This morning’s Albany Herald contained a bit of good news for Lee County:
Al Crace, the LYING Interim County Adminsitrator who had told everyone he would not seek the permanent post before eventually seeking the permanent post, will be gone by Friday.
He will be replaced on Feb 7 by Tony Massey, who was forced to step down from his most recent position as City Manager in Frankfort Kentucky over ethics charges that sound remarkably similar to issues currently plaguing Al Lott.
Massey reached an agreement with the city government of Frankfort to step down from his position with the city at the first of the year. He’d served as city manager there since 2004.
“It was apparent that the new group (of city commissioners) coming into office wanted to go in a different direction, so I’d agreed to step down from my position at the first of the year,” Massey said in a previous interview with The Herald.
However, in this article from the State-Journal of Frankfort Kentucky, it is clear that Mr. Massey isn’t being quite as honest as he would like us to think (emphases mine):
But the damage is in the books: The city’s Board of Ethics found Carter got an unwarranted benefit she shouldn’t have received from Tony Massey, Frankfort’s city manager, when he granted the license for temporary occupancy so she could rent the Hoge Avenue duplex, even though he lacked the authority and with the outstanding inspection issues.
The ethics board penalized Carter and Massey $1,000 each.
As a result of the ethics investigation and violations, Carter slipped on the primary ballot as a previous top vote-getter and Massey recently lost a bid for a job as city manager in another city. The shadow of the duplex and that temporary certificate of occupancy loomed in the background.
Carter, currently mayor pro tem and one of the top finishers in previous general elections, wound up in a sixth-place finish in May’s primary in the City Commission race. By some accounts, she faces a tough challenge for re-election Nov. 2.
And Gerald Watkins, a city commissioner in Paducah, says the ethics violation kept Massey from getting the city manager’s job there.
“We all think the world of Tony Massey,” Watkins said in a phone interview last week. “If that ethics charge hadn’t happened, I could say with some confidence he would’ve been offered the job.”
Watkins said he thought there was hesitancy among the Paducah city commissioners “to take the chance at the potential bad publicity from the ethics charge.” The commission there had a public relations headache when its first candidate for the job, Ben South, lied on his résumé, according to various news accounts.
Massey declined to appeal the ethics board’s decision but has maintained his innocence. In an interview after the ethics board penalized him $1,000 in August, Massey said he was only resolving a conflict between the city’s Planning and Building Codes staff and Carter, and he acted on advice from Planning and Building Codes Director Gary Muller.
Note that this State-Journal article was the very top of the Google search, other than the Herald’s articles naming him as a candidate and selectee for the Lee County post.
Sources tell me that the primary reason they went with Mr. Massey is that he was so similar to the superb former County Administrator Alan Ours.
Please don’t insult the honorable Mr. Ours by sullying his name in associating him with with known ethics violations. Apparently Mr. Massey has MUCH more in common with Al Lott than Alan Ours.
The bulk of this meeting – from around the 5 minute mark of Part 1 until around the 6 minute mark of Part 4, of a 58 minute long meeting, was sign ordinance stuff. The video of Commissioner Muggridge I uploaded individually last night is around the 30 minute mark.
Interesting to see what Republicans REALLY think about Liberty and Government. And remember, this isn’t a “fluke” of not knowing he was on camera – I sit in the front row of every meeting videotaping, and have been doing it for more than 9 months now, every single meeting.
The agenda for tonight’s meeting is up, and because it is the voting meeting, it is largely the same as the Agenda from two weeks ago.
Bob Alexander is requesting approval of the proposed design of Westover Rd Extension from Ledo to Fussell. On the Ledo side, the road will join west of the road IHOP is on, possibly right beside the skating rink. This end of the road is to line up with the proposed Westover Extension that is currently being proposed for Dougherty County. On the Fussell side, the road will pass close to the Grand Island property before meeting with Fussell just east of the 7th Day Adventist Church – causing two stop signs within a few hundred feet of each other. He also is proposing another sign ordinance moratorium (that still only affects permitted signs, even though it is another section that is in violation of State law) and hopes to have a new Ordinance to propose next month.
Mike Sistrunk, director of Public Works, has a proposal to buy a Bat Wing Mower using money that was allocated in the budget for another purchase which he does not need at this time. [Continue Reading]
The Albany Herald’s Carlton Fletcher has a great summary of the meeting here.
I thought this meeting could get “interesting”, and I knew its subject matter was very important, so I went through considerable effort to make sure we got video of the meeting, even though I personally could not be there.
And here it is: (For those mostly interested in the fireworks, that appears to be mostly in Part 5)
Today at 2pm there will be a Special Called Meeting of the Lee County Board of Commissioners at the Leesburg Library to discuss the current situation with the overbid Library project.
Some speculation says that one possibility that may be discussed is scrapping the Conference Center part altogether, or at least asking the architect to design the building in such a way that the Library could be built now, and the Conference Center added on at a later time when more funds are available.
I am hoping to have video of this meeting, but since I will not be able to attend myself, this is not guaranteed.
I highly recommend all citizens of Lee County, as well as anyone who owns property in Lee County (and thus pays Lee County property tax) attend this very important meeting.
Last week, the Lee County Board of Commissioners appointed Al Crace of Roswell, Ga as the interim County Administrator. Per both Crace and Lee County Board of Commissioners Chairman Ed Duffy, this is to be a temporary position lasting roughly 5 months or so. In other words, he could well be gone before the end of the year, though before Spring Break 2011 is more likely.
My problem, which I will be discussing with the Board at their meeting tonight and have already privately emailed them about, is the secrecy involved in Mr. Crace’s appointment. In the email I sent the Commissioners, I did a very basic google search on nothing more than his name, and I found references to some form of trouble in two of his jobs within this decade (he has held at least 3, possibly more). Specifically, apparently he was fired by the Mayor of Athens, and he resigned his post as Jackson County Administrator barely 24 hours after telling the local paper that he had no intentions of doing so.
Because the Board met in closed executive session (and daytime meetings to boot) for the discussions on who to hire, there is no record of what was discussed. Therefore, we have no way of knowing what was said and no way of knowing whether these issues were thoroughly discussed. On this issue, the Lee County Board of Commissioners has worked in a way we in Southwest Georgia typically expect out of the governing authorities of Albany and Dougherty County – they have been transparent as mud.
Fortunately, I have no intentions of allowing Lee County to be as transparent as mud. We, the citizens of Lee County, have a right to know what our government is doing, and Georgia apparently has some of the best sunshine laws in the nation – laws which I intend to work to make even stronger. JD Sumner had an excellent piece on this a couple of weeks ago in the Herald, and a friend passed along some more relevant information that I intend to use.
After the jump is the email I sent to the Commissioners with everything I found in my very cursory google search mentioned above. So far, there has been no response from any Commissioner. [See the Email]
