CARLTON FLETCHER: Whose pockets being lined in McCoy fiasco?

You’re fooling yourself and you won’t believe it.

— Styx

Dougherty County Commissioner Anthony Jones said the commission needs to get back to trusting each other to be effective. Sorry, commissioner, but that ship has sailed.

Not only is there a divisive mistrust among members of the commission, there is an engulfing mistrust of the commission among the taxpayers of this community who put them in office.

As four members of the commission continued to band together — in a stand that is the very definition of the word collusion — and three others sat by and allowed them to do so without asking them to explain to the public their reasoning, the board just flushed away tens of thousands of dollars in funding for a candidate search that meant nothing. But that, it now seems certain, is just the tip of the iceberg.

As promised, Albany attorney Maurice King filed suit in Dougherty Superior Court Monday, seeking “at least $3 million” on Mike McCoy’s behalf after McCoy, a 19-year veteran with the county who was named the most qualified county administrator candidate by the company that conducted that nationwide search at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars to the taxpayers, was “officially” turned down for the county administrator position by the commission.

King asks in the suit that McCoy be placed in the position, but I can’t help but ask why. Why would McCoy want to serve with a group that has treated him with such disrespect and disdain just to prove a point?

The question everyone should be asking, though, is what point are these four commissioners — Anthony Jones, Clinton Johnson, John Hayes and Gloria Gaines — trying to make?

That question is open to lots of speculation, and if nothing else folks ‘round here are good at speculating. The most common train of thought is that the commissioners are siding with Hayes in a battle of wills against McCoy. The two, as has been widely reported, were involved in an ugly incident in which McCoy said Hayes both verbally and physically assaulted him. He even filed a police report with the Savannah Chatham County PD and threatened a hostile work environment suit against the county before settling out of court.

But two of the commissioners have vehemently denied backing Hayes in some kind of vendetta against McCoy. One even said after Hayes fell asleep at the wheel and forgot to vote on a matter that the four had pre-agreed on, “Do you really think this is someone we’re going to blindly follow?”

And all four of the commissioners insist, “Oh, we like Mike. It’s nothing against him.”

As Jim Bouton so eloquently wrote in his groundbreaking book “Ball Four,” “Yeah, right.”

Another line of thought that has started to take traction at the highest levels of government is that either the four commissioners themselves are being paid to blackball McCoy or the people who are whispering in their ears, telling them what to do, are being paid to make sure they keep the commissioners in line. Given some of the conversation that’s sprung up around this sordid affair, it’s not as far-fetched as it might seem.

Do you see Anthony Jones or Clinton Johnson putting themselves, and their families’, futures on the line — King named the four commissioners “in their individual and official capacities” — over a matter like this without at least some assurances that they’re not going to be burned financially? I don’t.

Of course, if any payoff is going to the people encouraging the commissioners to stick to their guns — people who have turned this issue racial as a smokescreen to cloud their involvement — the web of deceit grows even more tangled. Those individuals’ tactics, by the way, become even more insidious when they turn on a black man who has worked his way up from a novice to a well-respected administrator in what is a modern-day example of the American dream. That these cowards who sit whispering in the commissioners’ ears use the old “Uncle Tom” blasphemy to denigrate McCoy makes them some of the lowest creatures this community has spawned.

So Gaines, Hayes, Jones and Johnson will go to court and defend their actions. That is where things could get very interesting. Anyone who knows Maurice King knows he’s going after them with both barrels. And while Jones and Johnson will have their own tough questions to answer, it’s Gaines and, to a much greater extent, Hayes, who will have to air a whole lot of dirty laundry.

And people who were part of the sordid Georgia Civics Awareness Program for Students business that led to the Hayes/McCoy altercation — Thelma Chunn and Harry James among them — are going to have their own tales to tell during discovery.

Still, as Henry Williams — irony of ironies — said Monday, the majority has spoken, so we should accept their wisdom and move on. He’s certainly correct in saying that the commission has wasted way too much time on this matter, and they should move on to bigger things.

Like that multi-million-dollar deficit budget that’s staring them in the face. And preparing the public for the no-doubt millage rate increase that’s coming in FY 2019. Oh, and finding a way to convince taxpayers that they were “doing what’s best for the community” when the county has to fork over $3 million or so — and a large payment for counsel — for colluding to keep McCoy out of a job that he worked hard to earn.

The commissioners have whispered to confidants that “it’s the white people who are mad about this.” Hate to tell them, though, but of the dozens of calls that this newspaper gets on a weekly basis condemning the actions of Hayes, Gaines, Jones and Johnson, an overwhelming number of them are from African-Americans. Sometimes when you wrap yourself in a cocoon of self-righteousness, fed by people with an agenda that serves only their purposes, you forget all about the people who choose right over wrong and call BS on your politics of race.

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