Official suspended for e-mailing obscene pictures

By Rhonda Cook

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The executive director of a 10-county regional commission was suspended without pay for two weeks and ordered to undergo sensitivity training as his punishment for sending hundreds of  sexually explicit e-mails over the city of Griffin’s e-mail.

The punishment was decided Wednesday night during a three-hour closed meeting of the board that governs the Three Rivers Regional Commission, which includes an area 50 miles south of Atlanta and stretching to the Alabama line.

Executive Director Lanier Boatwright declined to comment when approached by CBS Atlanta following the called meeting. Boatwright and several members of the board did not return messages The Atlanta Journal-Constitution left Thursday.

“Suspended for two weeks without pay, that a written reprimand be placed in his file as long as he works with Three Rivers Regional Commission and that he promptly attend sensitivity training," said Chairman Tim Lassetter, one of three representatives on the board from Coweta County.

"If any inappropriate e-mails are ever forwarded by him with his Three Rivers computer, he will be automatically be terminated," Lassetter told CBS Atlanta.

Lassetter declined to describe board member discussions in the closed session during which they eventually decided Boatwright’s punishment.

“I don’t think it was a punishment. It was a vacation,” said Carter Thompson who discovered the e-mails while looking for other records to use in a planned lawsuit challenging her firing last February.

According to Thompson, she was fired because Boatwright claimed she threatened him an e-mail. She said Boatwright considered her e-mail threatening when she wrote she would take her sexual harassment complaint to someone else if Boatwright did not help.

According to e-mails obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boatwright spent significant parts of his work days sharing with friends and colleagues graphic pictures of nude women, women performing sex acts on others and on inanimate objects, videos of a group performing a Christmas Carol by blowing on the top of beer bottles and making fun of Muslims and Walmart shoppers.

At the time the e-mails were sent, Three Rivers was using the city of Griffin’s e-mail address but it has since been assigned its own domain.

“The e-mails that were sent and received by Mr. Boatwright were beyond vulgar and degrading to women, minorities, low income individuals and people that are not considered to be attractive” said Thompson, who was a planner for Three Rivers. “If this is their decision, then this sort of behavior is obviously tolerated at Three Rivers Regional Commission and the people of their region should be disgusted that their tax dollars pay their salaries of these employees.”

Three Rivers is one of 12 regional commissions the Legislature created last year to coordinate economic development, transportation, information technology and human services programs. Each commission is autonomous, run by boards of two elected officials and a citizen representative from each included county. The commissions get state funding.

Three Rivers was created by the merger of two regional development centers -- predecessors to the regional commissions. Boatwright started working for the McIntosh Trail Regional Development Center 33 years ago, and he became executive director of Three Rivers when the Chattahoochee Flint Regional Development Center and McIntosh Trail merged.