The new ethics chief for DeKalb County decided against keeping allegations of misconduct confidential, based on advice Wednesday from the Georgia Attorney General's Office that these complaints are public records.
DeKalb Ethics Officer Stacey Kalberman said she will follow the state's guidance that complaints should be disclosed upon request under Georgia's Open Records Act.
Kalberman told the DeKalb Board of Ethics last week she wanted to be able to investigate complaints before they were made public because some allegations can be frivolous and politically motivated.
But three residents and an attorney for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution argued to the board that the public has a right to review accusations of ethical infractions.
Kalberman said Wednesday that she previously believed ethics complaints were part of ongoing investigations that shouldn’t be released, and sought clarification from Attorney General Sam Olens’s office.
“If anybody sees the way we operate, they’ll see we’ll do the right thing,” Kalberman said. “We may disagree over the interpretation of the statute, but if the attorney general tells us this is the advice we give, we’re not going to argue with that.”
An attorney for the AJC, Lesli Gaither, wrote in a letter to the Attorney General’s Office on Tuesday that ethics complaints must be revealed to the public, and they’re not covered by state laws exempting investigatory documents from disclosure.
“Put simply, these complaints are not board-generated records. They are they underlying records that lead to the investigation,” Gaither wrote. “This is akin to 911 and other records that may lead to an investigation, but are not themselves investigatory.”
The issue arose after voters overwhelmingly approved an overhaul of the DeKalb Board of Ethics last November, resulting in new members being appointed who enacted different rules. Among those rules was a paragraph stating that complaints are part of pending investigations, and they wouldn't be publicly available until 10 days after cases are closed.
Under the old Board of Ethics, complaints were released when residents and media organizations filed open records requests with the county.
Ethics complaints are pending against suspended DeKalb CEO Burrell Ellis, Commissioner Sharon Barnes Sutton, former Commissioner Stan Watson and former county employees.
The AJC on Wednesday renewed its request for four recently filed complaints that Kalberman didn’t release last week.
Those complaints involved Watson, Sutton, a code compliance officer and DeKalb Sanitation Division employees. The board last week dismissed the complaint against the code compliance officer, which involved a dispute over debris removal rather than an ethical breach.
Georgia’s Open Records Act requires a response within three business days.
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