Wednesday, February 6, 2002
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Wednesday, February 6, 2002 |
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Bullying editor wrong to blame lawyers Memo to mail room employees, interns, and any and all messengers at The Citizen: Don't deliver bad news to Cal Beverly you might get shot. In his column of Jan. 30, Mr. Beverly inexplicably attacks the lawyers representing Peachtree City and Fayette County in the ongoing tax equity mediation for doing their jobs. Granted, a headline of "Attorneys execute judge's order" would not sell as many papers, or in this case would not cause more papers to be thrown into more driveways for free as "Lawyers tell the public to stuff it: No records, no open meetings." Mr. Beverly's verbal venom seems misdirected. Mr. Beverly wrote a nice review midway through his column. It read in part, "The judge ordered all tax talks to be conducted in utter secrecy." He would have done well to have actually read the review to himself a time or two. Not just a review, this very statement is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the entire story. If anyone is saying, "no way, nothing, nada, zippo, take a hike, go fish, sit on your request" or any other adolescent dig Mr. Beverly can think of, it's the judge in this case, and not the attorneys Mr. Beverly has decided to pick on. Mr. Beverly's characterization of Mr. Lindsey and Mr. Davenport puts him in the same light as the neighborhood kid we all grew up with who brought the basketball to a pickup game. If he started losing or things didn't go his way, he took his ball and went home so nobody could finish the game. The bully who doesn't get his way will start swinging at whoever is closest or easiest to hit. When our county and city attorneys (who, lest we forget, are paid with public funds Mr. Beverly reminds us) start disregarding judges' orders, then Mr. Beverly should get on his soapbox and have at it. But for now, he should keep playing so we can see who wins. Why has the judge ordered the tax equity mediation to be held out of the public realm? Maybe he is familiar with Mr. Beverly's work. Or maybe he has played a pickup ballgame with him, and he couldn't finish the game. Forrest Cate Fayetteville [Editor Beverly replies: It's refreshing to see someone standing up for lawyers. On the other hand, Mr. Cate's core argument the judge's order is substantive and deserves comment. What Mr. Cate and maybe most of the general public may not know is that in visiting judge and mediation cases, the "judge's order" often is drawn up by one of the attorneys in the case, usually the complaining party's attorney, and generally is signed without much change by the judge. That almost certainly happened in this case. So it was the cities' attorney who most likely sought and received the secrecy covering. That's our best guess, because no one is talking, least of all the judge. This city attorney firm in particular has a history of recommending closed meetings. The infamous Georgia Utilities acquisition in the mid-1990s with closed joint meetings of Peachtree City Council and Water and Sewer Authority comes to mind. The county attorney could have objected, but there is no record that anybody objected to the secrecy. And that is my point somebody ought to have objected, on the public's behalf, before the secret negotiations ever got underway. The order could have been appealed, at least on procedural grounds, but none of the parties bothered. Apparently nobody objected not the attorneys involved, not the governing bodies involved leaving one to reasonably infer that all parties preferred to negotiate about our tax dollars out of public view. That the procedure also seems to violate clear Georgia statutory law about open meetings is the cause of our court action. Perhaps Mr. Cate is a trusting soul who prefers secrecy in local government. We think most Fayette citizens would rather have open representative government than taxation by judicial fiat.]
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