The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Will DeKalb County scandals scare away businesses, jobs?
There’s a reason people with nostrils don’t want to live near chicken houses. They smell.
Not every day, at least not in an overpowering way. But if the wind hits just right, the stench is unavoidable.
That’s what it is becoming like in DeKalb County, where every few months there’s another government corruption scandal, another reason to hold our noses and another cause for businesses to feel uneasy.
Joel Knox is one of those who is worried, and his frustration might cost DeKalb.
The 63-year-old founder and CEO of Inland Seafood is a big purveyor of fresh fish for restaurants and grocers. He employs more than 500 people at his DeKalb processing plant near Tucker.
And he had hoped to expand with jobs for about 150 more.
“I love DeKalb County,” Knox told me, “but you have to wonder what the heck is going on here.”
We chatted after the release of a county-commissioned report on corruption and waste by former state Attorney General Mike Bowers and investigator Richard Hyde.
In a particularly juicy twosentence paragraph, the pair managed to use the words disgrace, corrosive, embarrassment, destroyed, misconduct, appalling, corruption and “stunning absence of leadership.” It also called for DeKalb’s interim CEO Lee May to step down.
Knox said he almost didn’t return my call. But he grew up in DeKalb and years ago he was editor of the student newspaper at Emory. I think he concluded that it’s his duty to speak up.
He told me it was a coincidence I had called him. He had just returned from checking out a potential site where he could move his business. In Gwinnett County.
Concerns about government corruption, he said, have played into his thinking on the $10 million project.
It would be foolish to think he’s the only one who may be chased off at least in part by the smell of corruption.
Areas of DeKalb most in need of help are the ones most likely to be hurt by the fallout.
Won’t empty out
Of course, I’m not suggesting DeKalb will empty out over the shenanigans. Most businesses probably don’t weigh heavily the actions and ethics of local government leaders when they decide where to build a company.
We have so many other things to consider: growth potential, affordability, commute times (which local governments play a role in), taxes (same) and good schools and neighborhoods (same).
Much of the Perimeter Mall area is in DeKalb, but it remains hot property for development. State Farm is building a major regional campus there, though it will have limited dealings with the county because the property is in Dunwoody’s city limits.
David Sjoquist told me DeKalb’s controversies always find a way of bubbling up in his friends’ conversations. But the Georgia State University economics professor told me none of them talk about leaving the county over it.
Past corruption didn’t squash growth in some of the nation’s biggest cities, Sjoquist said. The city of Atlanta’s population grew despite the public school cheating scandal and the unrelated earlier conviction of former Mayor Bill Campbell.
But it would be a mistake to think the DeKalb government’s continuing odor of sleaze has no impact on the community’s bottom line.
“Stigma of political corruption” is among several big economic threats facing DeKalb, according to a report the county commissioned last year from economic development consultants.
I suspect repeated corruption is like the old “broken window” theory in policing. That’s the idea that shattered win- dows on local buildings aren’t just cosmetic blemishes. Instead, they send a message about what’s OK in a community and where it is heading.
DeKalb’s scandals are most likely to hurt areas that can least afford it — such as unincorporated south DeKalb — and that have had more difficulty attracting major employers and rely more on county leadership for economic development and things like road improvements.
Would you want to gamble on DeKalb right now if you needed the county to come through on some major infrastructure project?
A turnaround scenario
Juanita Baranco, who coowns Baranco Automotive and lives in Lithonia, told me the county she’s lived in for more than 40 years is “a turnaround” scenario for whoever becomes the next CEO.
That’s business talk for a troubled company that needs serious fixing. (She’s not interested in the job, she told me.)
DeKalb does some things right, but Baranco said it has to cure the “plague” of periodic scandals that she suspects has at least chilled interest from relocating companies.
Which brings me back to Knox and his fish empire at Inland Seafood.
He told me he sought financial incentives from DeKalb to support his planned business expansion. County leaders visited his plant, but so far he’s gotten no guarantees.
Then a big county water break this summer left his business dry for days. Knox said the county never gave him a good answer about who was to blame and why it took so long to fix during one of his busiest periods.
“That incident cost me a couple hundred thousand dollars in lost revenue,” he said. “It cost my employees some good overtime hours.”
Knox told me he began to wonder if continuing government problems are partly tied to corruption — that some employees or contractors have been hired because they had an in, rather than because they were the best qualified.
So now he’s considering moving his business to Gwinnett.
“It’s one thing to see corruption,” he said. “It is another thing to see corruption and incompetency at the same time.”
It’s the kind of double stink DeKalb needs to blow by.