HAMILTON PANEL FIGHTS FOR SECRECY

This is a headline that should get your attention: Hamilton panel fights for secrecy.

Truly, it’s hard to know where to begin when examining the dysfunction that is our Hamilton County Commission.

The commission is a body that in recent months and years hasn’t been able to reach a coherent decision about how to spend almost $1 million a year of our money — members’ so-called “discretionary funds — let alone the rest of the county’s budget.

Now this panel’s nine commissioners can’t even make a coherent decision about who they want their chairman to be from one month to the next.

But the most outrageous thing this board of so-called leaders is doing week after week and month after month is thumbing its collective nose at us in the public. Now the dysfunction has reached comedic proportions as the commission members turn on each other — ironically over being public about things they aren’t public about.

Times Free Press reporter Paul Leach wrote recently that Commission Vice Chairman Randy Fairbanks and Commissioner Sabrena Smedley went on rants from the dais last week about Commissioner Joe Graham’s lack of support for special projects within their districts. They labeled Graham a bully and a hypocrite, and accused him of going to the media whenever a vote does not go his way.

“We’re not always going to agree on every vote — we shouldn’t,” Smedley said. “But we should disagree respectfully, and shouldn’t be running to the media and throwing each other under the bus for own personal gain.”

She went on: “I’ve gone over and above and beyond the call of duty to be accountable and transparent as I serve my community. … [The bullying] is not right.” One has to ask: Who’s doing the bullying here? And what was Graham’s sin? He twice questioned whether the commission broke open meeting and open record laws when the commissioners privately circulated letters asking state legislators to allow them to set their own pay. In February 2015, Graham spoke to the media about the existence of such a letter; in December 2015, he revealed a copy of a second such letter from the commission dais.

Also when the commission voted last year not to raise taxes or go into the county’s savings to increase money for education, members also voted to amend Mayor Jim Coppinger’s county budget to allow themselves to go into the savings for the cool $1 million needed to fund their individual $100,00 slush funds (their so-called discretionary funds) which they dole out to constituent projects and curry votes. Graham cast one of three votes against that move. A subsequent commission vote overrode Coppinger’s veto.

Since then, Graham has usually declined to vote approval when each commissioner trotted out his or her discretionary expenditure motions. He didn’t oppose those expenditures, he simply answered “present” when his name was called.

But when, on Wednesday, Graham offered up a motion to spend $32,275 in his own discretionary money to replace windows at the John A. Patten Recreation Center in Lookout Valley — money left over in his fund from before commissioners dipped into savings. (Graham had chosen to return the money allocated to him from the savings.) But on Wednesday, Graham’s request was met with this storm on his character and behavior — the character and behavior that seeks to help the public know more about the commission’s conversations and actions involving the public’s money.

Joining Smedley, Fairbanks delivered a 12-minute tirade in which he questioned media scrutiny over his own answer of “present” rather than a vote to support a previous Graham request to spend $2,500 in discretionary money for the Lookout Valley recreation center. Fairbanks asked why the media had not focused on Graham for not supporting his colleagues’ special projects an estimated “50 or 60 times” over the last 18 months.

Fairbanks accused the Graham of airing the commission’s “dirty laundry in public.”

Dirty laundry like whether the commissioners’ request to set their own pay was being made on the down-low rather than openly from the dais?

Graham denied “running to the media” and defended his rare news conferences, saying “I am doing the public’s business in the public.”

But the shenanigans didn’t stop with the character assassinations. Some of the commissioners want to take back their votes for Commissioner Chester Bankston’s second year as chairman. Commissioner Greg Beck called out Bankston for allowing Graham or any commissioner to be “maligned” on the dais. Commissioner Warren Mackey said he would change his vote for Bankston due to unspecified broken promises he said Bankston made in a private conversation.

Yes, taxpayers, Tennessee law instructs that two or more commissioners need to be very careful about those private conversations — especially those where promises for support are made.

And yes, Commissioner Fairbanks and Commissioner Smedley — indeed all nine commissioners, even Graham — you should be airing your laundry in public. Along with your pay requests, and your slush funds, and your quid-pro-quo trades.

You represent us. You work for us. And that means you live in that glass courthouse commission room.