Meeting maneuvers kept public eyes off projects

Cobb commissioners knew spending $300 million on a new Atlanta Braves stadium would raise the ire of anti-tax advocates. Paulding airport officials realized their idea to start commercial air service could provoke outrage from residents.

In both cases, government officials took extraordinary steps to keep information from the public until the deals were largely finalized, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation has found.

Paulding airport authority board members, for example, held a retreat last summer at which they discussed with FAA and other officials the potential of commercial flights coming to the small airfield. They held that meeting 20 miles away in Douglas County.

No public notice was published prior to the meeting, and the airport authority kept the official summary of the discussions private by neglecting to produce minutes for approval until six months later.

And at the time of the retreat, the authority had already quietly entered into a lease with the company trying to commercialize the airport. The minutes from the retreat were not approved and posted to the authority’s website until months after that deal was made public in October.

In Cobb, the four district commissioners first learned details about the Braves move in individual meetings with Commission Chairman Tim Lee and Braves officials, so as to avoid a quorum that would force open those meetings.

Then on Nov. 13, as the public clamored for details about how much the county would spend and how it would pay for the stadium, district commissioners went in pairs to a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce, where they learned about the financing plan from business leaders and Braves officials.

Lee wasn’t present at those sessions, so two commissioners at a time attended without creating a quorum of the five-member board.

The financial deal was made public the next day. It calls for spending $8.6 million a year in county-wide property tax revenue, and a slightly larger amount from a trio of other taxes and fees that will be applied in targeted areas of the county. It will last 30 years.

Hollie Manheimer, an attorney and executive director of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, said both cases appear contrary to the Georgia’s Open Meetings Act, which says meetings must be public if “any official business, policy, or public matter of the agency is formulated, presented, discussed or voted upon.”

“The Open Meetings Act in Georgia has always been designed to aid citizen access, not arm public agencies against it,” Manheimer said. “To the extent meetings are moved out of the county, improperly noticed, and improperly recorded, these barriers impede citizen access rights.”

As to the round-robin meetings Cobb commissioners had with business leaders, Manheimer said: “If the … act exists for any purpose, it’s this situation.”

Cobb and Paulding officials say the secrecy was necessary because both projects were sensitive economic development deals that could have been wrecked by public knowledge.

Cobb County Attorney Deborah Dance, who attended the chamber meetings, wrote in an email that they were perfectly legal: “No quorum existed.”

Paulding airport director Blake Swafford said his board’s out-of-county retreat was necessary, because it was “the only way (to) capture everyone’s attention, and keep them focused and keep them in the room.” Had the retreat been held in Paulding, he said, board members would be “running all day long in and out” to handle other business.

Road trip

Paulding residents upset about the secrecy think the two-day retreat in Douglasville circumvented the law.

After weeks of planning, the airport authority sent a notice about the retreat to its official news outlet, the Dallas New Era, the day before it started. The problem: the newspaper is published weekly and doesn’t have a website, so it couldn’t post the notice before the retreat.

Swafford said in an interview that the authority always sends notices to the newspaper before meetings, but it does not have to publish the information in advance. He added that specially-called meetings are “never printed.”

The airport authority’s regular June meeting, listed on the county website, was canceled without mention of the retreat. And the minutes, which by law must be approved immediately after the agency’s next regular meeting, were not tended to until December.

That delay effectively blocked the public from knowing what was discussed the complexities of commercial airport certification; potential funding sources to expand the facility; and a presentation from Silver Comet, the company hired to secure commercial flights.

The minutes show Swafford presented a plan for terminal redesign, including a “TSA screening area,” and that there were presentations and discussions about commercial airport operations. Lunches during the retreat were paid for by Silver Comet and another contractor also involved in the airport expansion, documents show.

Paulding resident Anthony Avery called the combination of events an effective way of keeping “everybody in the dark.”

“Everything points to a cover-up… (of) the fact that they were commercializing the airport under our noses,” he said.

Swafford said the long delay in approving minutes was a simple mistake. He also said the retreat was the authority’s way to have an in-depth discussion without interruption.

“Really, it was an educational session,” Swafford said.

After the minutes were released in December, Avery asked the state attorney general’s office to review the way the retreat was handled. He was told it was too late — state law requires complaints to be filed within six months of the event.

A change of plan

The private meetings with Cobb commissioners on the Braves financing plan led to at least one key change, according to Commissioner JoAnn Birrell.

The original plan would have hiked property tax rates on about 3,000 single family homes in the Cumberland area.

That idea, which would have raised about $750,000 annually and was supported by Lee, was scrapped and never made public after Commissioner Bob Ott, whose district includes Cumberland, threatened to vote against it, Ott said.

The solution: exempt homeowners and make up the difference by raising the hotel room fee from $2 to $3 per night.

Birrell, who is up for re-election this year, said she also objected to the tax hike for Cumberland-area homeowners, and did so at the chamber meeting. She said the plan was changed as a result.

“We had a lot of questions and some things were revised or adjusted from questions and suggestions from all the commissioners,” Birrell said.

That’s a problem, said Cobb resident Larry Savage, a frequent critic of the commission who has twice run unsuccessfully for the chairmanship. Savage said policy discussions should have happened in public.

“At this point, we’re way beyond baseball,” Savage said. “Now, it’s about what kind of government will we tolerate.”

Commissioner Lisa Cupid said she thought it odd that elected leaders were told by the business community how the $300 million public commitment would be funded. “I found the whole thing very upsetting,” she said.

Ott, who attended the chamber meeting with Commissioner Helen Goreham, said he raised his objection to the financing plan Nov. 4, when it was first presented to him. He said most of the discussion in his chamber meeting focused on how the financing plan would be explained to the public.

“I know it’s a fine line,” Ott said. “I didn’t feel like at any time I was being asked to do something to skirt the open meetings law. It’s one of the difficulties … if you’re talking about how to present something to the public, how do you involve the public in that discussion? It would defeat the whole purpose.

“It wasn’t an effort to skirt the law; it was an effort to follow the law.”