The drama in Augusta politics pales in comparison with the current world situation. Topping the list of catastrophes is President Joe Biden’s idiotic pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan before evacuating Americans and the Afghan citizens who assisted the military there and abandoning $70 billion worth of aircraft and military equipment for the Taliban and their terrorist friends, ISIS and the Haqqani Network.
Biden’s Blunder is the worst American political and military disaster in recent history, capped by the slaughter of 13 American troops and 95 Afghans by a suicide bomber Thursday at the airport in Kabul.
Of course, that’s my opinion. This is, after all, an opinion piece.
Meanwhile, forest fires burn millions of acres throughout the West; floods in Tennessee left 20 people dead and hundreds of homes damaged or destroyed last week; and people are dying from COVID-19 as the pandemic rages on, as do the debates about to mask or not to mask. And the Vaxers and the Anti-Vaxers continue their war of words on the internet.
While the world is falling apart around us, here in Augusta we’re arguing about the same old stuff – government transparency and lack thereof; who will pay the bill for a public records lawsuit over the hiring of a fire chief; a local discrimination ordinance; restricting criminal records so future employers can’t see them; garbage service; ambulance service, etc., and so forth.
Augusta officials don’t want to pay the legal bills of news agencies that sued the city and won earlier this year. The lawsuit was to stop a scheduled May 11 vote on hiring a new fire chief until the city released the resumes of all top candidates for the job. So, the city’s legal team was in court Wednesday where they argued that, while the state’s Open Records Act may allow anyone to sue a government, only the attorney general of the state may properly bring a case on behalf of the people.
Now everybody who knows anything knows that is patently absurd, because they’re arguing that no citizen can seek to enforce the Open Records Act, although that law gives every person the right to access public records.
The city’s argument runs counter to 40 years of case law, said Georgia Press Association attorney David Hudson.
“That would be quite a precedent, wouldn’t it?” said Judge Jesse Stone, according to Sandy Hodson, staff writer for The Augusta Chronicle.
Stone issued the May 5 Richmond County Superior Court order finding the city had violated the Open Records law.
And the judge will decide who’ll pay Hudson’s $13,000 fee, which further motions and hearings would increase.
Meanwhile, we’d like to know who authorized General Counsel Wayne Brown to go to court to argue against paying the attorney fees. Commissioners did not vote on it. It was not even discussed during a closed-door legal meeting, according to several commissioners.
“I heard it on the news,” said Commissioner John Clarke, “as we often hear things for the first time. On the news.”
Clarke said it shouldn’t be too hard for the city to come up with $13,000 to pay the attorney.
“They could always pay it by putting it on the mayor’s PayPal account,” he said.
A Friday email and phone call to Brown’s office asking who authorized the challenge to paying the bill were not answered.
Just the Facts M’am to Show You How City Transparency Works
When word got out that four candidates were being interviewed for Augusta fire chief, the media requested documents on those candidates. The requests were dated April 13 and April 15. The interviews took place on Thursday, April 15.
Then, on Wednesday, April 21, Brown’s office replied to the Open Records requests by saying there was only one “finalist,” Dekalb County Deputy Fire Chief Antonio Burden, and produced some documents on Burden only. So, one question is, who decided between April 15 and April 21 that Burden was the sole finalist? There were no public meetings between those two dates.
A second question is how commissioners could select a finalist without a lawful meeting to do so? Who was pulling the strings? Was it City Administrator Odie Donald, who got Burden on the list of interviewees even though he did not score high enough to qualify to be included? But because documents were produced at the direction of the May 5 court order, and the actual hiring of Burden took place later in May at a public meeting, the closed meeting aspect of this farce was moot, except for those who were paying attention.
Trending in America: Defunding the Police and Hiding Criminal Records
Are criminals really criminals if you say they’re not anymore? That is a question many employers would want to know before they hired someone, but under a 2020 change in state law, they might never know.
Richmond County court officials will hold a “summit” in October that will help people get certain minor criminal offenses restricted from the view of prospective employers.
In case you want to know exactly what a summit is, it’s either the top of something like a mountaintop or a meeting of top government officials. I looked it up.
