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DEL.ICIO.USSnellville residents making mudpies
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The rhetoric’s getting a bit puffy in Snellville.
Recently a backer of Mayor Jerry Oberholtzer filed a formal complaint against the incumbent’s challenger Bruce Garraway for “diversion of resources.”
The diversion? Getting the police chief to send an officer to open the former councilman’s car after Garraway had locked his keys in it. In response Garraway fired off a news release insisting that he was only taking advantage of a police service available to all Snellville residents.
(Snellville police Chief Roy Whitehead has since discontinued the practice.)
Garraway didn’t stop there.
He issued an official request that the Snellville City Council investigate “potential conflicts of interest and collusion” between Oberholtzer and Joe Anderson, the filer of the “diversion” complaint against Garraway.
“Mr. Anderson is a former City Council member who left Snellville in the middle of his term, but who’s spent the last several years as a professional gadfly and troublemaker, using leaked information from Mayor Oberholtzer to fuel his various manias,” Garraway said in his prepared statement. “His unhealthy obsession with Snellville politics now threatens the good name and professional reputation of Roy Whitehead. Frankly, that’s repugnant.”
So what we’re talking about is one accusation of inappropriate use of a car jimmie with a countercharge of consorting with a gadfly. Right?
It’s not one of the 7 words you can’t say on TV
Kevin Kenerly came up with a blunt way to inform potential buyers and trespassers that the property they’re interested in has been cited for violating the county’s zoning codes.
“Why don’t we just put up a big yellow sign that says ‘This Property Sucks,’ ” Kenerly said.
The District 4 commissioner made this suggestion during a meeting with his elected colleagues and county staffers about changing the county’s property maintenance ordinance.
Sounds OK with us, but would Kenerly’s placard be OK under Gwinnett’s sign ordinance?
Is Shackelford now a Gwinnettian?
We didn’t see Wayne Shackelford cringe when he got called a “Gwinnettian” last week.
It happened during an awards presentation by the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners.
“He’s been an outstanding American and especially a Gwinnettian all of his life,” Chairman Charles Bannister said.
Only the older elephants are going to remember this, but Shackelford once publicly derided the term (pronounced Gwin-ee-shun). For the uninitiated, a Gwinnettian is a Gwinnett County resident.
“There’s no such word in my vocabulary. It is grammatically incorrect, and it’s an incorrect description of what we are,” Shackelford said during an interview in 1988.
The former state transportation czar and Gwinnett County administrator was responding to a reporter’s question about the origin of the word.
But Shackelford was talking like a Gwinnettian after receiving his award Tuesday. “I grew up,” Shackelford said. “I like it now.”
Gwinnett gets full-time drug prosecutor
District Attorney Danny Porter last week hired the county’s first lawyer who will exclusively prosecute drug cases.
Porter hired the attorney, Michael Smith, with $120,000 in federal, state and local grant funding from the Atlanta High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
HIDTA, as the program is called, funds drug case task forces, training and “prosecution initiatives,” according to a news release from the county communications office.
“[Smith] is a former state prosecutor from Florida who was assigned to the U.S. attorney’s office as a money laundering expert,” Porter said. “He has been a prosecutor for more than 15 years and has prosecuted complex drug conspiracy and money laundering cases both in federal and state court.”
U.S. Attorney David Nahmias, chairman of the HIDTA board, said hiring Smith “is an important part of our collaborative effort to address the scourge of drug trafficking in the metropolitan Atlanta area.”
“We’re grateful to the Gwinnett County Commission, Commission Chairman Charles Bannister and District Attorney Danny Porter for helping create this new position,” Nahmias said.
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