DeKalb County’s reconstituted ethics board will meet for the first time next week.
The ethics board — which is responsible for investigating complaints of wrongdoing against county officials and employees — has been effectively dormant since Aug. 2018, when the Georgia Supreme Court deemed the appointment process for some board members unconstitutional. Those issues were addressed in new legislation that DeKalb voters ratified in November, and appointments to the reconfigured board were finalized in early January.
County ethics officer Stacey Kalberman announced Tuesday that the board would hold its first meeting at noon on Feb. 11. The gathering will be conducted via Zoom.
“We will hopefully be able to really begin our business again, even though we’ve been sort of stymied for two years,” Kalberman said during a meeting with county commissioners.
Agenda items for the inaugural meeting are largely procedural in nature. Documents suggest that any discussion of outstanding ethics cases passed down from the previous board would be “informational only.”
The board could, however, decide how to fill a new “ethics administrator” position now mandated by law.
The person chosen for that role will be responsible for collecting and documenting all complaints before passing them along to the ethics board. The board would then decide if complaints merit a full-fledged investigation and, if so, hand them over to Kalberman.
The administrator position was included in last year’s legislation to address some folks’ concerns about checks and balances within the ethics office.
Kalberman said Tuesday that she plans to recommend that an existing administrative assistant take on the new duties. The decision, though, lies with the ethics board.
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