Augusta’s former mayor has finally admitted that he violated the law when he participated in a covert billboard campaign for a new arena at the Regency Mall site.
The Georgia Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission gave Hardy Davis Jr. a slap-on-the-wrist fine of $250, but the damage he did to the community during his tenure as mayor is, in my opinion, incalculable.
Opinion
The former mayor still faces another campaign finance law violation, and he will likely file another consent order that will almost certainly net him another slap on the wrist.
Davis is, again in my opinion, an ethically challenged narcissist. Sources close to the matter say Davis believes that he did nothing wrong and that he is the victim of an out-of-control news organization that made mountains out of molehills for political reasons. Only newspapers don’t have political reasons for digging out the truth about public men and women. Newspapers dig out the truth so the truth is out there, available to the public.
Also in my opinion, Davis is also really smart. He conceived all kinds of ways to spend public money that shirted the law without violating it. He raided the so-called “My Brother’s Keeper” charity bank account and spent money on everything but the charity he was supposed to be supporting but never did anything legally wrong.
Funding for the My Brother’s Keeper bank account came from the city’s general fund, and there are no known ties to any federal grant funding. And he had a little help from an overly trusting Augusta-Richmond County commission, which voted to give him control of the bank account without any oversight.
My Brother’s Keeper began as an initiative of the Obama Administration that later became a private nonprofit, but no records exist to show that it ever really officially operated in Augusta, not when it was a government initiative and not when it became private.
What the commission handed Davis with its vote amounted to a slush fund that he could use at will, and it was all perfectly legal.
Davis also blurred the lines by having the city pay his political consultants to conduct city business and ordered city employees to conduct business on behalf of his campaign initiatives.
The one mistake that Davis made was underestimating the city workers assigned to his office. Those who spoke out did so because of the nasty way they were treated by Davis’ “consulting staff,” and they feared that they might eventually be blamed for the wrongdoing they witnessed.
When the rotten pumpkin exploded in his face, Davis’ tactic was to duck, cover, deflect and deny, deny, deny.
When The Augusta Press took Davis to court over his refusal to release public documents regarding the Mayor’s Masters Reception nonprofit he helped create, the tactic was to stall for as long as possible with flurries of motions and needless depositions. Even though I, personally, was not a party to the lawsuits, I was dragged in and deposed when my time could have been spent pouring through documents or reporting on events in Augusta.
Ultimately, The Augusta Press won the case, but Davis appealed the judge’s verdict and even threatened a libel suit over a sentence that was true when published but became untrue when Davis amended some of his responses to the ethics commission.
We all knew that Davis’ libel claim would never hold up in court. However, after already spending thousands of dollars in court-related costs, we determined that because Davis was no longer in office and had lost virtually all of his political support, the money could be better spent in our mission to serve the community, so the matter was dropped.
No one at The Augusta Press takes any sort of pleasure that our news organization’s reporting brought down the political career of Hardie Davis; rather, I see it as a tragedy for him, his family, his church and the community he purported to serve. Hardie Davis was once a political star, but his baser human instincts got the better of him. He is a man with the charisma of Odysseus, but sadly, he is a victim of his own hubris as well.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
