CARLTON FLETCHER: Dougherty Commission eschews sunshine

I’m walking on sunshine, and don’t it feel good.

— Katrina and the Wave

In the next few days, the Dougherty County Commission will announce its selection to replace Richard Crowdis as county administrator. Most likely, unless someone slips up, the public will not be informed who among the reported 115 applicants were finalists for the position.

So the taxpayers of Dougherty County will have to take the word of the seven people on the County Commission — and, because it was hired to do the weeding out, the Carl Vinson Institute of Government — that the best candidate was hired.

And while, I guess, given that there has not been much of an outcry from the people who will be paying this person’s $150,000-$200,000 annual salary, no one in the Dougherty County public is overly concerned about this bit of public action being carried out behind closed doors, they probably should be.

Crowdis is recognized statewide among his peers among the top 2 or 3 percent of government administrators serving in the state. From first-hand observation, I’d flatly declare that there is not another elected/appointed official I’d rather have overseeing the tax dollars that come into county coffers. If you want an accounting of any fund that’s under county stewardship — from a $100 charity donation to a multimillion-dollar SPLOST allocation — Crowdis is on top of it.

One would hope Dougherty County officials are putting their politics of race, gender and religion, as well as their personal agendas, aside while interviewing the now four candidates from among whose ranks Crowdis’ successor will be selected. Hope, though, is all they’ll be allowed. Because county officials have refused to release the names of the finalists for the position in order to give the public — you know, the taxpayers — an opportunity to do its own digging into these people’s background.

Asked to make the names of the finalists public, County Attorney Spencer Lee said the county adheres to O.C.G.A. Section 50-18-72(a)(11) in its quest to determine who will head the day-to-day operations of the county government. He insists the county’s hands are tied by legislation.

And while the Georgia code does state that “all documents concerning as many as three persons under consideration whom the agency has determined to be best qualified for the position shall be subject to inspection and copying” (of submitted documents such as resumes and curriculum vitae) and that “prior to release of these documents, an agency may allow such a person to decline being considered further rather than having documents pertaining to such person released,” Dougherty County — and other such government agencies — are in no way “bound” by the law to, essentially, keep the public ignorant of their actions.

All they have to do is insist that the number of finalists be winnowed down to three before a decision is made. Then, the finalists can, as the law states, either pull out of the running or have their records made public for scrutiny.

Here, though is the rub in that simple recipe for transparency. Since the Carl Vinson Institute is guiding Dougherty County’s search — and one person close to the process told me, “we’re doing things, step-by-step, the way Carl Vinson has directed us” — that University of Georgia-based agency is making sure the finalist list doesn’t get down to three. Several attorneys who’ve dealt with such searches before told me in “keep my name out of this” confidentiality that, “We’re encouraged not to let the number of finalists get down to three so that you don’t have to reveal their names.”

The concern, it seems, is that some of the finalists don’t want their current employers to know they’re applying for a new job. Indeed, I’ve been told that one such finalist for the Dougherty job would “have severe issues if his current employer knew he was applying.”

But you know what? The privacy of that one or even two or three individuals does not trump the public’s right to know who their elected officials are considering to handle their money. If the lure of a $200,000 job and the opportunity to be the administrator of the county government in a mid-sized metropolitan area is not enough to get you to reveal yourself to the public — and, yes, your current bosses — then maybe you don’t need to be a finalist.

The Carl Vinson Institute, by instructing agencies to keep their finalist list to four or greater, is complicit in clouding transparency when the agency should be espousing it. But then, the institute doesn’t work for free, and who will determine what future jobs it gets? These finalists who it has helped shield during the hiring process.

County officials may say their hands are tied, passing the buck along to the state Legislature and even to the Vinson Institute, but the truth is there is a simple remedy that they could invoke. And that’s that the finalist list be whittled down to three, and before the one best-qualified candidate is chosen, the public be allowed to search out the candidates’ qualifications.

Given the commission’s stated desire to operate in transparency, I would think that this would have been part of the process. I was wrong.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.

Staff Photo