I certainly do hope nobody was surprised at Commissioner Brandon Garrett’s presentation of the unkempt state of the Garden City at Wednesday’s commission meeting.
Surely you all have witnessed the scenes he captured of overgrown grass, broken fountains and missing bricks from Riverwalk and Broad Street. Surely nobody was shocked and surprised at the picture of overgrown vegetation at the commission’s own home, the Marble Palace, and at county parks and city cemeteries. This has been going on for years and years.
During my tour of downtown Augusta a year ago, almost to the day, I saw it all at Riverwalk and Broad Street: the missing bricks, cracks with little trees growing out of them, broken concrete, broken fountains, uncut grass, dying shrubs. I took photos of it all but deleted them after I wrote a column about the awful way downtown Augusta looked.
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Deja Vu All Over Again
Anyway, it showed initiative for Garrett to take all those photos and challenge Administrator Odie Donald, Engineering Director Hameed Malik, Parks and Recreation Director Maurice McDowell, Environmental Services Director Brooks Strayer, Utilities Director Wes Byne and Central Service Director Takiyah Douse to clean up Augusta.
You see, all of the above are responsible for maintaining specific areas of the city. And most of them make more than $100,000 a year. Malik makes $152,000 and change.
“Businesses out there seem to find funding to cut their grass weekly or bi-weekly,” Garret said. “The more people we have, the more people they say we need.”
He also said it seemed like nobody takes ownership of maintaining the city.
Maybe not, but it would seem that somebody smart enough to make all that money ought to be able to figure out what properties the city maintains that their department is responsible for and tell their crews to cut the grass.
If commissioners wanted to be inventive, they could hire a consultant to color-code a map, so each department director could know exactly what they were supposed to maintain. The consultant could even work up a schedule of when they were supposed to cut the grass.
The typical response from bureaucrats these days for why things aren’t getting done is to blame COVID-19. The second thing they say is, “We need to create a department to take care of it.”
And that was Donald’s response.
“Some issues have been exacerbated by Covid,” he said.
Garrett asked Donald for a solution.
“What is our plan moving forward?
Donald proposed using $1.5 million from American Rescue Plan money for a quick start cleanup and cutting the grass downtown in cycles and emptying the trash cans every day.
And in the 2022 budget, Donald said he intends to “centralize those services under one department,” a public works department.
Afterward, Commissioner John Clarke told The Augusta Press reporter Scott Hudson, “It’s just one more attempt to grow the city government instead of cutting the city’s grass.”
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Diamonds, Every One, Even if They are in the Rough
McDowell came to the podium and told commissioners his department is responsible for 66 parks, plus rights of way and medians.
“We have 42 staff members,” he said. “We’re assigned 10 inmate labor crews. We have three or four on a good day.”
Then Garrett asked McDowell whether Augusta has too many parks to take care of.
“Have we looked to see how many active parks, passive parks are there? … Do we need to approach some of these differently?” Garrett asked.
McDowell said they had roughly already identified 14 such sites, and then he said something every commissioner should take to heart.
“Easy to identify, but when the public gets wind of it, it becomes a jewel in that particular area,” he said.
About 15 years ago, somebody got the bright idea to close Wood Park near Daniel Field because there was a problem with the pool, and the park wasn’t being used, so they said. But when word got around, there was such an uproar the city held two evening public hearings that dragged on and on past bedtime.
And in 2014, when insurance agent Louis “Hap” Harris was appointed interim District 7 commissioner, replacing resigned commissioner Donnie Smith, he immediately started talking about closing little-used parks to save money.
Although it wasn’t really my proper role to advise commissioners, I felt like it was my duty to warn him what would happen. He didn’t listen and soon learned the truth about trying to close neighborhood parks. People got up in arms, so to speak. The fact that Harris wasn’t
subsequently elected to the District 7 seat might not have had a thing to do with his crusade to close parks, but you know it didn’t help.
They Do This Stuff with a Straight Face
An Augusta Commission committee approved Donald’s framework for spending $82.3 million on the Augusta Rescue Plan and $6.5 million of that on one-time bonuses and higher salaries for employees.
