Called meeting Wed. after Oddo, Brown squabble over tax bill resolution

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The Fayette County Board of Commissioners has scheduled a special called meeting for Wednesday night at 7 p.m. (March 4) to consider a resolution regarding House Bill 170, after a considerable amount of squabbling at last Thursday’s regular meeting about whether it would be necessary this soon.

About three dozen citizens adjusted their schedules to attend last week’s 4 p.m. meeting (three hours earlier than usual because of a public event later that evening) and expected a serious discussion of a hot-button state political issue, but they got something that resembled a family quarrel.

The matter was tabled until the next regular meeting — March 10 — amid concerns that the Georgia General Assembly would act before that date and make the issue moot. The called meeting for Wednesday now overrules that tabling.
 

Repeated attempts by Commissioner Steve Brown to raise the issue at last week’s meeting were thwarted by Chairman Charles Oddo, who at one point shouted at his colleague sitting next to him and pounded the gavel to halt the proceedings.

Brown got his say during the regular commissioner comment time, making some of his points about House Bill 170 while adding that the days of free speech and open dialogue seen during his two years as chairman appeared to be over.

HB170, which proposes a number of major changes in state transportation funding sources, has already received considerable opposition from local governments that claim it would take away much of their revenue and force them to raise taxes on their citizens to make up the shortfall.

Brown had prepared a resolution addressing his position on the bill, which he hoped the board would pass in some form and let state legislators hear their concerns. He released a copy of the proposed resolution to the media and the public several days in advance of the meeting.

The Citizen received a second email the day of the meeting that said Oddo would shut down the discussion and not let Brown make his presentation.
 

Vice Chair Pota Coston began the discussion by making a motion to table the matter until the next regular meeting March 10. She said she had received some of the information only a few hours earlier and had not yet had time to digest it.

That began the back-and-forth between Brown and Oddo. Brown said he was attempting to address the issue of why it should not be tabled, but Oddo repeatedly told him to stop making his presentation. Brown continued to speak over Oddo on several occasions, which led to Oddo’s outburst.

Brown maintained, as did Commissioner Randy Ognio, that waiting until March 10 to bring the issue up again would likely be too late, as the state House of Representatives could pass the bill any day. That led to a considerable amount of discussion regarding Crossover Day, the deadline by which a bill must pass one chamber of the General Assembly to be considered by the other.

A number of audience members expressed their displeasure at the board’s decision to table the matter, which was ultimately approved 3-2 with Brown and Ognio voting against.
 

Oddo charged that Brown should have provided the information sooner than he did, noting that some of his supporting materials came in too late to be considered. That led to an overview of the county’s policy regarding when agenda items are to be submitted, and county manager Steve Rapson pointed out that Brown submitted some of his materials later than he should have in order to get them ready for the meeting, such as the PowerPoint presentation he wished to make. Brown passed out single-sheet copies of that PowerPoint before the meeting to audience members.

When Coston made her motion to table early in the proceedings, that essentially stopped any chance of the resolution being passed at that meeting. County attorney Dennis Davenport said that her motion took priority over any other and did not require a second, but it would require a discussion period.

Brown immediately urged the board to take action.

“If you’re going to make your opinion known, do it before the legislature decides,” he said. “HB170 will be voted on any day now.”

He then informed the audience that he had been told that day he would not be allowed to make his presentation. In the ensuing discussion, Rapson said that was partly because it was provided to county staff six hours before the meeting.

“Do we need to have a secret meeting before the meeting to decide what is on the agenda?” Brown wondered before continuing his remarks that were ultimately shut down by Oddo.
 

Ognio took up where Brown left off.

“This is time-sensitive. It will be voted on before March 10,” he said. “Why some commissioners say they are unprepared when they’ve had this material since last Friday, I don’t know. We’ve got to represent the citizens. If you want to vote against it, that’s your issue. But go ahead and let the citizens know your vote.”

Coston, who acknowledged that she had received the resolution the previous week, said that the bill is changing every day and the county’s legislators needed to be allowed to continue working on it.

Brown asserted that the resolution was cited more thoroughly than any he had seen in nine years in local government, but Oddo insisted that it needed to be vetted.

“You are creating a position statement for this county with the issue,” said Oddo. “You did not notify three of the commissioners that you were going to do this. You are also not required to notify the press before you do this.”

“I can notify the press any time I want to,” Brown replied.

“It’s about professional courtesy and ethics,” said Oddo.

As for the Crossover Day discussion, Davenport said that it is Day 30 of the 40-day legislative session but quickly added, “A day is not a day,” referring to the fact that it only applies to the days they are actually in session. More than once during the discussion it was acknowledged that Crossover Day could come before or after March 10.

Brown said that he submitted the resolution in accordance with county policy and procedure, but Rapson said the policy has always called for a two-week lead time.

“We’ve always submitted things a week ahead of time,” said Brown, while Ognio added that the policy needs to be reviewed and possibly changed.

Brown’s final appeal before the vote was to table the matter until the next week and have a special called meeting, but Oddo maintained that 12 days was a reasonable time.

When one audience member suggested it might be too late, Oddo replied, “I pray it’s not.”
 

