WINTER 2006-07 NEWSLETTER
GEORGIA FOI ACCESS
GEORGIA FIRST AMENDMENT FOUNDATION

GEORGIA FOI CONFIDENTIAL

‘What’s the big idea? Georgia faces a $7.7 billion shortfall!’

By Tom Bennett

Decatur, Ga., Jan. 17, 2007 -- The 2006 election had been over for only a few weeks when the Georgia Department of Transportation revealed a fact of state government life that might well have gone into the mix in the candidate debates. Here it is: Our state has 510 transportation projects in jeopardy.

According to the DOT’s innovative "What’s the big idea?" web site, Georgia has big problems. DOT introduced them in cyberspace with the headline above.  The site reported that there are "7.7 billion worth of much needed transportation projects statewide that were in the process of development or ready for construction but may not be built anytime in the foreseeable future because we have no money with which to build them."

The transparency of Georgia road-building ebbs and flows. In this century it has gone from attempting to approve projects in a little-known state authority, to adopting "public-private funding" with what critics said would be delayed disclosure of hard details, to crying out for public imput on the Internet in "What’s the big idea?"

WHY AGENCIES RUN SHORT: FLOYD COUNTY’S TAX BREAKS

Government agencies lack the funding needed to provide services to their citizens when everyone does not pay their fair share of taxes. For example, at the state level it appears that a big loser is going to be former Georgia Chief Justice Norman Fletcher’s dream of a genuine working system of indigent defense in our state.

Serious problems like that arise because there are privileged characters who, instead of paying their fair share, go to governments and negotiate tax breaks in secret. The newspaper that is doing the best job as watchdog of this dubious feature of Georgia life is the Rome News-Tribune. Here are Floyd County’s "Top tax breaks," as reported by the News-Tribune on its web site:

"Pirelli Tire North America, $294,260 in county taxes; Temple Inland, paper and box manufacturing, $723,514 in county and school taxes; Suzuki Manufacturing of America all-terrain vehicles, $292,955 in city, county and school taxes; and Southeastern Mills production of flour, cornmeal and food batters, $378,972 in city, county and school taxes."

CONTINUED FALLOUT FROM JUDGE CASTELLANI’S RULING

Rep. Jill Chambers of DeKalb County has re-introduced her bill to add words to the open-records exemption in OCGA 50-18-72 (1) for "records specifically required by the federal government to be kept confidential.  "Chambers and four co-authors want the wording to be changed to "federal government statute or regulation." One of the co-authors is Wendell Willard of Atlanta, who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. This bill was dropped in the hopper early, the 39th of what likely will be hundreds of House measures introduced in 2007.

Two big metro Atlanta governments suffered a bitter defeat in August 2005 when Judge Robert J. Castellani of DeKalb Superior Court ruled in Feltus v. Dekalb County et al.  According to Judge Castellani’s ruling, DeKalb County and the city of Atlanta reached a memorandum of understanding with the Federal Aviation Administration in 2002, and entailed dark entailed secrecy for what was going on at the tight little airport wedged into north Atlanta. The judge said the agencies were trying to "subvert the letter and spirit of the Georgia Open Records Act." He ordered the agencies to produce the records to Charles "Mickey" Feltus and other citizens opposing airport expansion.

PERDUE POSTS STATE GOVERNMENT LEASES ONLINE

In an October 2005 column, Jim Wooten of the Journal-Constitution praised the efforts of the New Georgia Commission. It is an effort by Gov. Sonny Perdue to "modernize management of the public’s business."

"Lease and ownership transparency are the keys to the genealogical chart of Georgia," Wooten wrote. "Post them publicly and somebody will know the relationships. It’s the greatest possible protection against cronyism and sweetheart dealing. Transparency is the beginning of accountability."

JIMMY CARTER’S EYEBROWS AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

Fourteen members of the Board of Councilors, a Carter Center advisory group, have resigned in protest of Jimmy Carter’s book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid," published by Simon and Schuster in 2006.  "We can no longer in conscience continue to serve the center," they wrote in a letter to the recipient of the Nobel Prize and the facilitator of the Camp David Accords. The councilors accused Carter of abandoning his "historic role in favor of becoming an advocate for one side" in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, according to CNN.

Once at an "Evening with Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter" at the Center when I should have been listening, instead I was counting the number of times he raised his eyebrows. He does it just as he is about to express an opinion he knows is off the beaten path, one that is not likely to be popular yet in his view needs to be said.

Those bushy protrusions become elevator-like when he is becoming controversial, and they must have been motoring up and down as he wrote this latest book on his word processor. Here are examples of its eye-catching conclusions:

-- The wall built to separate Palestinians from territory to be claimed by Israel accomplishes "a system of encapsulation and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories."

-- Palestinians "are deprived of basic human rights. They can’t assemble peaceably, travel without restrictions, or own property without fear of its being confiscated by a multitude of legal ruses" and

--The Bush administration’s "Roadmap for Peace" has become moot, with Israel "using it as a delaying tactic with an endless series of preconditions that never can be met."

As Georgia governor, Carter signed a goofy bill making a secret of local police incident reports once they got mailed to the GBI here in Decatur.  I’ve studied him for a long time and have come to believe that freedom of speech and what FOI advocates say is a corollary of it, open government, began to matter to Carter only after he became the 39th U.S. president in 1977.

As this candid book of his is leading to some criticism of what he says about Israel, it’s ironic that one of the events leading to his embrace of vigorous open exchange of both sides of issues occurred as he addressed the Knesset in 1979.  Carter was able to speak with only a few interruptions, he writes.  However, he then watched "verbal combat" commence when Prime Minister Menachem Begin and others rose to speak. One especially vocal member of the Knesset had to be forcibly removed from the chamber. Carter was surprised as Begin "expressed pride in the unrestrained arguments" by the members of the Israeli parliament. Then, leaning over to Carter, Begin whispered, "This is democracy in action."