CARLTON FLETCHER: Still figuring out Albany City Commission meeting

When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide. … Helter skelter.

— The Beatles

I’ve had the question thrown at me from a number of different angles since the special called Albany City Commission meeting Tuesday morning:

Just what the hell happened in there?

I’ve gone over events from that, let’s call it unusual, meeting a number of times since it ended, and, frankly, I still haven’t been able to figure it out.

This much I did get, though:

— City Manager Sharon Subadan now has the authority to greenlight utilities projects up to $100,000 without prior approval by the City Commission or the Utility Board. The commission voted 5-2 to give her that authority, which Subadan said would maintain any competitive advantage the city might have in putting together a deal, despite the fact that the Utility Board refused to recommend the legislation. Commissioner Jon Howard opposed the deal because he said he feared that minority and women contractors would be casualties of the new way of doing business, and Commissioner Bobby Coleman voted against the measure because he said it eliminated necessary checks and balances.

— The commission OK’d an agreement needed to complete the purchase of properties on Pine Avenue and Front Street to facilitate downtown development, a $219,000 deal that, with the $400,000 supplied by the Albany-Dougherty Inner City Authority, is expected to generate real interest in downtown. The $219,000 outlay is the first use of a $5 million revolving portion of the city’s $18 million-plus Job-Enhancement Fund earmarked for downtown development.

— The board agreed to, essentially, facilitate privatization of east Albany recreational opportunities by building a swimming pool and splash park with up to a million dollars in SPLOST funds and authorizing up to a half-million dollars in renovations to the Thornton Gym. When completed, the Boys & Girls Club of Albany will be paid $99,000 a year to manage and operate the facility.

— Approval was granted for a number of Utility Board-recommended purchases totalling $1.63 million, including a communications metaswitch that will eliminate hundreds of thousands of dollars in yearly telephone costs and allow the city to potentially raise an estimated $425,000 a year in new business telephone revenue.

— Commissioners Tommie Postell and Jon Howard orchestrated a power play that put John Burr on the Albany-Dougherty Economic Development Commission board over city Technology and Communications Director Jason Gauntt. The move so incensed Commissioner B.J. Fletcher, she called out fellow commissioners who she said “betrayed” her by promising to vote for Gauntt, whom Fletcher had nominated, and betrayed the city’s taxpayers.

In the wake of that latter board action, a few compelling issues emerged. First, Hubbard admitted that she chose to vote for Burr as a “compromise” because she feared that her failure to do so would have endangered the utilities vote that she deemed “crucial to the city’s financial future.”

With that revelation, many who take every opportunity to do so cried “racism” in reference to Postell’s, Howard’s and Coleman’s efforts to put Burr on the board. And while Coleman said he wanted more inclusion and intended to appoint people that “reflect this city” — which many considered a thinly-veiled reference to the city’s almost 70 percent black population — and Postell erroneously said Gauntt was “already on too many boards” when in fact the Technology and Communications director is on none, many who follow the city closely agree that the move was less about race, more about power.

Gauntt, a rising star in the city who is credited with playing a huge part in finishing the lauded South Georgia Regional Information Technology Authority infrastructure and who is being openly courted by a number of private-sector companies, has gotten too much attention to suit some among the city’s hierarchy. Some have even started a whisper campaign to discredit Gauntt, and a few of those have the ears of some commissioners.

Keeping Gauntt off the board in favor of Burr, who is a nice enough man but was certainly less qualified for the EDC position than either Gauntt, Daa’iyah Salaam or Demetrius Love, who’d all applied for the vacant seat, has the look of a statement vote that will, in reality, have little impact on the EDC. (That group, incidentally, met Wednesday, the day after the called City Commission meeting, and Burr was a no-show.)

Adding to the surreal tenor of Tuesday’s commission meeting was Commissioner Roger Marietta’s initial vote for Gauntt in the EDC decision and then his statement that he would change his vote in favor of Burr when Hubbard did not initially vote on the matter. When Marietta’s challenger for his Ward IV seat in the Nov. 3 municipal election, Chad Warbington, called Marietta on his apparent flip-flop during a well-attended campaign forum at Albany State University Tuesday night, the veteran politician called his action “parliamentary procedure.”

Ahh, Albany. Always, it seems, one step up and two steps back.