The very next item on the meeting agenda was the public comment period, and several people spoke up about the same issue.

“Why did you have the resolution on the agenda if it was too late to submit it?” asked Darwin Edwards, who said that he was in favor of an emergency meeting before it was too late.

“Transparency is very important to me,” he said. “Sunlight kills the germs.”

He added that the lack of discussion suggested a “kangaroo court” and he was also surprised at the time of the meeting. (As Rapson pointed out later, the 4 p.m. meeting time was established due to an event later in the evening which several of the commissioners would likely attend.)

Another public commenter, Angela Bean, lamented the lack of discussion.

“Two years ago the Board of Commissioners made the citizens very proud by adopting a policy of allowing public comment before a vote. Obviously that policy has now changed,” she said.

The board’s reaction flew in the face of the uproar HB170 has caused across the state, Bean added.

“We depend on our local leadership to be leaders for us. Commissioner Brown was doing what we ask for, which is leadership,” she said. “We needed to have a presentation at least, and then you could table the vote. Citizens attended this meeting for the purpose of learning about this legislation.

Bean said she didn’t recall an official change in the board’s policy concerning these discussions and she hoped the events of this meeting were only an oversight on Oddo’s part.

Pat Ernest said she was “so embarrassed and disappointed in what happened today. I thought we graduated from that when we turned over this board. I feel very disenfranchised and upset.”
 

Bob Ross put a bit of a positive spin on the spirited discussion on the dais and in the audience, calling it “a sign of interest by citizens in their government. This is healthy. It’s much better than the five of you just looking out here with no interaction.”

Ross went on to make a number of points about HB170, saying that “all transportation money ultimately comes from individual taxpayers.”

Sandy Edwards, who told the board that she took unpaid time off work to attend the meeting, said she would not know any more about the issue than she would if she hadn’t come.

“I don’t want Fayette to be left behind when we know this is time-sensitive,” she said. “Get something done before we get left in the dark.”

Steve Smithfield said that HB170 opens the door to projects “that may not be wanted or needed,” noting the resounding defeat of the T-SPLOST in 2012 and how it reflected many people’s wishes on transportation taxes.

Saying that the bill is “purposely nebulous” about how the money will be spent, Smithfield compared its language to efforts to develop what he called the least popular project in the county’s history — the West Fayetteville Bypass — adding that four of the current commissioners campaigned to stop that project.
 

During the commissioner comment period, Commissioner David Barlow referred again to an email that had circulated throughout the community and which he said suggested that he was in favor of HB170. Brown admitted that he sent the email.

“If you want to know where I stand on something, ask me,” Barlow said. “Don’t take what you get in an email.”

Brown thanked the audience members for their attendance and comments noting that they raised most of his PowerPoint items at that time. He then proceeded to make many of his intended comments that were not allowed previously, talking at length about the metro area’s transportation woes and saying that state officials “are coming for your wallet.”

He then addressed what he called “selective enforcement” of the policies regarding agenda items, saying that the board has often dealt with issues that appeared on the dais as late as five minutes before a meeting.

“In 2013 and 2014 in this room, every citizen and every elected official got to speak without restriction unless you were cursing or throwing things. In those two years you had totally uninhibited free speech,” he said.

“That has changed, and we are no longer the standard by which other governments are judged. I just pray that we’re not going to end up in a situation where we start voting people’s items off agendas and not letting people say this or that.

“You don’t have to agree with me. But at least, for God’s sake, have the discussion.”
 

Ognio reasserted that the policy needs to be changed, and that HB170 can be voted on and cross over at any time.

“This bill has no accountability,” he said. “Think about in the future when one of those automatic tax increases happens. You’ll go to your legislator and he’ll say, ‘I didn’t do that. It was already there.’”

Coston said that all of her decisions would be based on what is best for Fayette County, and she urged the audience members to let lawmakers at the state level know what they think.

“Contacting our legislators is critical. They all need to hear from us,” she said. “This bill is changing quickly. It is changing daily. We need to be prepared with a resolution that we can all agree upon. My whole goal is to work collaboratively with all of the commissioners. That is what we should be doing.”

Oddo noted that many of the audience observations were not too different from his own.

“We will be hearing Part 2 of the presentation within 12 days,” he said, referring to the comments Brown had just made. “We just heard Part 1, which went on for about 20 minutes and was not stopped.”

Oddo said that he had already expressed his views about HB170 to a state representative.

“I would not wait on this board to make a resolution to come up with a position,” he said. “You don’t have to wait on us. Contact your legislators.”
 

Contact information for each member of Fayette’s legislative delegation is on the county website, Oddo said. He also stressed that there has not been a change in policy as far as the board meetings are concerned.

“I still encourage the public to speak. Nobody was cut off and nobody will be cut off. But I expect this Board of Commissioners to follow the policy that is in place. If we don’t communicate among ourselves, you will see more of this and that is a shame,” he said.

“There was ample opportunity to bring this to the other commissioners. We are all available to listen. At the next board meeting we will have a proposal to discuss. This is not a free speech item. It is just an attempt by the chair to conduct the meeting in a way that is best for everybody.”