May: DeKalb may not pay the whole bill for corruption report

Interim DeKalb County CEO Lee May says he may not pay some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars investigators charged the county for a corruption report released Wednesday.

In an interview with V-103 radio Thursday morning, May suggested the investigators behind the report are more concerned about money than with doing a good job for DeKalb taxpayers.

“My last conversation with them, 70 percent of the meeting was about money, and I told them, ‘you’re going to get your money,’” May said.

The report by former Attorney General Mike Bowers and special investigator Richard Hyde is expected to cost about $850,000. May said DeKalb officials are holding up to $200,000 back and “we’ll be having some discussions about it.”

“I want some of it back,” he said.

The report said May hindered the investigation and called on him to resign. At a press conference Wednesday, the CEO called the report "at best laughable, and at worst it's pitiful."

Among other things, the report details about $537,000 in questionable expenditures by county commissioners and other DeKalb officials, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Investigators said some of the expenditures may be legitimate, but they weren’t able to finish their work to determine which were and were not for appropriate public purposes.