Lee May’s gamble to stop the bleeding in DeKalb
Back in the day, before Boy Scout first-aid manuals, a favorite way to staunch severe bleeding was to draw a red-hot poker from the fire and apply it to the open wound.
Cauterization was quick, but very painful. Sometimes it even worked.
The boldest political move of the week belongs to Lee May, the 39-year-old interim CEO of troubled DeKalb County. On Wednesday, May announced the hiring of former attorney general Mike Bowers to conduct a no-holds-barred investigation of corruption and malfeasance within county operations.
DeKalb is bleeding confidence. And Bowers is the red-hot poker.
Aside from the indictments, the confessions, the forced removals from office, the most obvious product of that bleeding has been a cityhood movement that threatens to carve what once was Georgia’s showpiece county into a handful of Latvias, Lithuanias and Estonias.
One day after he announced his hiring of Bowers, May drew the line between his gamble and the cityhood movement....
About the Author
Jim Galloway, the newspaper’s former political columnist, was a writer and editor at the AJC for four decades.
