Inside Edison’s governance transformation: Elected officials, residents drive city’s recovery

EDISON — The Edison community, a small rural city of about 1,200 people, has seen a complete shift in the makeup of its city leadership since June.

The city is in Calhoun County, west of Albany, and was revealed to be in deep financial disrepair in June and July. Residents, including current Mayor Shirley Worthy, at the time began questioning how the city was spending its money — especially about $600,000 of COVID-19 pandemic relief funds.

Reeves Lane, who served as Edison’s mayor for about 30 years, resigned along with council member Jack Johnson in August and September, respectively. The former city clerk, Tami Fincher, who was responsible for the city’s missing audits since 2018, had resigned a few months before.

Worthy and Councilman Curtis Adams were sworn in in October to replace the elected officials. Demetric Jackson replaced Fincher as city clerk. Lori Moore, an accountant, was hired full-time to prepare Edison’s financial books to be audited.

Tia Ingram, a small business owner in Edison, and Richard Worthy, Edison’s former fire chief, will take up council positions in January.

All of them say they have one goal in mind: Edison’s recovery.

Most of them have one thing in common: They were on the other side of the podium just a few months ago — speaking up for the city’s residents as public commenters in council meetings and budget hearings.

In turn, the city’s residents have become more active in attending meetings and hosting fundraisers or clean-ups to help the city with issues it can’t afford to address on its own. Ingram said she believes the newfound transparency from the new mayor has created respect and trust that didn’t exist before.

CITY LEADERSHIP REBUILT

Leading Edison as its mayor is usually a part-time job. However, these days Worthy is sifting through cardboard boxes of city records and answering phone call after phone call from frustrated residents at City Hall each weekday.

The 78-year-old retired from the Bank of Edison in 2015 with no intention of becoming a mayor to a city that is about a half-million dollars in debt and under state pressure to come up with five missing audits. Now, she’s in the thick of helping the city recover and getting to the bottom of how it got here in the first place.

“It’s a little more daunting than I expected. … Every time we get to a place we think we’re fine, something else pops up,” Worthy said.

In June, she and other residents began requesting bank statements and budgets from the city. They fired questions at the former mayor and council members during City Council meetings when discrepancies showed up. They were often met with no answer or demeaning remarks.

When Lane resigned, people began going up to Worthy and asking her to run. Worthy was often a voice of reason during public comment at council meetings. She went up to the podium, stack of paper in hand, and asked questions that riled up sounds of agreement from the audience.

Worthy thought about running for a while, prayed on it and talked it over with those closest to her. She said she believed her banking experience could help, so she ran.

The work that has followed is hectic, Worthy said.

At night, she said, she lies awake thinking about Edison — sometimes having epiphanies about how to solve an issue, rushing in the next day to share them with Moore.

“It stays with you,” she said. “If I was just doing normal mayor things, it might not be so overwhelming.”

However, Worthy said she has hope for the new council. They have a lot to bring to the table.

“I think what we’ve been through in the last 6-8 months will make us all work a little harder to know what’s taking place with the city and do what we can to avoid something like this from happening again,” Worthy said.

Moore is at Edison’s city hall every day also. She held financial roles in Randolph County and Lumpkin. As Randolph’s full-time finance director, she helped pull the county out of debt.

She said she finds Edison to be a different beast without its audits.

“I knew I was going to have to get the books ready for the audits,” she said. “But they are in shambles.”

She said she doesn’t have a clear timeline on when they will be completed, but she maintains honesty with residents who attend the council meetings.

“Being transparent with people, saying ‘I don’t know’ when I don’t know is the answer and focusing on things that are going to take us to where we want to be instead of focusing on things that are going to keep us in a vicious cycle … makes a big difference,” Moore said.

The new members need to be involved if they are going to change the way the city’s business is conducted, she said. You also need people who understand the roles of the council members.

“If you have somebody up here who shuts people out, all you’re doing is hurting the city as a whole,” Moore said.

Part of the city’s initial problem was that there were council members who didn’t give information about the city’s operation as freely as they should have, she said.

This is one of the big changes Moore said made.

Ingram hasn’t begun her position as councilwoman yet, but she said she already sees changes.

“We now have a transparent mayor,” Ingram said. “We don’t have to guess. We don’t have to wonder. I think the new leadership is going to go in a great direction.”

The 39-year-old Edison native said she never saw herself running for a council position. When she returned to Edison in 2019, she opened a barber shop, Radical Kutz, on Turner Street.

However, Ingram became more involved in council meetings after the city’s financial crisis came to light. She watched the council and citizens arguing as the former mayor sat silent. The more she paid attention to the meetings, the more she felt moved to help, she said.

She has a military background, a communications degree and a local small business.

“I knew I had a skillset that would benefit the city,” Ingram said. “I was like ‘Man, if you’re going to complain about it, at least try to do something to help it’.”

Ingram said she believes she can bring a younger perspective to the council. She has aspirations of fixing up basketball courts or adding dog parks.

“We need some younger vision,” Ingram said. “We have to make sure that, in addition to paying all of our bills, our city is actually appealing to the younger generation because they are the future.”

Through her business, Ingram forms connections with the younger generation. She wants to be the liaison between the old and the young, she said.

Ingram said she also sees herself being a link between city leaders and the citizens, helping them to understand what’s going on in the council.

“To actually be someone that was in the streets of Edison and know people from all different backgrounds,” she said. “I know people who are low-income, middle-income. … I can actually sit down and have conversations with them.”

Some Edison citizens already have bridged this gap between leadership and members of the public, whether it’s live-streaming council meetings to community Facebook pages or hosting community-backed fundraisers to raise money for the city’s volunteer Fire Department.

At the end of September, Janice General, an Edison resident, hosted a community clean-up. She organized a group of about 25 people who met early the morning of Sept. 30 to pick up trash and cut grass around the city.

The city had to cut back on public works staff to lower expenses, so they haven’t been able to focus on maintaining Edison, General said.

“I figured it was a way for the citizens to help out to try to keep up our town instead of just waiting on them to get the city right financially,” she said.

Edison’s financial crisis brought the community together, General said.

For the most part, everyone was focused on their individual lives, especially between the black and white communities that make up the city. Now, people in all different situations are working toward a common goal.

“I feel more positive now with the community coming together,” General said. “It’s not the blacks or the whites. It’s just the citizens of Edison.”

File Photo: Lucille LanniganStaff Photo: Lucille Lannigan[email protected]