Actually, according to the EDC search committee, a president hasn’t been “chosen” yet. The committee has merely been able to whittle down a field of 19 applicants all the way to a single person who has the right stuff to lead the EDC. That person, Mike Brooks of Zionsville, Ind., will be interviewed again next week and a determination supposedly will be made then as to whether the committee will recommend to the full development commission that it hire Brooks.
That just strains credulity to the limit. The committee has already decided the other 18 applicants aren’t good enough. There’s one applicant left. The committee has already interviewed the only applicant left and decided he’s the best man for the job. Who else are they going to recommend? The only question is why the committee is bothering to go through any more pretensions. The decision has been made.
And the decision has been made in a manner that skirts Georgia’s Open Records Law.
The law applies to organizations that derive funding from taxpayers’ wallets, which the EDC does. It is designed to give those taxpayers assurance that their business is being conducted properly. One of the ways it does that is it sets minimum requirements on information that the agency must share with its bosses — the taxpayers — about the way the agency is conducting business on their behalf.
Dougherty County taxpayers, quite simply, have been shortchanged by the EDC in this, its first presidential search.
Brooks may well be a great candidate for the job. He may very well be head and shoulders above the others who applied. We’ll never know. The Open Records Law says information on a maximum of the three top candidates is to be released to the public. Any finalist who does not want his or her information released can withdraw from consideration and is to be replaced by the next highest-rated candidate who has not declined the position, the law says.
This was not done. The committee did arrive at three finalists on Sept. 23. The EDC stated in a release that day that Tim Chason of the Chason Group presented the search committee with full information folders on exactly three candidates and that the committee had decided to interview those three people. When The Herald asked for their information under the Sunshine Law, Chason and the EDC backtracked, saying there were more than three and search was still in its early stages.
This came on the heels of the EDC and Chason illegally meeting in secret on Aug. 15 to discuss the qualities that the organization wanted in its new president, a topic that isn’t an exception to the Sunshine Laws under any stretch of the imagination. The EDC contended that was an accident.
On Friday, The Herald submitted Open Records requests — both verbally and via fax machine — for information on the three finalists and also for demographic information on the original field of 19 candidates.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the EDC finally chooses to step out into the sunshine, or decides to continue keeping the taxpayers in the dark.
— The Albany Herald Editorial Board
