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Ethics complaint lodged against councilman, concerning comments and e-mailsThu, 08/20/2009 - 2:43pm
By: John Munford
A Senoia resident has filed an ethics complaint against City Councilman Jeffrey B. Fisher. The 33-page complaint from Donald I. Rehman alleges a number of grievances, one being Fisher’s comments to him at the July 20 council meeting when Rehman spoke with council about sight distance problems at Rockaway Road and one of the exits for the Heritage Pointe subdivision. In his complaint, Rehman accuses Fisher of saying he was exaggerating the problem as he told the city council he planned to meet with county officials to resolve part of the problem that exists on the county’s side of the intersection. According to The Citizen’s notes of the meeting, Fisher suggested to Rehman that if he wanted to “expedite” resolution of the problem, it would help him to have a show of public support. Moments before Fisher’s comments, Councilman Bobby Graham had questioned the support for the project which Rehman had claimed from a number of residents in Heritage Point. Graham said he wanted Rehman to encourage those residents to come address council themselves. “You signed it ‘we of Heritage Pointe’ and when you go ... to the county to speak a petition might be more suitable in nature to benefit your cause,” Fisher told Rehman during the July 20 exchange. Rehman took offense to the comments at the meeting and told the council “the people feel strongly believe me. If you want the chamber filled believe me I’ll go and do it.” Ironically, moments before Rehman had thanked the city for doing its part to correct the sight distance issue on the city’s side of the intersection. In his ethics complaint, Rehman claimed that Fisher’s comments to him at the July 20 meeting “amounted to the equivalent that I was supposedly falsely exaggerating the safety issue at the Heritage Pointe subdivision exit.” At its meeting Monday night, the City Council impaneled an ethics board consisting of names drawn from a pool of residents submitted in advance by City Council members except for Fisher. Those residents must get together and determine their meeting time and date. The ethics board’s conduct will be deriven from the city’s ethics ordinance. Fisher said at Monday’s meeting that he has remained silent on the issue but he hopes to have his full say on the matter in the future. In the ethics complaint Rehman also questions Fisher’s use of his city email address to communicate “two abusive, offensive and devastatingly harmful e-mails” which were written “in the hopes of humiliating and shaming me in the neighborhood in which I live.” In the emails, Fisher explains to a Heritage Pointe resident that he has sent a large number of emails to residents there and while Rehman “has a support group of sorts ... there exists a large contingency of residents” who are not concerned about the intersection. The email exchange between Fisher and the Heritage Pointe resident were posted on the community’s message board, Rehman said in his ethics complaint. Rehman also reminded Fisher in an email included in the ethics complaint that he (Rehman) supported Fisher being appointed to the council seat in early Spring after the resignation of councilman Keith Harrison. Rehman has previously on several occasions asked the City Council to declare the intersection a traffic hazard, but council members have declined to do so. In his email to the Heritage Pointe resident, Fisher remarked that should the intersection be declared a traffic hazard, the city would have to close the intersection. Rehman in his complaint vehemently takes issue with the assertion that the city would close the intersection. In closing his ethics complaint, Rehman said he hoped the ethics board and the City Council take his complaint seriously. “I fervently hope that neither the ethics board nor the Mayor/City Council will view the alleged misconduct and improper actions of Councilman Jeffrey Fisher as the conceptual equivalent of no more than a ‘jaywalking’ misdemeanor type occurrence; rather, I would hope that his alleged misconduct and improper actions will become clearly viewed conceptually as the equivalent of an intentional hit-and-run homicide in which I have been conceptually struck down into the gutter, bled to death, and Councilman Fisher has long ago fled from the scene of his ‘destruction.’” login to post comments
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