The attorney taking on DeKalb County’s ethics board has been given three more weeks to respond to the board’s latest request to resume operations.
The new timetable increases the odds that a ruling on the legal request will be influenced by the work of state lawmakers.
Earlier this month, the ethics board asked DeKalb Superior Court Judge Asha Jackson to modify the consent order that's kept it sidelined for more than a year. The order was entered in Oct. 2018 as part of a long-standing lawsuit brought by former Commissioner Sharon Barnes Sutton, and followed a Georgia Supreme Court ruling that deemed the process for appointing some members of the ethics board unconstitutional.
The motion filed by an attorney for the ethics board argued, however, that the Supreme Court ruling only applied to future appointments — and didn’t preclude existing members appointed in the proscribed manner from staying on the panel and continuing to work. The ethics board agreed to the 2018 consent order because at the time it seemed like the state legislature would soon fix the issue, attorney Kurt Kastorf wrote.
It didn’t happen.
Lawmakers from DeKalb did produce ethics legislation in 2019, but the scope was far wider than just fixing the appointment process and voters overwhelmingly shot down the proposal in a November referendum.
Legislators are taking up the issue again this session, but discussions have thus far been contentious and largely unproductive.
Citing all that, the ethics board’s motion asks Jackson to allow the panel to resume its work as already constructed.
Dwight Thomas, the attorney for ex-commissioner Barnes Sutton, asked for more time to formally respond to the motion. Judge Jackson granted the request, setting the deadline at March 20.
While the legislature’s schedule has not yet been finalized, that date could be less than two weeks before the final day of the session. The timetable means Jackson could wait on ruling in the legal matter until she sees what legislation, if any, is passed.
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