The Atlanta Board of Ethics has nominated as its new executive director a woman who has experience navigating a treacherous political environment.
If the Atlanta City Council approves her, Nina Hickson, currently the interim city manager for East Point, will run the ethics board which operates independently of the council. The council is expected to review and vote on whether Hickson gets the $116,000-a-year position at its May 7 meeting.
Hickson was the city attorney for East Point before being appointed interim city manager of the south Fulton city, which has been rocked by political infighting among council factions. She declined to comment after the board's meeting Monday night on whether she is seeking a calmer political climate.
Last month the Atlanta City Council debated and ultimately shelved a proposal to give itself more authority in choosing the ethic executive director. That debate prompted the first choice of the ethics board, former state ethics officer Stacey Kalberman, to withdraw from contention.
After Kalberman was nominated, City Councilman H. Lamar Willis introduced legislation to change the selection process, asking the ethics board to submit its top three choices for executive director. The city council would make its selection instead of simply accepting or vetoing a single choice. Critics contended the change would erode the independence of the seven-member board.
The board had previously fined Willis for accepting money for his foundation from entities or people doing business with the city.
At Monday's board meeting, vice chair MaryAnne Gaunt warned Hickson that some might see her as city council's anointed ethics director. Hickson had initially been the board's second choice and moved up after Kalberman dropped out.
Gaunt, associate director of the Principals Center at Georgia State University, assured Hickson that the board saw her as "our nominee." Hickson assured the board in turn that she had no personal relationships with any council members.
"I think people who know me would say I am a very fair person," she said, "but I am also very strict about complying with the law."
Hickson has a diverse legal background, serving as a corporate lawyer and an assistant U.S. Attorney before becoming a Fulton County juvenile court judge in 1999.
As a judge, she won accolades for highlighting Atlanta's chronic problem with child prostitution and how pimps were able to manipulate weak state laws. She became chief juvenile judge in 2002, overseeing Georgia's largest juvenile court, but stepped down in 2004 during a child-neglect controversy involving her adopted daughter.
The daughter of the then 43-year-old Hickson was found on an East Point street, wearing neither coat nor shoes and asking for her mother near midnight in 33-degree weather on Nov. 29, 2003. Hickson, a single mother, later told police she thought her daughter, tired from a long trip from Maryland, was asleep when she left her alone to go to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to retrieve a piece of luggage.
The state Division of Family and Children Services closed the case within five days, calling it a one-time case of neglect.
Judges, lawyers and child advocates, however, questioned how Hickson could credibly oversee juvenile cases involving neglect and abuse after DFCS had found her actions constituted neglect.
"Understandably, many people are deeply troubled that I, the chief judge of Fulton County's Juvenile Court, could make such an egregious error with respect to the care of a child," Hickson said in a 2004 letter to the then-chairman of the Judicial Qualifications Commission. "I believe that it is important that the public and my colleagues be reassured as to whether I am entitled to their trust."
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