At least DeKalb County’s pols are trying to do something. Let’s give them that.
On the other hand, if they didn’t try to somehow straighten out the mess that is DeKalb County, they’d almost be criminally negligent. But let’s leave talk about criminality out of this because it’s time for some old-fashioned, roll-up-your-sleeves, civic-positive-thinking as the county creates an Operations Task Force to take a good hard look at itself.
With struggling schools, crime, government corruption, break-away cities and racial divisiveness, it is evident there are many places to look.
Where to start? Interim CEO Lee May (who is interiming for indicted CEO Burrell Ellis) figured a Power Point history lesson was in store.
In 1886, the Legislature created DeKalb government, a five-member Board of Commissioners of Roads and Revenues.
“We were focused on roads,” said May. That he used the past tense caused some to think he was admitting the roads today are deplorable.
In 1902, legislators tweaked the government and repealed the tweak two years later. In 1906, they created a sole commissioner post and then brought back a 5-man board in 1912. So governmental instability is nothing new.
Professor May’s history lesson also showed DeKalb government likes to study itself. In 1954, a commission recommended creating a chief executive officer form of government and an independent auditor. The CEO form of government, kind of like a mayor with a businessy name, eventually happened. The independent auditor? Still waiting.
Other study committees/task forces came in 1976, 1977, 1979 and 2006. The 1977 task force recommended the CEO form again because citizens held the commission chairman responsible for the county’s failures. The chairman was too weak, they said.
The county got its wish, and in 1985, Manuel Maloof became its first CEO — sparking arguments since that the position is too powerful, too separate, too (you fill in the blank). I covered DeKalb in 1998 when a band of commissioners and then-CEO Liane Levetan were locked in a lawsuit over spending sales tax.
But enough of the good old days. Let’s return to the present.
Interim CEO May said he brought four dozen slides to the public meeting last Thursday night for a reason. “What we are looking at is nothing new.”
So, May created a 15-member Task Force (whoops, he forgot to appoint elected Republicans and North DeKalbites, so he added state Sen. Fran Millar of Dunwoody and state Rep. Mike Jacobs of Brookhaven).
So, May created a 17-member Task Force with two subcommittees. One would study how new cities should incorporate, as well as how the 10 existing cities in DeKalb should expand. The other subcommittee would explore how the county’s government should be changed.
May has said he supports doing away with the CEO post. He also is a proponent of turning all of DeKalb into incorporated cities, following the lead of Dunwoody and Brookhaven, which have come to be in the past six years. All sorts of new cities have been proposed — Lakeside, Briarcliff, LaVista Hills, Tucker, Stonecrest and even the city of DeKalb, which would pull in everything that isn’t already in a city.
His presentation showed a series of maps of the proposed new cities, as well as existing cities’ wish lists for expansions. Some are quite aggressive.
I was sitting in the audience next to former county Commissioner Gale Walldorff and told her that carving up DeKalb reminded me of partitioning Poland. She saw it more like splitting up the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
Walldorff, who left office in 2006, said she came out to join the 125 other DeKalb citizens there “just to see if they are addressing any problems.”
Are they?
She shook her head quietly. She said she was a part of study committee that recommended creating an independent inspector general. “But it’s sitting on a shelf,” she added.
Joel Edwards, a retired MARTA bus driver who has been active in neighborhood associations for 30 years, said, “We need to clean up DeKalb.”
Was he talking about brooms and shovels and better code enforcement? Or was it throw the bums out?
Both, he said.
“The overall problem is the ineffectiveness of government,” he said after the meeting. “But the problem is not its set-up; it’s the people who are in it. How can they sit at a table and solve the problem? They are the problem.”
Rod Frierson, a Hidden Hills resident, gave the commission a bit more love. He told the task force he and his wife want to retire in the county one day and “we’re going to keep you uplifted. We want you to do this well and finish what you started.”
The Task Force includes six legislators, three county commissioners, a school board member, the development authority chief and assorted other civic leaders. The group is to come up with recommendations for a better procedure to create cities and how to fix the government. These wishes from the Democratic-leaning county will then be in the hands of the Republican-dominated Legislature, which will do whatever it wishes.
Walldorff questioned the dearth of Regular Joes on the board. Former Decatur Mayor Bill Floyd, who is on the board, questioned why there are no current elected officials from any of DeKalb’s cities.
Floyd has a sense the group has been stacked against the cities. “This makes me question if I want to be a part of this,” said Floyd, who caught himself and added. “But getting these people together in a room is a big step.”
May has said he is not limiting the Task Force and wants it to come up with “substantial and historic changes.”
So it’s time for some hard work.
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