From trials to sentencings: ‘This has been a very painful process’

Over the past three years, the federal investigation has zig zagged all over city government operations — from sidewalk and snow removal contracts to guilty pleas and indictments of high-ranking members of Reed’s staff.

Deputy Chief of Staff Katrina Taylor Parks likely will be sentenced in 2019 for accepting bribes. And Rev. Mitzi Bickers, a political consultant who helped Reed win the mayor’s office in 2009 and then served as a key liaison with the public, is expected to go to trial next year on bribery charges.

Prosecutors added an additional bribery charge in October, alleging Bickers illegally tried in 2014 and 2015 to win contracts in Jackson, Miss. The AJC and Channel 2 reported as far back as February 2017 on Bickers’ political connection to Jackson officials suspected of contract steering.

Federal prosecutors in Atlanta have not tipped their hand about where the investigation is heading next, but additional FBI agents and IRS auditors were added to the case over the summer.

Richard T. Griffiths, president of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, said his organization’s hope is that the changes to the city’s new transparency ordinance will prevent the kind of secrecy Reed practiced. That would be a meaningful outcome after three difficult years of investigation, he said.

“This has been a very painful process for the city,” Griffiths said. “What we hope comes out of it is that the city sets up a long-term process that can be a model for the rest of the state.”

Harvey Newman, professor emeritus at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, said there’s not much chance of the investigation causing long-term damage to the city. Atlanta, he said, has always been a “brash city moving on to the next project that will attract attention to the city, and there’s not much that can impact that.”

Two big ones are in the queue: The Super Bowl in February; and the $5 billion Gulch development, which promises to redraw the downtown skyline, is expected to break ground next year.

“Nobody’s going to talk about our politics over the blimp shots of the city during the Super Bowl,” Newman said.

But the impact on Reed’s carefully sculpted image has been noticeable, said Hattie Dorsey, a resident of the Old 4th Ward who was the founding president of the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership.

“I had great expectations when Mayor Reed was elected,” Dorsey said. “I don’t know if the office changes people, but it seemed to change him.”