This is not the first such summit sponsored by court officials and paid for by taxpayers, courtesy of the Augusta Commission. If memory serves, the last time State Court Solicitor General Omeeka Loggins came before commissioners for approval and a funding request of maybe $10,000, commissioners said, “Oh, don’t you want $15,000?”
According to District Attorney Jared Williams, restricting a criminal record is not the same as expunging it, and all convictions will show up on law enforcement criminal background checks.
Only petty misdemeanors are subject to possible restriction if citizens paid their fines, served their sentence, finished parole and completed any mandatory programs.
To have a record restricted, a person must have had no convictions in the previous four years and have no cases pending.
Serious misdemeanors, such as DUI, family violence and child molestation are not eligible for restriction, and felonies can only be restricted if the person was arrested but never charged or prosecuted or if the arrest charge was dismissed.
Child molestation, a serious misdemeanor? Seriously? How about making it a capital offense?
More Government; Less Freedom: Democrats are the Same Everywhere
Discrimination has been against federal law for more than 50 years, but now in Augusta they’re going to make it really, really against the law.
An Augusta Commission study committee chaired by Commissioner Francine Scott met to work on a non-discrimination ordinance Thursday that would allow people who think they’ve been discriminated against by a business to take their complaint to the city’s Compliance Department for investigation.
But the Compliance Department is already so overworked with complaints it would need at least three extra employees to handle those generated by the ordinance, according to Director Phyllis Johnson. Really? That seems like a lot since other cities in Georgia that have passed such ordinances have reported zero to one or maybe two complaints.
Commissioner Dennis Williams said he didn’t mind paying for three more employees to ensure Augusta was free from discrimination. Easy for him to talk.
Johnson said her department already receives from five to eight discrimination complaints a week.
So, my question is, “What do they do about it now?”
And what are those complaints? Are they from city employees or the general public? I’d file an Open Records request, but I can’t afford it. Maybe I could file a complaint that The Augusta Press is being discriminated against by the city with outrageous prices for information that should be readily available to the public.
Do you think I’d have to go through nonbinding arbitration like the committee talked about? And if I disagreed with the findings, would the compliance department notify the Marshal’s Department to summon me to Magistrate Court, as was suggested during Thursday’s meeting? And if I didn’t win, would I have to pay a bunch of court costs and filing fees in addition to the outrageous prices for public information?
You betcha!
The most sensible sounding comment I read in reports of the meeting came from Sue Parr, president of the Metro Augusta Chamber of Commerce.
“When you start going into the court system, just from a cost and time perspective for a business, that’s potentially very lengthy. When the cost to adjudicate the process is more than the penalty, you have to wonder what we’re trying to achieve.”
Yeah, what the hell are they trying to achieve?
How ’Bout That Dawg?
University of Georgia football great Herschel Walker is going to be running in Bulldog country again. I just hope Herschel doesn’t get tackled by his past in his run to unseat Democrat incumbent U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock in next year’s midterm elections. Herschel excelled at getting away from tackles and blocks during his glory days at Georgia, but the foes who’ll be trying to take him down in his Senate run will be a lot more vicious than any he faced on the football field.
Seems like both candidates have had major problems with their spouses, but who hasn’t? I have a lot of friends who’ve run over their wives’ foot with a truck during a domestic episode or stalked their ex-wives. I was thinking it was because I wasn’t hanging out with high-class folks. Now I see that wasn’t it, although I always thought that somebody running for the U.S. Senate would be above such shenanigans. Now I see how wrong I was.
No Surprises Here
In perusing Tuesday’s Augusta Commission committee meeting agendas, I see where Mayor Hardie Davis’ task force will present its final report on city monuments, street names and landmarks that have anything to do with the Confederate States of America. I wrote about the final report months ago, and to summarize, a majority of task force members voted to remove, change or obliterate anything honoring anyone or anything having to do with the Confederacy. The committee also recommended having the government (taxpayers) pay for the changes and submitted a list of possible street name changes. They were Mr. Frank Yerby; Dr. George William Walker; Dr. John Hope; Professor John Wesley Gilbert and Reverend Channing Tobias.
Thanks to Scott Hudson, senior reporter and reporter Dana Lynn McIntyre for their contributions to this week’s column.
