By John Ruch
In the latest confusion surrounding the advisory committee for Atlanta’s controversial public safety training center, City Hall officials can’t explain how a police official is running the group with unclear legal authority or how vacant citizen seats will be filled. And the publicly available official membership list remains incorrect.
Recently touted by Mayor Andre Dickens and DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond as an effective citizen input tool, the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee (CSAC) has had many transparency and representation problems – including basic questions as to who is a member and the controversial expulsion of one who was never replaced.
CSAC members were appointed in 2021 by the Atlanta City Council’s Public Safety and Legal Administration Committee to represent specific neighborhoods or governmental departments. SaportaReport has found that four past or present CSAC members served apparently without being appointed by the council – including the current co-chair and former secretary.
Two other members have had their constituency or ability to vote changed unilaterally by the CSAC itself with unclear legal authority.
Officially, according to council legislation, the group is supposed to have 17 members. In practice, the CSAC began its meetings with 19. Now it is down to 17, but with some different representatives than are named in that legislation.
There is no publicly available, correct, official list of current CSAC members. They are not posted on the training center project’s website, which has not been updated in months.
The CSAC also currently has two vacant seats – though one apparently has been filled behind the scenes in a private decision. The CSAC previously has dealt with vacant seats inconsistently and in contradiction with its own bylaws, which say the group must vote on nominees at the next meeting, followed by council approval.
Lily Ponitz, who was controversially voted off the group in June 2022 for criticizing the training center plan, was never replaced, despite repeated inquiries from her nominator, District 6 DeKalb Commissioner Ted Terry. Meanwhile, original member Michael Fears, who died in August 2022, apparently was replaced by Hollis Turner without notice or vote.
CSAC Chair Alison Clark did not respond to questions for this story. SaportaReport this month asked District 9 Atlanta City Councilmember Dustin Hillis, who chairs the public safety committee and is himself a CSAC member, about the status of filling the two current vacancies. Hillis appeared not to know the answer, as he forwarded the request to Atlanta Municipal Clerk Foris Webb III and a council assistant, asking to “see how they are appointed.”
The Municipal Clerk’s office only records appointments and is not involved in making them. Shawn Brown in the Municipal Clerk’s office replied, as he told SaportaReport last year, that the office has never been officially notified of CSAC vacancies or membership changes. The Clerk’s office version of the membership list is almost entirely copied from the original 2021 legislation, which left out members to begin with and is now even more out of date.
That in turn creates other transparency issues, as the official list is used to determine public officials who are required to file City ethics disclosures. Most CSAC members were incorrectly exempted from that process last year due to other confusion with the enabling legislation. The City Ethics Division is currently reviewing the propriety of Christmas gifts given to CSAC members by the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), the private nonprofit that is the training center’s lead planner and also runs the CSAC itself.
The legal basis for the CSAC’s powers, claimed in its bylaws, to override council appointments by removing or reassigning members remains unexplained. Mayor’s Office Press Secretary Michael Smith last year indicated that City lawyers had reviewed the bylaws, but said it would be “improper and inappropriate” to reveal what their advice was. The City Charter requires committees to have bylaws in place within 90 days of establishing a quorum, a deadline the CSAC missed by months.
Underlying membership confusion is the politicization of the CSAC, particularly around environmental issues that are fundamental to the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” protests and other opposition. The CSAC was created as one part of a hastily written council compromise on the City’s lease of the training center site to appease controversy about the lack of public input in the secretly developed plan. Dickens and Thurmond touted it last month as a citizen input device at a press conference unveiling a “memorandum of understanding” that itself is targeted environmental concerns.
But the CSAC membership was privately altered from the start to remove some rebellious environmentalists for disputed reasons. The first draft had a seat for the South River Forest Coalition (SRFC), a local environmental group that is a prominent critic of the training center plan and an adjacent DeKalb County park that was controversially swapped to a private developer, as well as other environmentalists that probably would have included a similarly feisty group, the South River Watershed Alliance. Those seats were removed from the CSAC list in the final legislation, with Post 2 At-Large Councilmember Matt Westmoreland saying they had requested the removal, and the SRFC replying that was not true.
Then came controversy over Ponitz, an environmental engineer who was nominated by Terry for her expertise and critical approach. She initially was elected as the CSAC’s secretary, but quickly ran into trouble with Clark, Co-Chair Sharon Williams and some others for her critical commentary, including via a SaportaReport opinion piece. Clark attempted to institute a ban on CSAC members speaking to the media and led to the removal of Ponitz as a member on unclear legal authority. Terry’s attempt to nominate a replacement went nowhere, while he became a controversial figure in CSAC discussions for his ongoing criticisms of the group’s transparency issues – including his lack of an appointee to give him feedback for his district. Clark later said it was OK for CSAC members to speak to the media to help spread a “narrative” that out-of-state protesters are domestic terrorists at the request of Atlanta Police Department Assistant Chief Carven Tyus.
