Fayette County commissioners are spending thousands of dollars to fight an NAACP lawsuit that seeks to create a more equitable way for blacks to get elected to the County Commission and school board, according to a state lawmaker who lives in the county.
State Rep. Virgil Fludd, D-Tyrone, said he has tried repeatedly to get an exact accounting from county officials on how much money the commission is spending to fight the lawsuit seeking an end to the county's at-large system. The suit is calling for the creation of five voting districts with the same number of residents in each district. One of the districts would be a majority-black district, said Ryan Haygood, director of voting rights for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York.
In addition to the Fayette County branch, the defense fund is representing the Georgia Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Unlike the school board, which is using the county attorney, the commissioners have retained outside legal counsel.
“Our firm has been employed to represent the commissioners and the elections superintendent,” said Frank B. Strickland, a partner in the Atlanta law firm of Strickland Brockington Lewis LLP. “We have filed an answer in the case and we believe the county has meritorious defenses." Strickland declined to discuss how much his firm has been paid. To date, commissioners have paid about $10,000 to the firm for filing the response as well as having demographers look at the data, County Administrator Jack Krakeel said Tuesday.
"We don't have a contract with the firm specifically," Krakeel said. "That's the initial fee paid to the firm." The fee does not include potential future litigation costs. Krakeel declined to discuss details of the case.
"As a taxpayer, I think it's a waste of money," said Fludd, who is black and represents a portion of the county. "This is a case where the county has little, if any, legal or moral standing to defend a system that is inherently racially biased at a time when there are much more pressing issues they should be devoting their resources and time to."
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the commissioners, the county elections superintendent and the school board in August, saying their system of voting where residents vote for all candidates regardless of where they live in the county keeps blacks from serving on the County Commission and school board.
Fayette County's at-large system is one of only a few left in Georgia. Since 1982, almost all the nearly 100 challenges to at-large systems in Georgia have been successful, said Laughlin McDonald, the Atlanta-based director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project.
"The only way African-Americans can elect their preferred candidate is if they get substantial white crossover voting, which they don't," Haygood said, recounting how in a recent school board election, a black candidate got 99 percent of the black vote and less than 18 percent of the white vote. She lost.
Blacks, as a whole, make up about 21 percent of Fayette's total population. No blacks have ever served on the school board or County Commission. For 15 years, black residents have pushed for district voting, which is favored by the Voting Rights Act, Haygood said. The lawsuit includes 11 Fayette voters as plaintiffs who say they've been unable to elect candidates of their choice to the two boards.
“We’re litigating the case now and we’re hoping to reach an amicable resolution,” Haygood said.
There are no commission or school board seats up for election in next Tuesday's municipal races.
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