If ethics complaints in DeKalb County seem as common as sweet tea in summer, that is not true of Avondale Estates, the county’s third smallest city.
Avondale’s ethics board met last week for only the second time in the city’s 91-year history, far as anyone knows. None of the three members were around the last (and first) time the board met in March, 2009. Indeed, shortly before the hearing began, member Andrew Cohen looked tentatively at the audience of about 30 and said, “Does anybody know what our procedure is?”
On March 4 Joe Mandarino, a 51-year-old tax attorney who’s lived in Avondale since 1999, filed an ethics complaint against the Board of Mayor and Commissioners. It demands voiding the Dec., 2014, annexation of Stratford Green, a neighborhood of about 400 the city added after a petition by residents. It also demands the commissioners’ resignation.
Mandarino believes the annexation was illegal because the board was missing one person after the October resignation of Mayor Ed Rieker. The complaint contends the board shouldn’t have conducted any business until the vacancy was filled. (That finally happened with the March 17 election of Jonathan Elmore as Rieker’s successor).
Though he’s lived here 16 years, City Hall staffers and civic-meeting regulars say they don’t know Mandarino. He didn’t come to the hearing.
In an interview with the AJC, City Attorney Bob Wilson said the city is not legally required to notify the complainant, nor is the complainant required to show up.
Mandarino said, “This is the first I’ve heard about it,” when reached by phone the day after the hearing. “I don’t understand how you can have an ethics hearing without me being there. But things run differently in Avondale.”
The ethics board dismissed the complaint, finding no unethical behavior. It said the complaint should have gone before the state’s Superior Court instead. It agreed with Wilson, who had written shortly after the complaint was filed that the commissioners “can continue to do business … as long as three of the five elected officials are at a meeting,” a quorum.
Mandarino’s complaint was filed two weeks before a mayoral special election, as Avondale was seeking a legislative sponsor for a much-larger annexation including commercial and residential properties.
Mandarino said politics was not his motive and he is not necessarily against all annexation. “This is purely my opposition to foolish government,” he told the AJC shortly after filing his complaint. He thinks Stratford Green could cost Avondale “millions of dollars down the road” because of complaints that leaking sewers have spilled waste into the neighborhood since 2013. Although the sewers are owned by DeKalb County, he believes Avondale will wind up paying for a lot of the repairs.
Handling the ethics complaint has cost the city nearly $10,000 in staff and attorney fees to date, and that may eventually climb to $12,000, City Manager Clai Brown said. The city’s annual budget for the city attorney is a modest $35,997. Decatur, in contrast, budgets $160,000 for legal services, that city’s assistant city manager said.
“We don’t have the millions DeKalb has,” Brown said. “I don’t know how much we’d have to spend if this goes to court. If we go over (the annual attorney budget) we’d have to cut back somewhere, or if we can’t cut back we’d dip into reserves.”
It’s also cost the volunteer commissioners no small amount of angst. Commissioner John Quinn, a labor and employment lawyer, said he’s trying to find out if the State Ethics Board will require formal disclosure of the charge. Commissioner Randy Beebe, who isn’t an attorney, absorbed it on a more visceral level.
“I got a lot of hate mail over (favoring) annexation,” Beebe said told the ethics board. “That’s okay. But this ethics complaint, that’s personal.”
Bill Floyd, longtime Decatur mayor who is now Director of the DeKalb Municipal Association, said Avondale’s experience suggests some changes are in order.
“It’s too easy,” he said, “to file a frivolous ethics complaint, and there’s no retaliation against a complaint like that. It’s my contention that in today’s politics, you are either legal or illegal and ethics doesn’t matter. If somebody does something illegal, than the district attorney should go after them and put them in jail.”
Meantime Mandarino has no plans to fade away.
“I’m going to try and be diplomatic,” he said. “I want to give the commission every opportunity to correct its mistake, to void the annexation. There are a lot of things to consider before taking it to litigation.”
About the Author
