(Find part one here. Find part two here.) I should probably mention that Sharon Barnes-Sutton lost my vote years ago when she told a crowd at a Democratic breakfast that media scrutiny could be dismissed as the act of white newsrooms looking for trouble in black communities. I’m sensitive to that. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution hired me
Find part one of the series here. The streams feeding the lakes of the Mainstreet Community subdivision have a silting problem. “We’ve been trying to get DeKalb County out here to fix this for five years,” said Nadine Rivers-Johnson, the community manager for the middle-income family subdivision off of South Hairston. “When we try to talk
Mohad Ragueh said he was one of the first people to respond to the fire Saturday. It started in a neighbor’s unit on the second floor, one inhabited by two sisters from Africa, their children, and a man they didn’t know well to whom they had rented one of the rooms, he said. When the fire alarms went
I discovered something about DeKalb politics as I went looking for the gears in the machine, and it’s been swirling around in my head, a Lovecraftian horror that might have spared me notebooks full of arcane twaddle, gibbering madness and self-destruction, if only I had ignored the early signs and stopped asking questions. Most people
Something about poking around politics in DeKalb County provokes a reaction I call rabid wombat flinging. Inquiry brings a snarling, over-the-top angry reaction designed to raise the legal and emotional cost of pursuing answers. A couple of years ago, I went looking for answers to basic questions about a spurious ethics complaint launched by a part-time
I asked Scott Holcomb about his stalled rape kit bill last week in between hearings. “It’s not over,” he said. Around here, until the gavel falls on Sine Die, he’s always going to be right. This afternoon, State Sen. Elena Parent’s gun background check bill was martyred in the name of testing rape kits. State
I woke up this morning to Trump winning Nevada by runaway numbers, and in a state of Lovecraftian horror began considering the electoral math more closely. As it happens, so did the Washington Post. They believe he is almost certainly going to get the delegates he needs. Looking at that makes me understand why Ohio
Michael Thurmond will make it official later this week: he’s running for DeKalb CEO. The continued existence of a CEO position in DeKalb — unique in Georgia county governance — is an open question with legislation pending to end the position in favor of a commission chairman system. And the job itself looks like a
The AJC reported today that the interim CEO for DeKalb County, Lee May, will not stand for election to a full term this year. “It was a trying time. No one wants to see your name plastered in the paper,” said May, now two-and-a-half years into a “temporary” tenure as CEO. “Ultimately the decision I’m making
(A petition has been added below.) My Facebook feed is awash in lies from the Daily Currant and Duffelblog and The Onion and Donald Trump, so perhaps I might be forgiven from assuming that Andre Walker‘s piece on Georgia Unfiltered was fiction, parody designed solely to provoke people like me. Alas. State Senator Donzella James
