DeKalb County’s next ethics officer could be hired in a manner of weeks.
On Wednesday night, the county ethics board named Elisa Murphy as sole finalist for the job — an important, often controversial position whose tasks include leading investigations into complaints of wrongdoing among DeKalb’s thousands of employees and public officials.
Murphy is a retired judge from Ohio who has also worked in human resources and is an adjunct professor in business ethics. She was one of “a large number of qualified applicants” for the position, ethics board member Alex Joseph said Wednesday, but emerged as the clear favorite following initial screening interviews.
“Mrs. Murphy has a very impressive but also very diverse background,” said Joseph, who with colleague Rosa Waymon helped lead the board’s review of applicants.
Wednesday’s vote set the stage for the ethics board to interview — and potentially hire — Murphy during a meeting now scheduled for 6 p.m. on Thursday, May 12.
Per the county’s ethics law, the DeKalb Board of Commissioners would then have to vote to ratify the hire. CEO Michael Thurmond would have to sign off as well.
If Murphy’s hiring is finalized, she would become DeKalb’s second-ever ethics officer — and arrive at an interesting time for an office that has seen plenty of them.
Stacey Kalberman, a former director of the Georgia ethics commission, served as DeKalb’s first ethics officer from 2016 until a few months ago. She presided over a tumultuous period that included nearly three years in which the ethics board was in legal and legislative limbo, the product of a 2018 lawsuit challenging how certain appointments to the board were made.
(Kalberman was able to continue other aspects of her job like training and advising county employees on ethical issues during the board’s hiatus, which ended early last year.)
With the end of her six-year term looming, Kalberman left the ethics office for another job in February.
She has said her departure had “absolutely nothing” to do with recently uncovered allegations made against her by deputy ethics officer LaTonya Nix Wiley.
In a pair of complaints The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported on last week, Wiley accused Kalberman of harboring a “negative bias towards Black people.” Kalberman has denied the claims.
Wiley was recently placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation. That process could begin shortly, thanks to another hire the ethics board made on Wednesday.
The board voted unanimously to hire Bonnie Levine — a local attorney with experience in labor, employment and other workplace matters — to serve as its outside counsel, pending an agreement on contract terms .
The role, which has been unfilled for several months, is largely an advisory one for a board is still navigating a new ethics law and finding its feet procedurally. But documents previously obtained by the AJC suggest one of Levine’s first jobs could be to help the board identify a separate attorney to lead the probe into Wiley’s complaints.
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