After 2 1/2 years and well over 100 virtual gatherings, the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners will return to in-person meetings next week.
Like most county and city governments, DeKalb went virtual with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, hosting public meetings via Zoom and other similar technology. But most of its municipal counterparts returned to some sense of normalcy many months, if not years, ago.
When the DeKalb commission hosts its first in-person public meeting on Oct. 25, it will likely be the last local government in metro Atlanta to make the transition back.
Robert Patrick, the commission’s presiding officer, made the announcement last week.
“Everyone else is meeting in person,” he said Tuesday, “and we should probably be catching up with them.”
The decision has raised some concerns among fellow commissioners, chiefly as pertains to public participation.
During Tuesday’s (virtual) commission meeting, county attorney Viviane Ernstes said future in-person meetings will be shown on DCTV (Comcast Channel 23) and streamed on the county’s website. Members of the public are welcome to attend and provide comments or submit their thoughts via email.
But as things are currently set up, Ernstes said, residents will not be able to actually participate in meetings from a virtual setting.
Technology director John Matelski said upgrades are in the works but the county’s Maloof Auditorium, where meetings are held, is not currently equipped to handle “hybrid” gatherings, with some participants in person and others participating via Zoom.
Commissioner Lorraine Cochran-Johnson said the upgraded technology needs were something that “could have, or should have, been addressed already.” Colleague Ted Terry said the virtual option has become “very important for public engagement.”
“We don’t live in a world now where everything can just be all back in-person,” Terry said.
He accused Patrick of not being transparent with his decision. Patrick said he’d tried to reach out to Terry several times but heard nothing back; Terry said he had the call logs to prove otherwise.
The county is still operating under an emergency declaration that, under the Georgia Open Meetings Act, gives them a wider berth to hold public meetings remotely. But Ernstes said that any bouncing back and forth between in-person and virtual meetings could raise legal questions about the exemptions that are currently allowed.
That likely has implications for other county boards and commissions as well. The DeKalb elections board, which has also been meeting remotely since 2020, recently said that it will gather in-person in the future.
The DeKalb County Board of Commissioners will meet at the Manuel J. Maloof Auditorium, 1300 Commerce Drive in Decatur, at 9 a.m. Tuesday. Committees will meet at the same location later in the day.
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