Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens is placing blame on the city clerk’s office and Atlanta City Council for nearly $1 million in consulting payments made to the former clerk tasked with overseeing signature verification for a referendum on the city’s public safety training center that never began.
In a memo to council members issued Tuesday, the second-term mayor said he became aware of $910,000 paid to former clerk Foris Webb III after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution records request for payments made related to consulting and legal advice over the effort to force a public vote on the training center.
Webb was brought on by the city as a consultant in August 2023 to help with the massive undertaking of verifying tens of thousands of signatures collected on referendum petitions as belonging to registered voters. But the effort bogged down in litigation, and the signatures were never counted.
Nevertheless, Webb received 26 monthly payments of $35,000 each, with his final invoice submitted in October.
Dickens argued in his memo that his office was not responsible for the payments.
“I did not authorize Mr. Webb to perform any work for the city outside of that for which he was retained, including any work he may have performed for the office of the clerk,” Dickens memo says. “If payments continued after the referendum process was paused — and in the absence of active petition verification — the relevant oversight questions concern supervision, scope monitoring and fiscal controls within the office to which the clerk reports.”
The clerk’s office reports to the City Council.
But some council members are pushing back against that narrative.
“The reality is that the execution of paychecks and the accounting and invoices and all of that was overseen by the law department, which it’s under the executive office,” said Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari, who added that the council should call for a formal investigation.
“We have to get to the bottom of this — (the law department) needs to answer questions,” Bakhtiari said. “We need to have an investigation and have those conversations and share the results of that investigation publicly.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Dickens seemed to agree to an investigation in his memo.
“Those questions warrant a full accounting of what work was performed, when it was performed and at whose direction,” the mayor wrote.
During the last full council meeting on Feb. 16, council members paused regular proceedings to ask questions about the contract.
Atlanta’s new City Attorney Marquetta J. Bryan didn’t have many answers but said she terminated the contract immediately after discovering it through the AJC’s records request and implemented a number of new policies to install tighter controls.
Webb has declined to respond to multiple requests for comment from the AJC.
But because the contract was created and signed years before Bryan began working for the city, she couldn’t say who OK’d the contract or why it went so long without being noticed.
Credit: City of Atlanta
Credit: City of Atlanta
Councilmember Kelsea Bond also pressed the mayor’s office to respond to the council’s questions last Monday.
Bond pointed to a resolution passed in August 2023 by the City Council that authorized then-City Attorney Nina Hickson to hire outside counsel for the signature verifications.
“It felt to me like (Dickens’) administration is deflecting blame,” Bond said of the letter sent Tuesday. “Because my understanding is that this was something that fell under the city attorney, who ultimately is somebody that the mayor appointed.
“So I didn’t read his memo as correct characterization of what happened.”
Dickens’ memo ends on a different note.
The mayor said the signatures on the petitions should be counted, even though the city has won two lawsuits relating to the training center and the referendum attempt — and the training center is open and operational. Opponents needed to submit at least 58,231 valid signatures from registered Atlanta voters for the referendum effort to be successful.
“Results of the petition may still be useful in informing future policy decisions and bridging whatever divide exists,” Dickens said.
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