One can't exactly compare it to Martin Luther pinning his "95 Theses" to a chapel door, but there's no question that something different in Atlanta politics happened at 9:31 p.m. last Monday.
That's when the newly elected president of the Atlanta City Council nailed a terse statement to her Facebook page, atop a news account of more than $500,000 in bonuses that had been handed out to a select group of city employees, wearers of ugly sweaters, and talented lip-synch artists in the waning days of the Kasim Reed administration.
Her message: "Former Mayor Reed, What you have done is illegal and disgusting. Felicia A. Moore"
Moore would stand in front of TV cameras the next day and say much the same thing. Through a spokesman that afternoon, Reed replied that the bonuses were entirely legal and appropriate — rewards for valuable workers who had helped put the city on “its best financial footing in 40 years.”
But by Wednesday, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had sent her chief of staff to a meeting of the city council's finance committee, a session dominated by questions from Moore, to contradict her former mentor. Marva Lewis conceded that the raises doled out by Bottoms' predecessor were indeed "excessive."
Historically, Atlanta city council presidents are dismissed as the unglamorous vice presidents of City Hall. It has been ages since any council president dominated a daily news cycle. Felicia Moore dominated the week, as a pent-up voice of outrage reacting to that indictments, search warrants and distasteful revelations that have rained down on 68 Mitchell St.
"I'm really concerned. I get emotional sometimes about it because I'm very sad, and then other times, very angry. I believe this scandal…is probably going to be one of the larger ones we've ever seen," Moore said Monday in an interview with longtime journalist Maynard Eaton on "Newsmakers Live," a weekly interview show conducted in an Atlanta nightclub.
Eaton asked about the racial implications of the scandal. “It’s about green,” replied Moore, who was a 20-year veteran of the council before her election as president last year. “Plenty of people who are white have gone to prison as well. It’s about greed. It’s about some greedy people. It’s about green.”
The Facebook post that Moore addressed to the former mayor came later that night.
There is the fact that, with the pugnacious Reed no longer in the building, his longtime critics — and Moore has been among them — feel freer to express their discontent. Within the confines of City Hall, in fact, the former mayor’s name has been disappeared. He is no longer Kasim Reed. He is “the Previous Administration.”
Some of Moore’s sudden prominence is circumstantial, and thus perhaps also temporary.
In her first three months in office, Bottoms has proven herself non-confrontational and cautious, yet she has already notched some achievements. The new mayor has settled a longstanding property dispute between the city and the Atlanta Public School system. She’s completed the purchase of 4.5 miles of unused railroad corridor to complete a key section of the Beltline.
But on April 5, Mitzi Bickers, a former director of human services in the Reed administration was indicted on federal bribery charges. Shortly afterwards, Bottoms asked for resignation letters from 26 top-ranking city officials. The mayor is still sorting through them, deciding who to keep and who to send packing.
There is also the fact that the Bottoms administration is now plowing through requests for public records from the press that had been long ignored by the Reed administration. A criminal investigation is underway, and compliance by Bottoms has required the new administration to take a back seat to the bottled-up revelations.
Monday was a case in point. That’s when the mayor’s office handed over documents that spelled out the bonuses handed out as Reed finished his second term, including $36,000 in raffle drawings and $31,000 for holiday party winners of contests for lip-synching and ugly sweaters.
That led to front page headlines and Wednesday’s finance committee meeting, which stretched for nearly four hours. Though not a formal member of the committee, Moore sat in — and peppered Bottoms’ aides with questions.
At one point, the council president began reading aloud a hasty online news report alleging that the GBI was at that moment raiding city offices, and that city attorney Jeremy Berry had fled the building. Moore was quickly told that this was not true.
GBI agents were in the building to arrange interviews, but no records were seized, and Berry was in a meeting off-campus. (Moore would later correct the record on her Facebook page, without apology.)
Despite that interruption, the meeting continued.
Moore noted that Bottoms had accepted the resignation of Jim Beard, the city’s chief financial officer, who will continue to serve until May 17 — when he returns from a training program at Harvard University, for which the city paid $60,000 last fall.
“He’s not an inexpensive employee. I’m sure that he has knowledge that could be helpful to us,” Moore conceded. “But we don’t get the benefit of any of that training now that he’s resigned. To me, it’s just kind of messy.”
Also during that never-ending meeting, Moore and other council members were told that a law department memo justifying the bonuses had disappeared — collateral damage from the recent ransomware attack on the city’s computer system.
The Bottoms administration has proposed hiring outside counsel to investigate the bonuses — attorneys who would be chosen by the law department. “I will listen to the auditor and the ethics officer,” Moore said later. “I won’t give much credence to the law department, particularly when the law department is party to this whole thing with a memo they can’t find.”
Moore wasn't done with the week's spotlight. The next morning, the council president took her outrage to a breakfast meeting of the Buckhead Business Association. Also there was Mary Norwood, who lost to Bottoms last year in the mayoral runoff, just as she had lost to Reed eight years earlier.
Over the eggs and toast, Moore delivered one last piece of eyebrow-raising news — about that ugly sweater contest. One of the winning sweaters had Norwood’s image on it, she said.
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