City of Atlanta, Rampant Speculation Edition
There’s a 1.3 million-page document dump scheduled today at Atlanta City Hall, and a second contractor has been charged with paying city officials to win city contracts, aka, bribery.
That money is connected to the nearly a million dollars in bribes E.R. Mitchell has already admitted he paid to unnamed city officials.
This is a federal investigation and as such, about as transparent a process as the selection of Popes. But generally, the bigger prizes in public corruption investigations are the public officials. So far we’ve seen charges filed only against businessmen, but people are starting to wonder how far this scandal is going to go. Lots of folks are walking on eggshells -but the conventional wisdom is that no elected officials are going to be caught up.
But you (and the Atlanta media) will soon have a million pages on which to base any speculation you’d like to offer up. Feel free to share it in the comments section below.
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Mike Hassinger
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It does seem strange this situation started in 2010 which is the same year Mayor Reed took office. It would be interesting to see if these two were active in city contracts prior to Reed.
Perhaps city council should have asked more questions. During the 2011 ice storm the city paid more than the going rate for services from Mitchell. City council noted the high expense but apparently did not investigate further.
http://www.myajc.com/news/local-govt–politics/atlanta-paid-contractor-accused-bribery-least-million/AWiOsN0yR6VbYQOEhVNwKN/
The fact they dropped actual documents instead of digitized copies seems truly odd. I haven’t heard why the City wanted to do it that way, and hope they have a good reason, because if they chose the awkward, cumbersome, more expensive, non-digital method JUST to mess with reporters, all they have done is make the reporters mad and guarantee extra coverage. And extra negative coverage.
got money on the public works dept.