Miss Manners would be aghast.

An ex-mayor shouting from the City Council audience to the current mayor, “And you are calling me a moron!”

Mayoral candidates and an ex-mayor conducting an unscheduled hostile cross-examination during a council meeting.

Candidates and others yelling from the audience during a meeting that, to say the least, lost its decorum in the midst of claims and counter-claims about whether the city’s police department was recklessly built above a combined trash pit and sewage sludge dump.

Or, one might conclude, it was a typical pre-election meeting of the Peachtree City Council, an opportunity for candidates to get the spotlight despite some sporting only very recent records of showing up for the twice-monthly public meetings.

Ex-Mayor Bob Lenox took his allotted 10 minutes plus some to defend his administration’s purchase of 5.5 acres from the city’s major developer. The land was the site of the developer’s original sewage treatment plant, long since gone to trees and weeds, but fronting on Ga. Highway 74.

Mayor Brown “gave misleading information about the land,” Lenox said in his prepared remarks. The site of the police headquarters is environmentally safe, Lenox argued.

It’s got “a clean bill of health,” Lenox said. “It’s as good as it gets.” There are no pollutants on the site, there’s no cleanup needed, and there’s no legal liability, Lenox asserted.

Lenox said Brown should apologize to former city planning director Jim Williams, now city manager of Fairburn, for accusing Williams of responsibility for selecting a polluted site.

Brown declined and said he and Lenox would just have to agree to disagree.

That brought mayoral candidate Dan Tennant to the microphone. Tennant demanded to know whether Brown, himself running for reelection, had consulted with city staff before appearing in a televised interview about the police site.

From the speaker’s podium and from his seat in the audience, Tennant kept peppering Brown with questions about whether Brown’s publicizing the police site issue was “good judgment.”
Lenox jumped back in, saying Brown and the council a couple of years ago accepted a gift of four-tenths of an acre adjacent to the police station that represented the most polluted part of the former sewage site.

“Why did you accept that land?” Lenox asked Brown.

“We didn’t know” it had problems, Brown replied.

“And you call me a moron!” Lenox shouted from his seat.

In the end, Councilwoman Judi-Ann Rutherford tried to bring some order back to the dueling mayors’ show. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” she said several times, though it was not clear whom she had in mind.