Former DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones denies racial bias against employees

Taking the stand Wednesday in a high-stakes trial, Vernon Jones denied leading a systematic effort to achieve a "darker administration" during his eight years as DeKalb County's chief executive officer.

"I wanted the best and the brightest," Jones testified in a race discrimination and hostile work environment case brought by former county parks and recreation employees.

Jones, who was CEO from 2001 through 2008 and is now running for Congress, said he wanted a workforce that reflected the DeKalb community.

"That meant blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, gay, straight, anybody who wanted to work for DeKalb County," he said. "I wanted everybody to have a seat at the table. ... I stand by that to this day."

Jones acknowledged that white employees were concerned he wanted to toss them out and replace them with black employees. At a March 2001 meeting of department heads, he made it a point to tell his top management that was not the case, Jones testified.

Jones said there was a buzz about it because he was the county's first black CEO. It's been no different for Barack Obama because he is the nation's first African-American president, said Jones, who is expected to testify again later in the trial in U.S. District Court in Atlanta.

The litigation began in August 2004. Although the lawsuit centers on what happened to four former parks and recreation employees, the plaintiffs' attorneys are being allowed to question witnesses about what happened in other departments to try and show jurors there was a countywide policy or plan to discriminate against whites.

According to testimony, there were 33 black and 61 white upper-level managers in DeKalb when Jones took office on Jan. 1, 2001; by August 2005, there were 60 black and 57 white upper-level county managers.

On Tuesday, jurors heard a potentially damaging tape-recorded phone conversation between Assistant County Manager Morris Williams and Joe Stone, head of DeKalb's human resources department.

At the time of their March 25, 2003, phone conversation, neither Williams nor Stone was aware that one of them had inadvertently allowed their conversation to be recorded on the voice mail system of another county employee. That employee, the county's information systems director, would later turn over that recording to J. Tom Morgan, DeKalb's former district attorney who is now a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

During the call, Stone appears to tell Williams he was angry that the county's new fire chief, David Foster, wanted to promote four white firemen to the rank of battalion chief.

"He wants to pick ‘em from a population that is solid snow white already," Stone said. "Now he got to cut that [expletive] out with Vernon. ... He told David Foster not to -- we don't promote anybody until you figure out how you can fix this problem."

The CEO, Stone said, would be furious. "Vernon's going to kill ‘em," he said.

Stone and Williams testified that the conversation was taken out of context. They said a former high-ranking Fire Department official, Michael Peer, not Foster, had proposed the battalion chief promotions and they opposed them because they wanted to preserve Foster's right as the new chief to make his own promotions.

Foster, however, had already been on the job as chief for two months. According to evidence, he had already asked that a white fireman be promoted to battalion chief and that request was rescinded. Peer is now deceased.

During the phone conversation, Stone used a number of profanities and a racial epithet. "I used some bad words," he testified uneasily before the jury. Once the conversation was made public, he said, "It was embarrassing."

In May 2006, Stone and Williams were reprimanded by Richard Stogner, who is a defendant in the case and was Jones' executive assistant. Even though both sides have exchanged thousands of pages of documents before the trial, the county produced the reprimand letters to the plaintiffs' lawyers on Tuesday, a day after lawyer Mike Bowers told jurors in opening statements that the two employees had not been disciplined for the conversation.