The Augusta mayor should be ashamed of himself.
After six years in office, Hardie Davis ought to know what the rules are for documenting expenditures of taxpayer money. Plenty of other government employees follow those rules to a tee. Every day.
The sloppy bookkeeping he’s allowed to happen in his office makes him look bad. Really bad. Every one of the expenditures that have been questioned recently could be absolutely reasonable and proper. But no one will ever know because the documentation for the vast majority of those expenses is missing or lost – unless it’s intentionally being withheld from public scrutiny.
Davis publicly advocates for transparent government. He even sponsored an open-government website, Open Augusta, which offers the public a view of election results, budgets, information about how to file open records requests, reports on city initiatives, budgets, even check registers, but the site contains no explanations of any of the expenditures. Even credit card charges are listed, but again, the site has no information on what those charges paid for.
It’s not enough for the mayor–or any other city official–to admit to spending money without explaining what it paid for. That’s halfway open government, not fully open government that welcomes the sun of public scrutiny to shine in on it.
Mayor Davis needs to set the record straight. If he is innocent of any wrongdoing, he needs to come clean, and insist that his office, as well as the city Finance Department, find the missing records and make them public. He needs to have the Open Augusta website revised to include detailed information on what the expenditures listed were for. He needs to take these actions immediately. Otherwise, these failures become his personal failures. He will bear the shame.
The Augusta commissioners should be ashamed of themselves, too.
When the 10 commissioners took their oaths of office, each signed on to serve the people of Augusta, but they’ve failed miserably in the area of financial oversight.
At the very least, they’ve allowed the mayor to spend thousands of dollars of taxpayer money without providing any evidence of how it was spent.
At worse, they’ve allowed city employees to play loosey-goosey with important financial records – records that could prove all of the mayor’s spending to be on the up-and-up. Instead, they’ve chosen to be complicit in their silence. Thus far, only one commissioner has spoken publicly on the mayor’s spending. District 10 Commissioner John Clarke has called for an audit of the Mayor’s Office accounts. We applaud Commissioner Clarke for his willingness to call the mayor to task.
It is time for the other nine to join Clarke’s call for an audit and complete financial accountability, and not just for the Mayor’s Office but for all city offices.
The people of Augusta will be shamed if they do not demand the commission and the mayor clean up their acts. And if the mayor and commissioners do not respond, the public should vote them all out of office when their terms end.
