Metro Atlanta Chamber Chief Executive Sam Williams announced Tuesday he plans to retire.
Williams, 68, has been a central figure in Atlanta’s business community for decades and leader of the chamber for the past 17 years.
He played a key role in the effort to save Grady Memorial Hospital and improve the metro area’s business climate and quality of life, but he has recently been mired in controversy.
The business community has been criticized for its support of former Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall amid a cheating scandal that later led to dozens of indictments. And the chamber also was the point organization advocating for the T-SPLOST tax referendum, which failed last year.
In a statement, the chamber said Williams, 68, has already served three years beyond the commitment he made in 1996 to serve until age 65. The organization said that at the encouragement of its Executive Committee, he will extend his contract until the end of this year, or until a replacement is hired in 2014.
“Since early this year, I’ve been in discussions with our board’s executive officers on the steps we’ll need to take to start a thorough search for my replacement,” Williams said. “By announcing my retirement today, the board will have seven months to identify my replacement while also allowing time for an effective transition.”
The chamber said during his leadership, the organization has recruited more than 700 companies to the region, creating more than 75,000 direct jobs. He has focused on attracting bioscience and high tech jobs.
Fallout from APS scandal
The chamber has also been a staunch supporter of Atlanta Public Schools. It helped found the Atlanta Education Fund, which raised money for the district. In recent months, however, the organization has come under the microsope amid the APS test cheating scandal.
In July 2011, a governor’s task force released a blockbuster investigative report that found widespread cheating in the district. In the findings, the authors criticized business leaders, including those at the Metro Atlanta Chamber, for a campaign to attack the “messengers” rather than find the truth because they were more concerned with protecting “the Atlanta brand.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reviewed previously undisclosed files from the governor's task force, including a deposition taken from Gary Price, a managing partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, who led an earlier, Chamber-backed inquiry into cheating at APS, and a recorded interview investigators made of Williams. The records and recording show that:
* Williams and Price had misgivings about the independence of the Blue Ribbon Commission, which promised a fair and unbiased inquiry into the cheating allegations, right from the start because it contained a key ally of former school superintendent Beverly Hall.
* Auditors hired by the commission to investigate produced a report using methodology that commission and chamber officials worried was flawed. Indeed, the initial draft of the report to the commission had so many problems that Price, himself an experienced auditor of a major auditing firm, called it “garbage” in his testimony to investigators.
* Despite their private concerns about the commission’s independence and shortcomings, chamber and commission officials nonetheless attempted to sell the commission’s report discounting systemic cheating at APS and exonerating Hall as independent and authoritative.
* Price told investigators that he and some other commission members did not believe the commission’s report vindicated Hall, as she subsequently claimed it did. But they did not say so publicly or express how “incredibly disappointed” they were when Hall claimed vindication.
In 2011, the AJC reported one of Williams’ key deputies at the chamber, who was also a staffer for the commission, authored plan to “finesse” the commission’s report through the governor’s office to win a stamp of approval from then-Gov. Sonny Perdue and silence the commission’s critics in the media.
In a statement to the AJC, Williams made little mention of his personal role or response to the scandal.
“Throughout the investigation, the Chamber’s primary concern was the impact on the children and the integrity of our schools,” the statement said. “The Blue Ribbon Commission referred more than 100 individuals to APS for further investigation. Business leaders and members of the Chamber were shocked to learn of the depth of the crisis within APS.”
T-SPLOST defeated
The chamber also suffered a defeat last July when metro Atlanta voters on Tuesday rejected a $7.2 billion transportation plan that business leaders have called an essential bulwark against regional decline.
The defeat of the 10-year, 1 percent sales tax left the Atlanta region’s traffic congestion problem with no visible remedy. The chamber pushed to create the referendum in the Legislature and then poured millions into a campaign to pass the tax.
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