Rural Georgia town wines and dines for roads

How we got the story:

Reporter Andria Simmons traveled to Bainbridge for the State Transportation Board meetings and outings May 14 and 15 and interviewed board members, local officials and GDOT staffers there. She later obtained bills for the costs via a Georgia Open Records Act request from the city of Bainbridge. She also interviewed a Forsyth County lobbyist who paid for a hospitality suite as well as other lobbyists not affiliated with the trip.

Bainbridge, Ga. — Standing on the grounds of SouthWind Plantation, a beautiful hunting lodge in extreme Southwest Georgia, you’d never know you were in one of the poorest congressional districts in the nation.

Big-game heads hang from the massive stone fireplace in the lodge’s Great Room. The staff prepares sumptuous meals in the kitchen while ducks quack lazily in the private lake outside.

Not the first place you’d expect to find Georgia transportation officials.

City and industrial development authority officials did what locals usually do when the State Transportation Board makes one of its rare visits. In Bainbridge last week, they laid on a $6,107 prime rib buffet at SouthWind, a $923 motor coach tour of the area and a $346 catered lunch. Later that evening, a lobbyist for Forsyth County welcomed board members to a hospitality suite at the Holiday Inn Express stocked with free wine, beer, liquor and bar snacks. Forsyth County is about 270 miles to the north, but here the lobbyist was, buying drinks and hoping to secure the widening of a highway near Cumming.

Local officials made no bones about why they cosponsored the day’s events.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to show them some projects that we want to get done,” said Bainbridge City Manager Chris Hobby. “Not necessarily that we want the state to foot the whole bill for, but that we could cooperate on.”

Twice a year in the spring and fall, the State Transportation Board takes its monthly meeting on the road, always at the invitation of a local government. The trips give board members a chance to learn about other parts of the state and talk to local officials about their regions’ needs. They also give local government officials a chance for valuable face time with the people who have direct influence over prioritizing and awarding transportation projects.

Sponsors of these trips include city and county officials seeking new road projects. Lobbyists who are pushing new transportation policies or engineers who want contracts sometimes contribute, too.

An AJC analysis of the expenditures revealed no clear violation of Georgia’s ethics law arising from the trip to Bainbridge, as long as the city and Forsyth County lobbyist report the expenditure later in disclosures to the state ethics commission. But some say spending of the sort is a gray area that should be clarified. And at least one government watchdog group is crying foul.

“It all goes back to the type of lobbying that we work against, and that is the use of gifts to influence a decision,” said William Perry of Common Cause Georgia. “In the perfect world, lobbying is about the exchange of ideas or the case that you make for a project to be funded. It should not be a decision based on ‘well, they treated us to a $6,000 dinner and I had a great time, therefore they should get a new highway.’”

Jet Toney, who chairs Georgia Professional Lobbyists Association, said the current ethics law was not intended to prevent local governments from conducting promotional activities with public officials, so he sees no problem with the way the trip was handled.

“Why would anyone want to diminish the relationship between a local government and any state official or agency?” Toney asked. “Whether it is appropriate, that is a matter for the taxpayers in that local government to decide.”

State Transportation Board Chairman Jay Shaw bristled at the notion that board members are unduly influenced during their out-of-town trips. He said that is “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” adding that “you’re not going to build a road because of somebody paying for your dinner when we come down there.” (Sam Wellbourn, Dan Moody, Emily Dunn, Don Grantham, Stacey Key and Dana Lemon did not attend the dinner, although Moody joined the board for its official meeting in Bainbridge the next day.)

Board members are not paid and receive a $105 daily stipend from the state, which often is not enough to cover lodging, meals and parking, according to Shaw.

“That’s the kind of crap that keeps people from being in public service,” Shaw said. “It’s just awful. There is nobody that was not doing everything way above the board. We paid our own travel, we paid our own way.”

The cost of hosting the board for city of Bainbridge was “absolutely worth it” in the eyes of local officials, just to be able to demonstrate the area’s needs, according to Hobby.

At the top of the city’s wish list was $3 million in funding for a bypass that would draw truck traffic out of the downtown square.

The locals also hoped to coax a redesign for a dangerous intersection where GDOT engineers (unpopularly as it turned out) were suggesting the construction of a roundabout. Lastly, the locals are seeking to revive the Georgia Ports facility in Bainbridge, which has been largely without barge traffic for years since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stopped dredging the Apalachicola River.

The loss of barge traffic, coupled with the recession, caused many area jobs to dry up and continues to hamper business growth, Hobby said. At a cost of $60 per person, the meal served Thursday night — thick slabs of prime rib, green beans, mashed potatoes and cherry-topped cheesecake beneath a white tent hung with chandeliers — would have been out of reach for many residents of Decatur County. The per capita income is only about $15,000 (compared to about $43,000 in the city of Decatur, Ga.) and almost a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line.

Before the trip, the community requested that participants chip in a $100 contribution to help pay for the outing, but only seven did: three from the Concrete Pipe Association and one contributor each from Georgia Power, the American Concrete Pavement Association, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (for this reporter).