Amy Taylor, a CSAC member who recently filed an appeal against the training center’s land-disturbance permit, is affiliated with the SRWA but does not directly represent it on the group.
Dickens and Thurmond in their MOU press conference described the CSAC as a citizen group. But five of its members are high-level government employees, including a DeKalb Board of Commissioners member, an Atlanta City Council member, Atlanta’s deputy chief operating officer, and representatives of Atlanta’s police and fire rescue departments. Another member represents DeKalb’s parks department and serves on a citizen advisory board for that department. And the APF runs the CSAC meetings.
Administrator confusion
A new unanswered question about the CSAC is under what authority it is currently being administered by an Atlanta Police Department (APD) staff member.
The CSAC was set up by the council legislation to be “convened,” staffed and administratively supported by the APF, an unusual structure that means the developer is running its own review committee. The idea was that the APF would take input from the group and regularly report it back to the council.
APF Chief Operating Officer Marshall Freeman has led the CSAC meetings from the start as a convener, running Zoom recordings, answering questions, responding to Open Records requests and serving as a go-between with contractors and government agencies. He is named in the bylaws as the group’s administrator. In January, Freeman left APF and took a new job as APD’s deputy chief administrative officer. But he continued to run the CSAC’s January meeting, despite working for APD rather than APF.
APF and Freeman did not respond to questions about his legal authority to run the meetings and if an APF official will take over for future meetings. Webb, the municipal clerk, said his office has no review power over issues of legal authority to operate City committees, but added that he would “alert the Law Department to the issue.”
That department did not respond to SaportaReport questions, but apparently alerted Smith, the Mayor’s Office press secretary. Smith did not directly answer, but in a statement he attempted to declare as unattributed background information, he said the council legislation’s language “does not require that the Committee be convened by the APF.” He did not respond further when SaportaReport noted the legislation indeed uses the word “convene” and, regardless, says nothing about authorizing APD to administer the CSAC. APD is represented on the CSAC by a membership seat currently held by the police chief.
APD Public Affairs Director Chata M. Spikes would not say if the department was aware of Freeman’s involvement in the CSAC or got a legal opinion about it. Instead, she referred to Smith’s response and said, “APD has nothing further to add.”
Unofficial and shifting members
Because the council legislation creating the CSAC was hastily written, it had several significant errors that made membership confusing from the start and a problem for the group itself. The names of three members – Clark, Nicole Morado and Pat Culp – were misspelled or incorrect and remain that way in the Municipal Clerk’s list. Two other members – Ponitz and Williams – were not named in the legislation at all.
The unnamed members caused chaos in the ranks of who was representing which legislation-authorized constituency. Shaun Billingslea was named in the legislation to represent Eastside Walk, but Williams thought she was, too. Taylor was named as the DeKalb District 6 representative, but Ponitz thought she was.
Clark resolved the situation by changing the representation and voting status of some of those members, with unclear legal authority. Ponitz got to be the District 6 representative, while Taylor was made a Starlight Heights representative – though Morado was already named in the legislation for that neighborhood. That meant that both Eastside Walk and Starlight Heights now each had two representatives instead of the council-intended one. So Clark declared that Williams and Morado were their official neighborhood representatives, while Billingslea and Taylor were “back-ups” who could attend but vote on matters only if the other rep was unavailable. Taylor objected to the decision at the time.
Morado told SaportaReport last week that much of the confusion came from an informal and private pre-selection process involving discussions with DeKalb Commissioners Terry and Larry Johnson and then with Freeman. She could not at first recall which one formally nominated her, which turned out to be Terry. “It all seemed fairly informal until the resolution passed about the CSAC,” she said.
Morado called the confusion about Ponitz’s status “a mess indeed” and said of the Eastside Walk double-representation problem, “What a cluster!”
Fears and his Norwood Manor neighborhood were not in the original legislation but were added as an amendment before its passage – something initially missed in the CSAC bylaws, which omitted the neighborhood. Norwood Manor was added to the bylaws in an April 2022 amendment, according to Atlanta Community Press Collective coverage, by which time Turner was already representing the neighborhood. It is unclear when she apparently replaced Fears, who remains on the official City list of CSAC members six months after his death. The Norwood Manor Civic Association says Turner is its representative and that both she and Fears represented the group on the CSAC at some point. Turner did not respond to a comment request via her Facebook account. Morado said she did not recall voting or discussing a replacement.
