I've been in this business a long time, and after a while you can begin to think that you've seen most everything that politicians can throw at you.
Then someone like Tim Lee comes along and opens virgin territory that you never knew existed.
Lee, the chairman of the Cobb County Commission, faces an ethics-board hearing next week into his controversial handling of secret negotiations to bring the Atlanta Braves to a new stadium in Cobb, a facility to be built with a significant subsidy by Cobb County taxpayers. In preliminary hearings on the issue, ethics board members did not seem all that convinced by Lee's protestations of innocence.
That skepticism is justified by extensive documentation. To cite just one aspect of the case, the record demonstrates that Lee, acting on his own and in violation of county policy and law, hired a private attorney to negotiate secretly with the Braves. It demonstrates that Lee misled the citizens and taxpayers of Cobb County, as well as his fellow commissioners, about hiring the attorney, as well as a lot of other things. And in a new "apology" issued in hopes of avoiding an ethics-board hearing, Lee continues to deceive:
"I never imagined, and still don’t believe, that it could be considered to be a “hire” because compensation or contracts for future work were never discussed, promised or delivered," a supposedly contrite Lee wrote.
Contrast that with the contents of a once secret email that Lee caused to be sent to Dan McRae, the private attorney in question. It was sent to McRae by an official of the Cobb Chamber of Commerce to keep it out of public records:
“I am passing on to you the following provided by Chairman Tim Lee on behalf of Cobb County and its entities. The county confirms the attorney-client relationship between it and (McRae's firm) as its project counsel/bond counsel” for the Braves deal.
Lying in a supposed apology is not generally a sign of sincere contrition. Nor are Lee's continuing efforts to frustrate an honest look at his actions.
Angeline Mathis, a Cobb County attorney and private citizen, is one of five Cobb ethics board members who voted to proceed with the case against Lee after a preliminary hearing. Since then, however, Lee has replaced his attorney, and has now demanded that Mathis recuse herself.
Why? Because as the AJC's Dan Klepal reports, Lee's new taxpayer-provided attorney is Ben Mathis, the ex-husband of Angeline Mathis. As a result of the hiring, Lee now claims that Angeline Mathis cannot judge him fairly and seeks appointment of a new member to replace her on the board, thus delaying the process still further.
See, I never would have thought of that one.
Such maneuvers add to the already significant pile of evidence that Lee sees the process of civic government as something to be twisted and manipulated rather than honored and respected. I'm not buying his contrition for a minute.
(CORRECTION: In my embarrassing own mea culpa, an earlier version of this blogpost misidentified attorney Ben Mathis as author of the Chamber email to Dan McRae. He was not.)
It's also important to point out that such an attitude could have consequences. The stadium project is contingent on an expensive pedestrian overpass over I-285 for which there is no apparent source of money. (Lee had initially claimed -- falsely or incorrectly, however you wish to characterize it -- that the cost of the bridge was already in the project budget.) It is dependent on access to nearby parking lots that so far do not appear to be available. In fact, there are still a whole lot of unanswered questions about the project, including a court case to be argued before the state Supreme Court challenging the entire approval process as illegal.
In an open process conducted in accordance with the law, such issues would have been much more fully discussed and debated, in public. That's why such laws and policies exist in the first place. Lee and his allies, including the Braves, chose to shortcircuit that process by demanding final public approval of the plan within two weeks of its revelation, and by hiding important details about its true costs. The process was a sham.
Lee's fate aside, I nonetheless hope that those questions can be resolved, that the stadium opens in 2017 on schedule and that is a huge success, despite continuing doubts about the traffic it will generate. I also hope the 2017 Braves win the World Series in that stadium.
But I confess to doubts about all of those things.
About the Author
