A month after pledging to to reimburse the city of Alpharetta for concerts they attended at taxpayers' expense, two of the three candidates running for mayor still hadn't kept their promises Thursday morning.
Before day's end, however, Doug DeRito's wife had dropped off a check to the Convention and Visitors Bureau for $1,096, while he was out of town on business. Jim Paine delivered a check for $1,274.
The payments came as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution made inquiries about who had so far paid and attempted to contact them.
In a joint investigation with Channel 2 Action News last month, the newspaper found that a fifth of the nearly $150,000 worth of Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre tickets and parking passes purchased by the CVB in 2008 and 2009 went to elected officials, and no records were kept on what happened to another $127,600 worth of 2010 and 2011 passes.
In the wake of the reports by the AJC and WSB, the two mayoral candidates promised to repay the CVB for the tickets they accepted. A third mayoral candidate, David Belle Isle, paid $450 on Oct. 18 for tickets he took. The only other official to pay was Councilman Mike Kennedy, who wrote a check for $118 on Sept. 26 with the notation "reimburse for Styx 2011."
DeRito denied Thursday's payment had anything to do with the newspaper's questions about the repayments, saying he had only received information last week from the CVB on the value of the tickets he took.
Paine said he also received a tally of his tickets' value from the CVB last week and he usually pays bills at the end of the month. He conceded that messages from the AJC prompted him to pay Thursday. "I would have to say that the money was there, and I planned on paying it," he said.
After WSB started asking questions about ticket usage in early 2010, CVB President Janet Rodgers quit keeping records. At some point in 2010, she erased the data she had from her computer.
Rodgers has since told the AJC that, though she responded to earlier requests that she no longer had the records, she has located copies that she had all along in a forgotten file.
Belle Isle first wrote a check to the city in late September, calculating the six tickets he took as being worth $75 apiece, but it was returned with instructions to pay the CVB. He also issued a news release challenging his opponents to do the same. DeRito and Paine both responded that they were already working on it, planning to pay the money back quietly, and they accused Belle Isle of political grandstanding.
Belle Isle said Thursday that the fact neither of them paid before Thursday calls their statements into question.
"It's important that our next mayor, and any elected official for that matter, do what they say they're going to do," Belle Isle said.
William Perry, executive director of the government watchdog group Common Cause Georgia, said there are a range of reasons why the candidates might not have reimbursed the funds earlier. "The good thing is that they went and paid for it," Perry said.
In the existing 2008 and 2009 ticket records, which WSB had obtained before the CVB erased its records, Paine was shown receiving 26 tickets and DeRito taking 12.
How the CVB arrived at $1,274 and $1,096 reimbursement amounts wasn't clear Thursday. DeRito refused to say whether any tickets taken after 2009 were included, saying only that he paid for the tickets he used. Paine, who was ill, said he didn't have the information with him.
About the Author
