Now that Mayor Bob Young has announced he's outta here come June 20 to become a regional director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the political maneuvering has begun in earnest.
Potential candidates for interim mayor were popping up like mushrooms last week, among them sitting commissioners who would have to resign their seats permanently to serve three months.
Commissioner Willie Mays said he would serve if elected by his colleagues. His term ends Dec. 31, and he's not eligible to run for another commission term.
But wait. If Mr. Mays resigns his 9th District seat to become interim mayor, he will not have served out his second four-year term, so wouldn't he be eligible to run for the commission in November for another four-year term? Or he could run to fill Mr. Young's unexpired term or for mayor next year. The possibilities are endless.
It's kind of humorous, though, because hardly a meeting passes that Mr. Mays doesn't mention how he'll be leaving soon. He has been on the consolidated commission since 1996. Before that, he was on the old Richmond County Commission and, before that, the old city council. And he's only 53.
Commissioner Andy Cheek said he thinks he could do a good job as interim mayor, and it would give him time to focus on running for mayor next year. That's sort of strange because he criticized Mr. Young for stepping down 18 months before his term ends, but Mr. Cheek would be doing the same thing for a longer period. His term ends in 2007.
Commissioner Tommy Boyles said he will announce a run for Mr. Young's unexpired term June 20, after the resignation is official.
Former Augusta Commissioner Moses Todd checked in by phone from a job site in Philadelphia to say he'd be honored to serve as interim mayor.
Richmond County Republican Party Chairman Dave Barbee said he thought about it and decided he had two chances - "slim and none."
"I don't foresee me getting six votes from the commission," he said.
Former Administrator Linda Beazley also said she might run for the interim or the four-year mayor's post.
Other names being bandied about for the interim slot are lawyer Ed Tarver, who ran against Charles Walker for the 22nd District Senate seat last year and lost; Augusta businessman James Kendrick; Larry DeMeyers, the chairman of the CSRA Alliance for Fort Gordon; Planning Commission Director George Patty; and former Richmond County Extension Agent Clyde Lester. Maybe he could get the bugs out of city government.
ORDER IN THE HOUSE: Mr. Young's wife, Gwen, jokingly asked why commissioners didn't appoint her interim mayor, as they did Betty Beard commissioner when her husband, Commissioner Lee Beard, died.
"Oh, Lord," she said. "It would be a bloody three months. I'd kick every backside down there. They wouldn't have to worry about me running. They'd be running for the hills."
Actually, Mrs. Young couldn't afford to take time off from her successful business, Gwen Young & Associates Real Estate Co.
"The only reason Bob could afford to serve as mayor is me," she said.
AND DON'T THINK IT'S BEEN EASY: "The most frustrating things about our six years has been to have to listen to people go off on all kinds of comments on things that I know that they don't know what they're talking about," Mrs. Young said. "I know they can search from now until the end of time, and they will never find one thing that Bob Young has done since he's been in office that personally benefitted him."
BUT SHE'S BETTER FOR IT: "To some degree, I know it has been very frustrating to him to have to operate on the level that he's had to operate," Mrs. Young added. "Everybody knows what I'm talking about. He's a sophisticated man. He's an intellectual. And for him to be demeaned in a lot of ways, to tolerate some of the meetings he's had to be in, I think has probably really strengthened him. I know it's strengthened me. These six years of having to hold back and not say anything have really, I think, made me a better person."
ALOHA, BABY: Mayor Pro Tem Marion Williams; Commissioners Bobby Hankerson, Richard Colclough and Betty Beard; and city Clerk Lena Bonner are set to go to Hawaii for the annual five-day National Association of Counties conference next month.
The last time Augusta government officials went to Hawaii for a conference was decades ago when Lester Newsome was Richmond County clerk and Bob Daniel, now deceased, was attorney, Ms. Beazley said. On the flight home, the plane had some sort of mechanical problem and scared everybody to death, Ms. Beazley said.
QUOTES OF THE WEEK:
"This is not a whodunnit. The question is how much he did it. How much did he steal?"
- U.S. Attorney Richard Goolsby, in opening statements at state Sen. Charles Walker's federal conspiracy and fraud trial.
"I'm going to tell you how they've gotten it wrong."
- Mr. Walker's criminal defense attorney from Atlanta, Ed Garland.
ANCHORS AWAY: Commissioner Cheek was holding forth at last week's special purpose local option sales tax meeting about the importance of commissioners becoming "cheerleaders" for the upcoming general obligation bonds and sales-tax package when he lapsed back into an image he used toward the end of last year's frantic sales-tax meetings. You remember, the ones that produced a 15-year, $486 million package voters threw eggs at in November.
Mr. Cheek said City Administrator Fred Russell had presented a good package this time and commissioners should get busy selling it to the public and quit reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
"Let's get the Titanic reinvented so that it doesn't sink," he said. "The Titanic is a bad reference. Scratch that."
But he couldn't let go of the ship analogy.
"Let's look at this ship and get it out of the harbor and at least running before we start worrying about the direction it's going to take," he said.
EVERYBODY'S DREAM: NO STRESS, GOOD PAY: At the Augusta-Richmond County Coliseum Authority meeting last week, member Wayne Frazier, who heads the authority's personnel committee, briefed the board on applicants for the finance manager's job, from which Katrina Bryant recently resigned. Dr. Frazier said the civic center received 10 applications.
One of the applicants told him she couldn't work under stressful conditions. Another demanded at least $75,000 a year, twice what Ms. Bryant made. Needless to say, neither applicant was offered the job. Authority members did vote to hire an experienced applicant who asked for about $40,000 a year.
HOW DUMB DO YOU HAVE TO BE?: Richmond County public schools may be out for summer, but that hasn't stopped one teenager from calling in bomb threats.
But without school to disrupt, where can you call? Apparently, the Richmond County Law Enforcement Center at 401 Walton Way.
Lt. James Young said the teenager called Augusta 911 twice, threatening to blow up the building housing Sheriff Ronnie Strength, the jail and Juvenile Court Judge Herbert E. Kernaghan Jr., who has had to deal with a flurry of class-halting, day-disrupting bomb threats at county schools since the beginning of the year. Judge Kernaghan has sentenced many of the threat-makers to time behind bars at youth detention facilities.
The 15-year-old, whose name was not released, was charged with transmitting a false public alarm.
City Ink thanks staff writers Jeremy Craig and Kate Lewis for their contributions to this week's column.
Reach Sylvia Cooper at (706) 823-3228 or sylvia.cooper@augustachronicle.com.
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