The committee also approved a $1.5 million VAX-UP Augusta program to bribe unvaccinated residents with $100 rewards for getting a COVID-19 jab. The notion of paying folks to take a shot has captured the public’s attention more than the $6.5 million the government will squander, hand out to people who don’t deserve it and use to grow government. Everybody’s talking about the shot pay.
“I’m getting emails and text messages from constituents asking me where their hundred dollars is if they’ve already been vaccinated,” said Commissioner Catherine McKnight. “Some people say it’s another stupid thing Augusta’s doing. And is this going to lead to our eventually having to pay people $100 to vote?”
Quote of the Week
“Where is this money coming from?”
– Sarah Williams on the Facebook Augusta Today page
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One Man’s Trash is Environmental Service’s Nightmare
Peach Orchard Road resident Woodrow Fryer had his 15 minutes of fame Wednesday when he gave commissioners a piece of his mind about his trash service.
Fryer told them his trash hauler picks up trash when he wants to, and sometimes he doesn’t want to. So, he doesn’t. The hauler told Fryer he put his garbage can too far from the road. So, Fryer moved it closer, and a vehicle hit it and scattered the can and the garbage along Peach Orchard Road. Then he couldn’t get anybody in the city to let him talk
to somebody who’d see to it he got another can. This went on for a week, Fryer said, until he called Commissioner Ben Hasan who made sure he got a garbage can.
“This trash business, it’s a stinkin’ business for what we’re paying for somebody ought to do something different,” he said. “And when we call down here to not be able to talk to someone from the landfill or the people that pick up the garbage or whoever. When I finally got an answer, you know what they said? They said the man who they paid for delivering the trash cans walked off the job. Well, am I responsible for hiring your people? If the guy you got delivering trash cans, if he quits, then somebody else needs to start delivering cans. That’s how it works. We can’t stop because there’s one man down.
“I was in the military for 25 years. One troop got knocked down, we didn’t stop the war. We didn’t call timeout. Somebody else had to step up and get that slot. But what really got me was Monday, a lady called me. She said, ‘Listen, we’d be willing to come up to your gate, and we can have the guy to get the can.’
“How can I trust you to walk 40 yards when you won’t get out of the truck and pull the can one foot?
“So, my suggestion to ya’ll is every year before these taxes come out, you need to put a questionnaire on our tax bill receipts, so we can grade our trash service, law enforcement, ambulance service, all this stuff we’re spending all this money on. It wouldn’t take much, so we can grade these people because I’m not the only one who has these problems.”
Commissioners and staff were falling all over themselves trying to make Fryer happy before he left commission chambers Wednesday.
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How Satisfied Are You?
Below is a sample questionnaire the city could put in tax bills as Fryer suggested. Please grade each one on a scale of from one star to 10 stars with one being the worst and 10 being the best. All responses will be anonymous.
Create your own user feedback survey
January 2022
Questionnaires the city put into 2021 tax bills are in, and commissioners met behind closed doors to decide what to do with them. Most felt it would not be fair to release them to the public because it might taint some departments while giving others the big head which
wouldn’t be fair. Besides, they wanted to keep their scores under wraps. So, they decided to award participation trophies.
Parks and Recreation was supposed to get a participation trophy because they cut half of Magnolia Cemetery. But Commissioner Catherine McKnight spoke up and said because they only cut half of Magnolia Cemetery, shouldn’t they just get half a trophy, but she was voted down.
Engineering was supposed to get a participation trophy for managing the storm water program, but because storm water still wreaks havoc in Augusta in heavy rainstorms, half the commission objected.
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The commission awarded a participation trophy, named The Woodrow Fryer Trophy, to environmental services for being the most improved department since Fryer reamed them out during a commission meeting in 2021.
The sheriff’s office received the law-enforcement participation award for their work in rounding up the Ghostface Gang. The sheriff and everybody from the sheriff’s office, the mayor’s office, the GBI, FBI, Marshal’s Office and ATF was there giving each other credit and squeezing into the official photo frame.
Gold Cross EMS received a participation award for working overtime during the pandemic but no new contract or subsidy. They would have preferred the latter.
Thanks to Scott Hudson, The Augusta Press chief reporter for his contributions to this week’s column.
Sylvia Cooper is a Columnist with The Augusta Press. Reach her at sylvia.cooper@theaugustapress.com.
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