[adrotate banner=”13″]
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, and if that doesn’t work, get sneaky.
Augusta Commissioner Bill Fennoy’s meeting agenda item to give Greater Augusta’s Interfaith Coalition’s Census Count Initiative $25,000 to find hard-to-count people failed all three times it came before commissioners. So Fennoy put it on again but didn’t wait for it to come up at the Dec. 8 meeting. He had the city clerk email commissioners asking them to sign a letter approving the $25,000 to be ratified at the next meeting. The clerk received the necessary six votes, and Fennoy hand-delivered the check.
At Tuesday’s meeting, commissioners Mary Davis, Brandon Garrett and John Clarke questioned the move and said they received the first email but never heard anything else about it.
“Did we put any kind of ask for a budget or any kind of paperwork with that gift of $25,000, or is it an outright gift, and we don’t have to have any accountability or paperwork?” Davis asked.
City Administrator Odie Donald said anytime the city funds something, it will ask for general information.
“In this case, it wouldn’t be so much around the actual expenditure but the outcome related to the count,” Donald said.
“Mr. Mayor, may I follow up?” Davis asked. “I thank the administrator. I just know when we do any kind of grants to non-profits, we do ask for some type of audit-type something. I’d like to see that please.”
“We’ll make sure to get you that,” Donald said. “Just to note, it was related to actual census activity, so it would be a specific activity they would use for making outreach, material etcetera. We will get you a follow-up on what they did with those expenditures for the count.”
Garrett said the reason he and Davis were questioning the signature voting was that they received the initial request for support but never saw the responses or final tally.
City Clerk Lena Bonner apologized for the omission.
“I was waiting on the responses,” she said. “Quite frankly, once I received confirmation, Commissioner Fennoy asked that I proceed, which we did. Commissioner Fennoy, Dennis Williams, Ben Hasan, Marion Williams, Bobby Williams and Commissioner Sias. But I’ll get that out to you, Sir.”
Marion Williams said it sounded like commissioners gave a gift to the interfaith coalition.
“They worked hard to help our city get the census-count dollars we should be getting, ” he said. “We wouldn’t want to take the time to go out there and go in those back alleys. I just want to make sure we understand it wasn’t a gift horse we gave, and he rode out in the sunset. It was the work that the people did that I’m appreciative of them doing.”
Members of a governing body may legally vote by signature and ratify the vote in public in a subsequent meeting, but they are advised to do it for emergency situations only.
Later, Clarke said, “I think it was more underhanded than anything. That is not the way the commission should do business. It had already been on the agenda four different times and voted down three times. They just meant they were going to give them all that money. Bill Fennoy kept putting it on the agenda. In the beginning, everybody was under the impression it was a voluntary effort, but people started having to drive from point A to point B. And they had food giveaways to get people come in and sign up.”
And they had a consultant lobbying for them, former city Administrator Janice Jackson.
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
We don’t have to spell it out for you, but like in real life, in a divorce, the devil is in the details.
As you know, attorney Jared Williams defeated incumbent District Attorney Natalie Paine in the Nov. 3 election, and now Columbia County wants out of the Augusta Judicial Circuit and to have its own district attorney, which commissioners there say will save the county $1 million a year.
To test the validity of those cost savings, I asked eminent Augusta Attorney John Long what he thought about it.
“The proposal and statements that Columbia County will save money with splitting the circuit is pure BS,” he stated.
It’s going to cost a whole lot more in alimony payments than either of the parties think, according to Long, who has facts and figures showing it will cost the state and Columbia County a lot of money every year if a new circuit is created. And it will also cost Richmond and Columbia counties money.
“Any divorce, either in a marriage or in a business normally cost both sides,” Long states in an email. “There is no difference here. The seven sitting judges, soon to be eight with Mike Annis’ retirement, run our three-county circuit very efficiently. Our circuit is not broken, so why try to fix it? I hope that the motivating factor is not race, but it has that appearance.”
Long might hope that the motivating factor is not race, but Marion Williams says he’s sure it is and wonders why the Richmond County Legislative delegation isn’t speaking out.
“I’m very disappointed in the way people are sitting back when they ought to be upset at the racism that’s going on,” he said.
Well, John Long is a good attorney with a great deal of legal ingenuity. For example, he once defended a city employee at an Augusta Commission meeting who’d been suspended for testing positive for marijuana. Long said the employee had been at a party where the partygoers held him down and made him inhale the smoke.
Anyway, Long says the Columbia County vs. Richmond/Burke County divorce would cost taxpayers unnecessary millions a year.
[adrotate banner=”13″]
A Month Ago I Couldn’t Spell Assistant District Attorney. Now I Are One.
