The Augusta Commission’s back and forth voting and abstentions on the Jan. 30 city administrator vote were the centerpiece of evidence that the city needs a charter review.
Act III will likely play out this way: The commission will vote on Takiyah Douse, and this time, the so-called Gang of Five will not be able to abstain, so Mayor Garnett Johnson will get to break a tie.
Johnson has made it clear he does not believe Douse is the best qualified; so, he will likely vote against her, and Douse will leave the stage singing her aria, “Don’t Cry for Me, Augusta, Georgia!”
Make no mistake, this current administrator issue, along with most of the other important issues facing Augusta such as neglected and even rotted out infrastructure, are directly linked to the archaic charter that created fiefdoms back in 1996.
The current nobility commission does not want to give up an acre of land or an ounce of power.
To really understand the city’s current situation, we have to look at what occurred in the past.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the city of Augusta was facing total bankruptcy.
Augustans had followed the national trends of the 1970s and were moving out of the city and into the suburbs. They took their business in the form of tax revenue with them, too. In the space of a decade, downtown Augusta went from being a thriving retail center to a ghost town with little more than strip clubs and porn theaters offering entertainment.
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The mayor at the time, Charles DeVaney needed to think creatively, and think creatively he did.
Aurelia Epperson, who worked in the city’s administration under DeVaney, blew the whistle that the old city of Augusta had been siphoning money off from the waterworks, at DeVaney’s direction, to pay salaries for city employees, and that action led to a total crisis.
Pipes were bursting all over the county, and the city didn’t have the reserves to pay for, quite literally, anything.
The committee that was formed to come up with a city-county consolidation plan, led by then Sen. Charles Walker, knew they had to come up with a governmental structure that would attempt to please everyone, and they had to come up with it quickly.
Because of DeVaney’s poor decisions in office, the committee was decidedly against having another strong mayor, and so that possibility never even made it onto the table.
Some of the committee members, according to Ralph Walker, who sat on the panel, also felt that there was a racial imbalance in city government; so, the decision was made to create a commission that would be 50-50 equal along racial lines by carefully gerrymandering the districts.
I believe the committee’s intentions were pure; however, I do not believe they considered the future consequences of what they were doing.
According to the late former Commissioner Andy Cheek, this guaranteed racial balance allowed the politicians of both races to create the impression that a racial “divide” existed on the commission; but what it really did was create what Cheek termed “Black money and White money.”
The politicians carved out their own fiefdoms and the corruption spread like kudzu.
When the newscasters blared, “The Augusta Commission today voted along racial lines,” the politicians on both sides laughed and winked at each other.
It was Cheek, along with former Commissioner Marion Williams, who battled against this by crossing that invisible barrier many times with the citizens’ best interest in mind. But they were powerless against the machine that the charter had created.
Over the years, some commissioners have run their fiefdoms with iron fists and the unspoken policy was, “I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me.”
That fiefdom mentality went so far as to make disgraced former Commissioner Sammie Sias think he could turn a community center into his personal fiefdom.
Individual commissioners would regularly attempt to shake down business owners and potential developers, which helped line their and their cronies’ pockets, and further depressed any potential growth.
“Sure, I can help you get that zoning variance for your project. By the way, did I tell you that my nephew owns a construction company?”
One of the more brazen examples was when the then owners of the Maxwell House in downtown needed commission approval for allowing Section 8 housing at the property. The mayor at the time, Bob Young, was totally against the idea as were the business owners in downtown.
The owners approached then Commissioner Betty Beard to help garner the six votes for approval.
Beard allegedly told the owners that she could help if they would consider giving a “charitable” donation, and the owners cut a check for $25,000.
When the commission learned that the alleged extortion occurred, they were advised by the city attorney to return the check.
The check was never returned.
Instead, Beard instructed then-City Administrator Fred Russell to quietly deposit the check in an obscure bank account, which he did. Beard then had that money routed to a friend of hers who was a city worker so that the woman could undergo gastric bypass surgery that had been deemed “elective” by the insurance carrier.
Now, why didn’t Russell report this to the commission? Because doing so would have likely cost him his job. All of the department heads know that running afoul of one commissioner can be a career altering decision.
Concurrently, some of the department heads, the ones who have taken ineptitude to levels not seen since the rule of Nero, know that even if the mayor and five commissioners want them fired, someone like Commissioner Bobby Williams will have their back and abstain.
I am not going to list what type of changes that I believe should be made to the charter; that is a conversation for down the road; however, if the citizens give Johnson a vote in May, his first action needs to be to get with the legislative delegation to form a charter review committee.
Unlike last time, the committee should not feel pressured to act quickly and should work with the Carl Vincent Institute of Government to craft a chartered government that functions effectively and is immune to the fiefdom mentality.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
