One of the main reasons that I was behind the referendum to give the mayor a vote on the commission is the Augusta Commission’s long history of protecting problem employees and holding that sixth vote over the heads of competent directors to keep them in their pocket.
Former Parks and Recreation Director Maurice McDowell is just the latest example.
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McDowell did more than enough to be fired; he chased off virtually every competent employee, opened the city up to lawsuits, chased skirts and charged the city for hotel rooms for his private use.
As if all of this was not bad enough, he couldn’t seem to maintain public buildings or even keep the grass cut. Yet, he was allowed to resign with a “golden parachute.”
Mayor Garnett Johnson wanted the man fired, but Human Resources Director Anita Rookard apparently purged his employment files of the known complaints and heavens knows what else.
McDowell was also protected by the so-called Gang of Five, who, for unknown reasons, flat out refused to vote to have him fired. Ultimately, Johnson had to take matters into his own hands and inform McDowell that his only way out was to resign, as his many foibles with female employees were about to be made public.
What did McDowell do next? He took his lottery winnings and then applied for the position of city manager in the small southwest Georgia city of Sylvester.
The Augusta Press journalist Susan McCord caught wind that McDowell had emerged as one of the three finalists and did what any good reporter would do; she requested his resume, references and other application materials from Sylvester, but was informed that McDowell had withdrawn his name from consideration.
In my opinion, the good people of Sylvester avoided a head-on collision.
This is not the first time where an Augusta mayor has had to intervene and attempt to skirt the commission to get a disastrous department head culled out of the herd.
Over 20 years ago, Fire Chief Ronnie Few had racked up a GBI investigation against himself and faced a 124-page Grand Jury report that was “highly critical” of the chief’s performance, according to press accounts of the time; however, there were not the six votes necessary on the commission to fire him.
So, then-Mayor Bob Young agreed to write a letter of recommendation for the embattled chief when he applied for the fire chief position in Washington D.C., telling the Augusta Chronicle at the time that he just “wanted to get rid of him.”
Few did not last long in Washington.
There have also been times where the commissioners have played politics to get their person of choice to resign by agreeing to give up one of their own sacred cows.
In 2019, according to the Augusta Chronicle, both City General Counsel Andrew MacKenzie and City Administrator Janice Jackson were given the opportunity to resign rather than be fired, and both were given golden parachutes.
First of all, it is not ethical, in my opinion, that the city routinely dumps their trash on the doorsteps of sister cities by allowing a resignation instead of termination. McDowell had no business applying for a city manager job, given his performance in Augusta, and he darn well near landed the job.
The other thing to consider is that Augusta has, over decades, gotten the reputation among ne’er-do-wells as a city that will not fire anyone, and that is likely how we got McDowell in the first place. Even though McDowell had been fired from a previous job in Bulloch County for inappropriate conduct with a county clerk and misuse of his county-issued cell phone, he was hired to work in Augusta.
In the search for a new fire chief in 2021, the city had to be taken to court by local press organizations because the city would not release the names of the real finalists for the job in an effort to sweep in Antonio Burden, even though he was not recommended as a finalist, and he was suspended at his former job for using his county vehicle to make a liquor store run.
Now look at what we have running the Fire Department.
Burden hides behind his desk when fire trucks are totaled in accidents and did not even bother to hold a press conference out of human compassion when two people died in a fire mainly because of a snafu with the county’s dispatch system.
I remain convinced that the citizens of Augusta made the right choice in giving the mayor a vote. The next step is to move forward with a charter change that forces the city to change its employment practices.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