DA-elect Jared Williams is definitely a true Democrat who’ll be starting a jobs program for the DA’s office based on what WGAC radio host Austin Rhodes posted on his Facebook page.
“There are 24 experienced Prosecutors in the Augusta DA office…12 of them are walking out the door in January,” Rhodes stated.
“Jarred Williams has a certified disaster on his hands. One is the DA herself, 6 are taking new jobs because they didn’t want to work for the new DA, and five have been told by the new DA that they would not be kept in his office,” Rhodes continue. “The five who were told they would not be kept were given no reason, and I am told when they called him to specifically find out his reasoning, he hung up on them. This is unprecedented in our judicial circuit, and a cluster muck of epic proportions.”
Rhodes later added that Williams is also firing three investigators.
“Columbia County needs to put its divorce from the circuit through at WARP SPEED,” he continued. The sooner they get away from that mess, the better!
Rhodes added, “To my old friend Chief Superior Court Judge Carl Brown, I urge you in the strongest respectful way…get this man in your chambers…shut the door…and straighten him out! I know that while you have no technical authority to stop him…maybe he will listen to you. He damn sure needs to listen to someone!”
One Brown Gives an Update on Another Brown’s Soul Festival
James Brown might be feeling good, but the James Brown International Soul Festival seems to be suffering from Covid-19.
Augusta Convention and Business Bureau CEO Bennish Brown, representing the festival’s steering committee, updated commissioners on festival plans Tuesday and said, “We can tell you it won’t be in May of 2021.”
The committee needs to develop a five-year plan and engage a certified entertainment management company to eliminate financial risk to the city and the CVB, as well as to determine ownership of the festival. The city has already invested $200,000 in seed money.
“I think the big issue is what happens with the pandemic,” Brown said.
What is This? The French Revolution?
Mayor Hardie Davis wants to create another bureaucracy in city government to make sure nobody outside the government is discriminated against in any shape, form or fashion because there’s no state law against it. The mayor wants the committee to have the power to fine businesses the committee finds guilty. So be careful, and don’t even look at anybody funny if this is approved.
Davis had better be careful too because I just read through state law, and there’s no state law against cities having egomaniacal mayors either. So, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility for a committee to be created to deal with that too. Call it the Anti-egomaniacal Mayor Ordinance, and fine him every time he comes up with ideas like this to get attention and pad his resume.
Anyway, when Davis’ agenda item came up, he first gave a sermon about discrimination, et cetera and so forth. Then he presented three members of Augusta Pride who spoke from personal points of view, after which Commissioner Ben Hasan and others insisted there should be public input. After a while they voted to have City Attorney Wayne Brown write an ordinance, after which there’ll be public input before it’s adopted. If it is.
[adrotate banner=”13″]
The Chamber Speaks
Meanwhile the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce has already weighed in with a letter to the mayor and commissioners, which I am making you privy to in its entirety. (If it’s too long, Harold, skim over it.)
“Dear Mayor and Members of the Commission:
The Augusta Metro Chamber has carefully reviewed the proposed non-discrimination ordinance presented for possible adoption, and we are strongly opposed. While we support efforts to prevent discrimination, the proposed ordinance is problematic for many reasons. Adopting the proposal will not move our community in a positive direction.
“Augusta-Richmond County has built a strong reputation for attracting and retaining a business community that values diversity in its many forms. Employers in our strongest economic sectors, including health care, manufacturing, military and technology are routinely recognized for being the best national models for human resource management. Today’s business community sees the positive impact that inclusion has on their workforces and their customer relations. This ordinance will devalue trust between business and local government, and sends a strong anti-business message. The proposed ordinance will damage Augusta’s image as a place that values business.
“Equally important is that this ordinance is fundamentally flawed in that it seeks to duplicate already existing state and federal law protections against discrimination and places a new and significant burden on businesses at the local level. Additional regulation and oversight by a non-elected panel of appointees to adjudicate matters of discrimination will create untold cost, disruption, and legal burden for both the county and businesses.
“We also find that exempting Augusta-Richmond County from the ordinance sends the wrong message to our business community that discrimination is solely institutionally owned by organizations outside of government. We believe that if the intent of the proposal is to create protections and remedies for all of Augusta’s citizens, it would not broadly exempt the largest single sector in the local economy, government.
“The Augusta Metro Chamber stands ready to support efforts in fostering a community that is free from prejudice and we hope that you will include us in meeting those goals. However, we believe that this ordinance is a measure that will not move us further toward that ambition, but in fact lead to confusion and economic loss.
Sincerely,
Susan E. Parr, IOM, GCCE, President/CEO”
Sylvia Cooper is a Columnist with The Augusta Press. Reach her at sylvia.cooper@theaugustapress.com
[adrotate banner=”13″]
