, which would be in view from the front door of their home, would “look like a stockade.”
The board denied the variance.
I always heard that fences made good neighbors, but a stockade is overdoing it a bit.
He Must Have Stayed at a Holiday Inn Express
And then there was a story Friday about an Augusta University professor running an events business out of a $1.5 million Italian villa-style house smack-dab in the middle of the upscale Barrington neighborhood in Martinez.
Augusta University cyber college Associate Dean Gursimran Walia bought the house last year and has been marketing the property as Villa La Dolce Vita, an ideal place for weddings and other events.
That would be like having a Holiday Inn move next door to you. Villa La Dolce Vita might be ritzier than a Holiday Inn, but it would still be noisy. And when people party and get drunk, they all act the same.
I Have Met the Enemy, And It Is Not Me.
On the local government scene, Scott Hudson, senior investigative reporter for The Augusta Press, spoke to the mayor and Augusta commissioners Tuesday about the media’s role and responsibility to inform the public about what their elected officials are doing.
“First of all, I am not your enemy,” he said. “The Augusta Press is not your enemy. Our colleagues in the electronic media are not your enemy. We’re journalists. Our role is to document what we witness and inform the public about what our government is doing. … We are only here to inform the public of what is going on with their government whether it is good or bad.”
Hudson had a special message for the mayor.
“Mr. Mayor, this is your arena,” he said. “Sometimes it may seem like a circus, but you are the ringmaster. With all due respect, the general counsel is an adviser. He advises you, but he does not control proceedings. So, if you determine that a closed-door meeting may violate the law, it is your responsibility to open the meeting to the public. Otherwise, you have diminished the compact between the citizens and the public.”
I’m not exactly sure what prompted Scott to emphasize the need for the elected officials to be open and transparent except that they don’t seem to be much that way. So, maybe he thought they needed educating since nobody else is telling them what they need to hear in terms of open government.
The commission’s attorney is supposed to keep them in line during closed-door meetings, aka “executive sessions,” although for the life of me I don’t know why they call them that because every time commissioners emerge from one of those two-hour closed-door rap sessions I look and look and never see a single executive.
The public doesn’t know whether Brown lets commissioners stray from the topics they’re legally allowed to discuss behind closed doors, such as real estate and personnel. How could they? Nobody talks, even if they do suspect what they discussed crossed the line because they don’t want to admit they participated in an illegal meeting. Most think it’s illegal to talk about it anyway, but it’s not.
There’s Nothing New Under the Sun
Everybody who’s really been paying attention knows that nobody in the Augusta government, past or present, is losing any sleep about the Sunshine Law. It’s been that way forever. In the past, commissioners even had secret meetings at restaurants before commission meetings. Sometimes they went out-of-town, all the way to North Augusta, thinking they’d be invisible there.
They sometimes met on the QT at Sconyers Bar-B-Que. When Mayor Larry Sconyers was working on a deal to bring a Hankook Tire plant to Augusta, he invited commissioners to his restaurant for a meeting with the tire officials. So many other people had been invited, word got out, and the media joined the party at Sconyers. Everybody was there, and it was like old home week. Unfortunately, the economy took a downturn, and Hankook Tires didn’t come to Augusta.
Another time commissioners planned to meet at Sconyers on a Saturday to talk about the water crisis in Augusta caused by severe drought and a malfunctioning turbine at the water-intake plant on the river. During peak hours of water usage, the water tanks on Tobacco Road and west Augusta ran dry, and everybody was as mad as – I would say as mad as a wet hen, but there was no water to get wet in.
Anyway, I went to Sconyers that Saturday and saw Commissioner Bill Kuhlke about to turn in before he saw me and backed up and started circling around the block and calling Larry to ask what was going on. Then Commissioner Freddie Handy drove up, opened his car door and just sat there. He said, “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d just drop in.”
Georgia’s Top Cop in the Garden City
When Mike Bowers was Georgia’s attorney general, he was well-respected, and in today’s parlance he would be described as having a lot of gravitas. He used to go around the state sermonizing at local churches about the laws of God and man, the latter being his particular area of expertise. He came to the First Methodist Church in Valdosta when I lived there and spoke. I wish I’d paid more attention to what he said, but how was I to know what would later transpire.
After I moved to Augusta, someone asked him to come speak to the Richmond County Commission, which was known for spending twice as much time in closed-door pre-meetings than in public ones. I don’t think it was Jim Wall, the county attorney then, who invited him because he just smirked when I asked him what he thought about Bowers’ educational seminar on government transparency.
But Bowers words carried a lot of weight until a longtime blonde mistress surfaced and started giving TV interviews about their relationship. It created quite a scandal and caused Bowers to lose a lot of his gravitas.
After that, the next time I asked Jim Wall about some legal matter, he told me to ask Mike Bowers.
Bowers is just one of many prominent people who’ve been publicly embarrassed, even disgraced, by a scorned woman. For example, just this week former Augusta Commissioner Sammie Sias was sentenced to three years in federal prison for destroying government documents and lying to an FBI agent.
It all started when his longtime lover Willa Hilton wrote a letter outlining his misdeeds running Jamestown Community Center and pocketing sales-tax money.
They Gave a Whole New Meaning to the word “Recreation.”
The two had been carrying on for about 20 years, but then his ardor must have cooled because, according to her letter to Augusta commissioners, he began to treat her shabbily, the last straw being when he showed her a blow-up mattress with new gray paisley sheets and put them in a conference room at the center. She claimed to be indignant, which never made any sense to me since they’d been fooling around for years. Anyway, after that, things went from bad to worse, and Sias fired her from her job at the center.
The city’s legal and recreation officials tried to placate Hilton when she first complained to them about Sias, but it didn’t work because Sias didn’t live up to his word to stay away from Jamestown while she was there, according to her.
“He thinks he owns the center,” she wrote in response to Sias’ memorandum firing her. “He set up his office there, ran his re-election campaign out of it, took in thousands of dollars from rentals and a summer camp program. Most of the money went into his pocket, not the association’s account. He would deposit it and turn around and cash a check for cash.
All of the invoices for SPLOST dollars were made up by Sias, according to Hilton. “All purchases were made by him. All hired people were made by him, which were his friends, and all paid out money was done by him. This was a one-man project. None of the invoices were true. Never turned over original receipts.”
According to Hilton, Sias would write a check for cash, always under $10,000 so the bank wouldn’t have to file a cash transaction report. He would get other people to go cash checks for him, and he even spoke about giving kickbacks to a city employee each time he got a check from the city, Hilton claimed.
When Hilton’s allegations became public in 2019, Sias called a news conference and admitted having a 20-year extramarital affair with Hilton but denied everything else. He said he wouldn’t call for an investigation himself but didn’t have a problem with one done under “penalty of law.”
“If you lie, you need to be held accountable,” he said.
It happened.
