Augusta Mayor Hardie Davis Jr. and his former aide Tonia Gibbons have again denied in an amended response to the Georgia ethics commission that they had any part in a campaign to build a new entertainment arena at the Regency Mall.
City attorney Wayne Brown filed the first response on Aug. 9. Ed Tarver, Davis’ personal attorney, filed the second response on Dec. 17.
That same day, a former city employee said publicly via a Twitter post that the mayor knows more about the matter than he is saying.
Jessica Buffkin, a former administrative assistant in the Mayor’s Office, directly contradicted Davis in a Twitter post former Commissioner Wayne Guilfoyle found online.
“He knew,” Buffkin wrote on her Twitter feed. “He knew exactly what he was doing. He knows exactly what he is doing. And he will keep doing whatever he can get away with it,”
In a phone interview, Buffkin acknowledged that she wrote the now-deleted Tweet, and she said that she stands by her words.
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According to Buffkin, the Mayor’s Office ran the entire campaign, which included advertising on billboards, under a parallel redevelopment campaign called #SoGo. Buffkin says that as an administrative assistant, she did not know at the time that she was witnessing actions that could lead to an ethics commission investigation. She was doing tasks she was assigned, she said.
Emails from Buffkin show that she was passing on information in the form of “files,” and was not actively drawing up documents or handling invoices.
Buffkin said that the environment in the Mayor’s Office was “weird.”
“When that whole thing came out, it was clear that they knew who paid for those billboards, but it was like ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge. We know who, but we don’t know who.’ All of it really began to make me feel uneasy,” Buffkin said.
The last straw for Buffkin was when she was assigned tasks related to Davis’ reelection campaign, particularly when she was instructed to send emails from her personal account. According to Buffkin, when she balked at using her personal email account for political business, the atmosphere in the office became toxic.
“I was asked to do things I knew a city employee should not be doing, and I knew I needed to get out of there,” Buffkin said.
Buffkin did not come directly to the media with her observations. She posted a Tweet for her followers. Guilfoyle sent the tweet on to reporters. Since leaving her position with the city of Augusta, Buffkin has moved out of state to attend graduate school.
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The ethics commission is investigating the Concerned Citizens of Richmond County group that ran the campaign because members never registered with the board of elections campaign as required by law. A second ethics investigation seeks to determine who paid for the billboards that were used in the campaign.
Davis has denied since 2018 knowing anything about the failed ballot campaign to move the proposed new James Brown Arena to the site of Regency Mall.
“I am not, nor have I ever been part of a Concerned Citizens of Richmond County group. I would ask that the Concerned Citizens of Richmond County make themselves known and own their part in the billboards,” Davis said.
In his televised statement, Davis characterized the ethics investigation as being political in nature and questioned why anyone would care about billboards purchased three years ago.
Davis said that numerous members of the media were along for the ride in his 2018 bus tour as part of his SoGo Summit and characterized any investigation by the media into that summit to be “tomfoolery.”
Documents and invoices from the Mayor’s Office show that city money was used to pay an Atlanta architectural firm, The Sizemore Group, to handle logistical details of the SoGo Summit, which included a bus tour, a presentation and dinner at the Partridge Inn.
The Sizemore Group also produced the drawings or “renderings” for what a possible new James Brown Arena would look like on the Regency Mall site. According to Davis’ own emails, he approved the renderings, paid for by the Mayor’s Office, to be placed on the billboards.
The total cost to taxpayers for the SoGo Summit and the billboard renderings was $25,622.05.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
