The boom years of the Oughts were very good to Gwinnett County [1], a suburban Atlanta county of 800,000 that grew by a third in the last decade. But boom times are rarely good for local government ethics, and Gwinnett County appears to be no exception. A grand jury report unsealed in October (a searchable copy is attached; see below) found a series of land acquisitions by the county at above market price (even after the boom years ended) and from individuals with whom certain county commissioners had relationships and, possibly, from whom they were taking bribes and kickbacks (see an article on the grand jury report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution [2]). So far, two county commissioners and one judge have resigned.

In three blog posts, I will look at what happened, at the ethics reforms recommended by a 2007 report and by the grand jury, and at how recommended ethics reforms have been greeted by the county commissioners.

The Failure to Follow Formal Processes
What happened can best be summed up as an old-boy network that was the ordinary course of county business. Here, for example, is the grand jury's conclusion about one of the land deals (p. 29):

The Grand Jury can find no rational, reasonable basis for the acquisition of this property other than to bail out the son of an old friend of several members of the Board of Commissioners.

The grand jury looked closely at five land deals from 2004 to 2009, all of them ostensibly for the purpose of creating parks. None of them have become parks.

The grand jury interviewed county officials about the formal land acquisition process. It found that none of the five land deals followed this process. Process is the most overlooked aspect of government ethics, largely because it rarely gets its own ethics provision. Failing to set up or follow processes, and exploiting loopholes in processes, is a principal way officials use their office to benefit themselves and others. This is true especially of the contract bidding and land sale, acquisition, and approval processes.

What is especially troubling is the grand jury's finding that "No present or past commissioner who testified before the Grand Jury displayed any familiarity or understanding of this process." (p. 12) That is, it isn't that they took advantage of loopholes, bullied officials, or schemed to get around the land acquisition process, as so often occurs. They simply ignored it as if it didn't exist. Laws and processes meant nothing to them.

The Custom of District Courtesy
What did mean a lot to the commissioners was the "custom of district courtesy," as the grand jury calls it (p. 23) before describing it as "wildly out of control." This custom provides that no land acquisition matter would be put on the agenda for review by the board of commissioners unless staff received the approval of the commissioner for the district in which the land was located (or the chair's approval, which apparently would not be given without the appropriate district commissioner's approval, except when, as in one land deal, the chair wanted to "stick it to" the district commissioner and help an old friend and political supporter (p. 35-36)).

I disagree with the grand jury. This custom was not "wildly out of control." It was what controlled the actual as opposed to the formal process, as this sort of custom does in many cities and counties (see my posts on its use in Dallas [3]and Prince George's County, MD [4], for example).

Why are customs like this a problem? One reason, as the grand jury points out, is that it costs taxpayers a lot of money, in this case $3.4 million (for the five land deals alone). A second reason is that these millions of dollars benefited those with special relationships to certain commissioners and, possibly, certain commissioners themselves, thus undermining trust in county government.

A third reason is that this custom gives other commissioners the ability to deny any knowledge of the transaction, rather than giving them the responsibility of learning about the transaction and determining whether it is in the best interests of the county. And needless to say, commissioners did tell the grand jury they knew nothing about the other districts' land deals. They had no interest in providing oversight if it meant others' oversight over their own transactions.

And that's the fourth and most important reason, from the government ethics point of view. When a district representative has effectively full authority over deals and contracts in his district, this makes those deals and contracts not the county's, but the representative's. The representative comes to think of what happens in his district as somehow separate from the county, including its processes, and he tends to think of what happens in other districts as none of their business. Districts might be good for accountability from voters in the electoral sense, but they are not good when district representatives are given special powers that they can use to help themselves and their family, friends, and business associates.

Disconnects
An interesting wrinkle in some of these matters was that the deals were settlements of lawsuits, or so the story went. But the grand jury found a serious disconnect between the commissioners' version of the stories and the law department's (p. 37):

The Grand Jury heard testimony that the perception of Commissioners Kenerly, Nasuti and Beaudreau was that the lawyers for the County were unable to prevail in zoning lawsuits so settlement was their only option. The testimony from the Law Department was that the County prevails in most zoning lawsuits and in any event the result of a loss would be a remand for a new zoning decision not the payment of monetary damages.

This sort of disconnect between the county commission and the rest of the government seems to go through the entire land acquisition process. The only page they seemed to both inhabit was the acceptance of the old boy network as a given. It is because of this disconnect that the grand jury's principal recommendations involve a restructuring of county government (see pp. 46ff).

In the second blog post, I will look at recommendations for ethics reform by the grand jury, as well as by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government back in 2007.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research, City Ethics

203-230-2548