Funds from the My Brother’s Keeper checking account were used between November 2021 and January 2022 to pay a college student who was working in an unpaid internship program for the Mayor’s Office.
The unpaid internship program, known as the Mayor’s Fellowship, was established to allow undergraduate and graduate students “to gain first-hand knowledge of how a high-energy local government office operates,” according to the 2017 program handbook, which is available online. The handbook specifies that the program provides neither compensation nor insurance. “A student’s academic institution may choose to give the student course credit in accordance with their own policies,” according to the executive summary in the handbook.
However, the program morphed into a paid position for at least one college student.
City check registers for the My Brother’s Keeper checking account show several entries under the name of Myles Delont Graves, a student at Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C. Those entries total several thousand dollars. Specifically, Graves was paid $8,962 over a three-month period beginning in November 2021 and ending in January 2022.
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District 3 Commissioner Catherine McKnight says she is alarmed to hear that the bank account for My Brother’s Keeper still exists and that it was paying out money with no explanation as to why. McKnight renewed her call for an audit. She said she had no knowledge of a fellowship program and added that if someone was being paid under the table, then the payments need to be investigated.
“We’re at the point where the city continues to spend taxpayer dollars with no accountability. I have never targeted the mayor, I have asked for a city-wide audit, but this spending keeps getting linked to (Davis). That is a lot of money to pay someone for 15 hours per week. We need to find out what that money was for,” McKnight said.
The Augusta Commission defunded the My Brother’s Keeper program for the 2022 fiscal year budget after it had been shown that the program never actually existed. The funding for the program had been diverted to other uses.
That means in the period Graves served as intern, the My Brother’s Keeper bank account should have been closed.
According to its Facebook page, the Augusta My Brother’s Keeper program was set up to follow the program President Barak Obama launched in 2014 to address the needs of at-risk young men of color.
The Facebook page states, “MBK Augusta is a community based organization that stems from the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative passed by President Obama in 2014. Our goal is to identify and improve opportunity gaps and hardships that boys and young men of color face in the community to ensure their future success.”
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According to the city website, the Mayor’s Fellowship program is an internship for college students who wish to one day work in government administration. The manual makes it clear that interns receive college credits for working 15 hours a week.
“The Mayor’s Fellowship is designed to utilize the same academic calendar as the local colleges (Augusta University Paine College, Augusta Technical College, etc…). Unless otherwise arranged with a supervisor, internships will start the first day of the semester and end the last day of the semester,” states the policy manual posted on the city website.
Email records show that Graves performed office duties such as forwarding emails and sending Davis reminders of his various future travels including the African American Mayors Association conference in Washington D.C. and the eGov Summit in Miami Beach, Fla.
Graves’ city email has continued, but his last check was issued on January 20.
Graves could not be reached for comment.
The Mayor’s Office has released some documents related to Graves’ activities in the office but has provided no explanation as to why Graves was paid what amounts to $49.78 per hour to do office work. The Mayor’s Office also did not send any indication that Myles was ever considered an employee of the city or that he was issued a 1099 form or W-2 to report taxable income.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
