Five civil rights and policy advocacy groups issued a joint letter Tuesday asking the Atlanta City Council to hold a work session with public input on a controversial reform bill that they said would imperil the independence and efficacy of the city’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).
“This legislation was drafted on an expedited and rushed timeline, and it has already changed significantly without enough time for council, let alone the public, to review,” said their Jan. 21 letter. “In some cases, the changes have only created further confusion and concern.”
The heads of the Southern Center for Human Rights, the Center for Civic Innovation, Working Families Power Georgia, Women on the Rise Georgia, and the national NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund proposed that the city council schedule the work session — a public hearing for council members to receive citizen input — between Jan. 24 and Jan. 28. They asked the council to publish notice of it immediately, due to the limited timeline for public review.
The OIG reform bill must be read three times and voted on twice by the full city council, after undergoing modifications in committee. That means it could become law as soon as Feb. 3.
“We absolutely need to have a work session,” said Councilmember Matt Westmoreland, in an email response to a request for comment. The other 15 city council members have not yet responded to similar comment requests.
It’s up to the chairs of the city council committees hearing the bill to call for a work session – in this case Howard Shook, who chairs the council’s Finance and Executive Committee, or Eshé Collins, who chairs the Committee on Council.
The reform bill cleared the Finance and Executive Committee with some modifications last week by a 5-2 vote. It was at that meeting that former City Council President Felicia Moore proposed that the council schedule the joint work session for the two committees hearing the bill, to facilitate a substantial debate with public input.
The Committee on Council, then the full city council, were scheduled to hear the bill on Tuesday, but the meetings were postponed due to inclement weather. They are currently slated for Thursday, weather permitting.
Shook, the bill’s author, filed it with the city council on Jan. 6, based on recommendations from a task force appointed by the council to review the Office of the Inspector General. That was after some council members and Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens raised concerns about protecting the rights of city employees under investigation. Shook was also on the task force, along with Councilmember Marci Collier Overstreet.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which signed on to the Jan. 21 letter, had already written a Dec. 2 letter to the city council, urging it to reject the task force’s recommendations and “safeguard the OIG’s important function in preventing waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption in Atlanta.”
The five advocacy groups asked for the work session to include a line-by-line review of the bill with time for public comment and presentations from Atlanta Inspector General Shannon Manigault and the Association of Inspectors General (AIG), which sets best practices for government inspectors general nationally. The national group was not able to raise its concerns over the bill with the city council’s task force last fall, before it issued its Nov. 6 report.
On Tuesday, the Association of Inspectors General renewed its objections to the current version of the proposed legislation, following a Jan. 13 letter to the city council and mayor urging them to reject the bill outright, because it would curtail the Atlanta OIG’s independence and investigative powers.
“The AIG continues to have grave concerns,” the group’s president, Will Fletcher said in the Jan. 21 follow-up letter. “When viewed in totality, the original and the amended bill are simply two peas in a pod, both destined to render the OIG incapable of providing effective, independent oversight for the residents of Atlanta.”
Disclosure: Atlanta Civic Circle has served as a media partner to the Center for Civic Innovation for voter education projects and city budget reporting.
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