The Augusta Land Bank Authority has been an island unto itself for decades with little, and at times, no Augusta Commission oversight.
A creation of the consolidated government, the Augusta Land Bank was intended to be merely a legal “holding tank” for real estate, mainly land acquired by the city through tax forfeitures. The bank is only supposed to hold the land until it can be auctioned off on the courthouse steps. Only, the opposite is occurring.
Some property never makes it to the courthouse steps because it has already been sold off at cut-rate prices in backroom deals. Landowners also complain that the Augusta Land Bank has tried to gouge them with red tape and junk fees attached to tiny slivers of land they want to buy that the city owns and that abut their property.
The Augusta Land Bank was never chartered to buy land, but yet, they do, as we all found out with the disastrous Weed School sale.
Now, it has been determined that Augusta Land Bank Director Shawn Edwards likes to wine and dine as if he were living in Prohibition era Chicago, spending tens of thousands of taxpayer money globetrotting and running up enormous restaurant tabs.
All of the new revelations just add to the outrages of the past, such as when it was discovered last year that Edwards and his cronies were attempting to launch a strip club on Gordon Highway, using city land, mere weeks after finally winning its costly legal struggle to kick strip clubs out of downtown and restrict them to industrial areas.
It is time to reform this shady enterprise.
The Augusta Commission needs to place a moratorium on all land bank transactions until a full audit can be performed.
While Edwards works at the pleasure of the Augusta Land Bank Authority, not the commission, and cannot fire or discipline him, there is nothing stopping Augusta Mayor Garnett Johnson from asking the Georgia Attorney General to convene a Grand Jury inquest.
It may have seemed a good idea at the time of its creation to place the land bank under the purview of the Tax Commissioner’s Office, but what that has led to is a handpicked board that rubber stamps Edwards actions with impunity.
The Augusta Commission can vote to change the land bank charter and bring the errant agency under public control with oversight on how the public funds given to the land bank are spent.
Any commissioner that would vote against exercising public control of this quasi-governmental agency might as well be considered a co-conspirator to corruption and voters should remember that come election time.