After Ponitz was removed last year, Commissioner Terry nominated Taylor as her replacement for the District 6 slot – the position she thought she originally had. But the seat has gone unfilled – and District 6 without the legislation-required representation – for nearly eight months, despite Terry’s repeated requests to the council for updates on his nomination.
Now Morado has resigned over the police killing of a protester, and it appears the CSAC is once again acting unilaterally instead of carrying out the bylaws-required vote and council approval. According to a message obtained by SaportaReport, Clark, Williams and Freeman notified other CSAC members that Taylor was being shifted to a full voting member for Starlight Heights “effective immediately.” The message did not mention her months-old nomination as District 6 representative or the bylaws vacancy-filling process.
Clark did not respond to questions about the process for filling the seats held by Morado and Ponitz and how interested people might nominate themselves.
A seat for a designee of the Atlanta mayor also has changed membership apparently without council approval. Former Deputy Chief Operating Officer Jestin Johnson is still on official lists, though he left the job in 2021. Current COO LaChandra Burks has been serving for months.
The only change on the official Municipal Clerk’s list since the group’s inception is a seat automatically filled by the head of the City Council’s public safety committee, which changed from former Councilmember Joyce Sheperd to current Councilmember Dustin Hillis.
As further membership confusion, the CSAC has not publicly posted meeting minutes since 2021 and those available contain misspellings of some members’ names and use first initials instead of full names. The CSAC meets only virtually via Zoom.
Brown, the clerk’s office staffer, said last year that it was up to the appointing body to report membership changes in City committees like the CSAC. While the City Council appointed CSAC members, council staffers have repeatedly claimed it has no supervisory authority over the group, including for Open Records requests, raising the question of how the appointing body would learn of membership changes. APF and Clark did not respond to questions as to why all of the changes were never reported to the Municipal Clerk’s office.
The purpose of the clerk’s office keeping such lists, Brown said, was so that everyone from officials to residents would know who is serving on City bodies and would be aware of vacancies if they wanted to serve.
“That’s what it’s for – just to be transparent,” he said.
Current CSAC members
The following is a list of the current CSAC members as determined from recent meeting attendances. This list notes differences from official lists in City Council legislation and Municipal Clerk files as well as changes from the original membership dating to October 2021.
- Jerrie Bason, DeKalb County Recreation, Parks and Cultural Affairs Department
- Shaun Billingslea, Eastside Walk. Considered a “backup” member by CSAC.
- LaChandra Burks, City of Atlanta deputy chief operating officer, as Atlanta mayor’s designee. Burks is not named in official lists, which instead continue to list former Deputy COO Jestin Johnson, who left that job in December 2021.
- Alison Clark, Boulder Walk (chair). Misspelled as “Clerk” in official lists.
- Pat Culp, Cedar Grove. Incorrectly given as “Clark” in official lists.
- Dustin Hillis, District 9 Atlanta City Council member, as chair of Atlanta City Council Public Safety and Legal Administration Committee. Previously held by former Councilmember Joyce Sheperd. The chair automatically holds this seat and it is the only update from the original legislation in the Municipal Clerk’s current list.
- Larry Johnson, District 3 DeKalb County commissioner. Johnson has sometimes sent a staff member to represent him.
- Ophelia Lee, Thomasville Heights Civic League
- James McLemore, Atlanta Fire Rescue Department first deputy chief
- Shirley Nicols, South River Gardens Community Association
- Amy Taylor, Starlight Heights, according to a unilateral CSAC decision announced via an internal group email, as a replacement for Nicole Morado. Morado remains on official lists with her name misspelled. Taylor is reported as a DeKalb County Board of Commissioners District 6 representative in official lists, and was previously declared a “backup” Starlight Heights member by the CSAC.
- Anne Phillips, City of Atlanta Neighborhood Planning Unit Z. Phillips is also president of the Atlanta Planning Advisory Board, a City-created umbrella group of NPUs.
- Jacqueline Rainey, Stonewall Heritage Community Association
- Darin Schierbaum, Atlanta Police Department chief
- Tory Tucker, Gates at Bouldercrest
- Hollis Turner, Norwood Manor. Turner is not named in official lists, though predecessor Michael Fears is.
- Sharon Williams, Eastside Walk (co-chair). Not named in official lists.
- DeKalb District 6 seat: vacant, but incorrectly listed as Taylor in official lists. Formerly held by Lily Ponitz, who was not named in official lists.
Great reporting as always! Sounds like the confusion is a feature not a bug…
The layers of this onion not only bring tears to the eyes, but they are reeking from Trinity Ave in downtown Atlanta to Commerce Drive in downtown Decatur. The CASC should be sunset almost as quickly as the Atlanta and DeKalb scheme to perpetuate the legacy of disinvestment in southeast Atlanta and southwest Dekalb.