Meet the controversial former mayor seeking a seat on the Fulton Commission
Tiffany Henyard says she had no intention of running for the Fulton County Commission when she moved to Union City last year, leaving behind a litany of controversies from her term as a mayor in Illinois.
After losing her reelection bid for mayor of Dolton, Illinois, in 2025, Henyard moved to Fulton County because her boyfriend suggested she come to the area, she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday. She says she was unfamiliar with Union City when she started renting a home there last May. She has a clothing store in the city of South Fulton.
She said she decided to run in this year’s election to replace Fulton Commissioner Marvin S. Arrington Jr., who is running for chair of the commission, after hearing people who came into her clothing store, Tha New Wave, complaining about how Fulton County was being run.
“Well, I think it needs a lot of help,” Henyard said of Fulton County, in an interview outside its Board of Registration and Elections on Monday, after the board voted that she meets the residency requirement to remain a candidate for the District 5 seat. “That’s what we’re here to do, make changes, fix it and create opportunities that we don’t have in south Fulton.”
Henyard, 42, said she has been a lifelong Democrat but is running in District 5 as a Republican, in part because she said the Republican Party better reflects her values. As the only Republican running in District 5, she will face the winner of a four-way Democratic primary contest in the November election.
“The core values didn’t line up, such as faith, family, growth, policies,” said Henyard, referring to Democratic Party values. “Things like that I really, truly care about.”
Henyard’s tenure as mayor of Dolton — population 21,426 at last count by the U.S. Census — lasted just one term, from 2021 to 2025, but it was marred by controversy.
Federal investigators are looking into payments Henyard authorized out of city funds to contractors without going through the proper channels, according to several reports from Chicago news outlets.
For example, in one case, at Henyard’s urging, the city approved $200,000 in payments to a contracting company owned by a family already tied up in a corruption probe that landed at least one family member behind bars, according to local media.
Henyard has also been accused of using her position as mayor to cover up allegations that Andrew Holmes, then a Dolton trustee, sexually assaulted a city employee.
The employee and a Dolton police officer said the worker was drugged and raped by Holmes during a group trip to Las Vegas in 2023, according to a lawsuit. When they told Henyard about it, they were sidelined at each of their jobs, according to the suit filed in Cook County court in April 2024.
The village agreed to settle the claims in 2025, but details of that settlement weren’t immediately available.
Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, working as a consultant for the village of Dolton, found in January 2025 that Henyard and others had mismanaged village funds during her tenure, putting the village $3.5 million in the hole, according to local news reports.
Some of the issues Lightfoot highlighted were paid trips to Las Vegas — including the 2023 trip at the center of the sexual assault cover-up allegations — and making unapproved payments to vendors, according to reporting by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Lightfoot’s noncriminal investigation found that low staffing levels in the village contributed to poor oversight of the mayor’s spending, according to the Sun-Times.
Trustees were blocked from seeing regular financial reports, and credit card expenses spiked as high as $779,000 at one point without receipts to support the payments, Lightfoot found.
The finance issues also meant that some 48 lawsuits were filed against the village during Henyard’s tenure, according to the report.
Dolton sued Fifth Third Bank earlier this year, saying the financial institution should have flagged to the village that Henyard was passing checks through without getting a needed second signature.
She took more than $2 million from the village accounts to pay vendors, but there was no oversight into where the money went, the village said.
The bank pushed back on those allegations in Illinois federal court last month, saying, among other things, that the village knew the bank wouldn’t police the check signatures to fit the village policy. It wasn’t Fifth Third’s responsibility to monitor the use of the funds from the accounts, the bank argued.
That lawsuit is still pending and is set for a hearing in May, court records show.
In Fulton County, Arrington, who is finishing his third term while running for chair of the Board of Commissioners, dismissed Henyard’s chances of winning the race because she is running as a Republican in the majority-Democrat District 5.
“She has no chance on God’s green Earth to win as a Republican in District 5,” Arrington said Monday in an interview. “I can’t take her seriously because she registered as a Republican in a district that’s over 90% Democratic.”
On Monday, Henyard appeared before the Board of Registration and Elections to demonstrate whether she met the requirement that a candidate live in a district for at least 12 months before the date they would be sworn into office — in this case, Jan. 1, 2027.
At the hearing, Henyard demonstrated to the board that she signed a lease for the home more than one year before she would assume office and made rent payments. The board voted 3-1 that she was an eligible candidate, with member Julie Adams voting in opposition.
“It’s not our job to determine what’s going on in Illinois,” said elections board member Terri Crawford. “She has met the requirements for being in Georgia, and that’s all we have to review.”
In District 5, these are the Democratic candidates who qualified to run: Dejia Felicity Swindell, a marketing strategist; Sojourner Marable Grimmett, who works in marketing, communications and community outreach; J. Jazz Thomas-Jones, a podcaster, minister and freelance journalist; and Helen Willis, who has served on South Fulton’s City Council since 2017.
The Democratic primary election is May 19.
About the Authors
Reed Williams is an enterprise reporter on the Local team at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
