By Jennifer July Mitchell

Effingham County resident Richard Lancaster got his 10 minutes in front of a state senate committee Wednesday to tell the senators how hard it had been to challenge what he felt were illegal actions by the Effingham County Commission.

Lancaster testified in Atlanta before a committee chaired by Sen. Renee Unterman (R-Buford). Unterman, who chairs the Senate’s committee on State and Local Government Operations, established the committee at the urging of Common Cause Georgia Executive Director Bill Bozarth to examine Georgia’s ethics laws and whether the mechanism for citizens challenging local and state government actions is prohibitively complicated or burdensome.

Bozarth wanted to hold hearings to encourage the Georgia General Assembly to reintroduce legislation to address conflicts of interest by elected officials. The language addressing conflicts of interest fell out of an ethics bill last session. At Bozarth’s urging, the General Assembly has agreed to re-examine the issue.

“I wanted the hearings to begin a process of awareness so they feel a message from people in the state so there is a process for hearing ethics violations that’s not available now,” said Bozarth. He chose the Effingham story for the committee to hear because of the thoroughness of the work the citizens did and the legitimacy of the issues involved. “This was a legitimate situation and I have a great admiration for the people who persevered so long,” he said.

Lancaster is one of a number of Effingham County residents who, both individually and as a member of the Neighborhood Organization (NO) challenged what they said were violations by the Effingham County Commission of the Georgia Open Meetings Act as well as other state law. Lancaster and several other citizens filed an ethics complaint against former County Commission Chairman Gregg Howze for failure to disclose property he owned, some of which would be impacted by his votes on building the county’s new water and sewer system. The ethics committee ultimately reached a consent agreement in which it fined Howze $20,000, the largest fine of its kind ever levied by the committee against an official in office at the time of the violation.

But it cost $20,000 in legal fees to get the fine. Lancaster filled the committee in on this and other hardships he and other citizens endured in challenging Howze and the commission.  “Our attorney’s fees cost us $20,000 to get a $20,000 fine, and that sounds like a pretty loud message,” Lancaster told the senators.

He also told the committee that his original petition to the Ethics Committee included a challenge of a sale by Howze to the Effingham County Board of Education of land for a school site. Lancaster and others challenged the failure to disclose the sale to the Judge of Probate as required under state law.

That, however, was not within the Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction. “I told them I think they need to give the Ethics Committee a broader scope of investigation and more power,” he said. “The whole time we were involved we heard they were underfunded and understaffed, so from  my point of view beef that up and enforce the laws you have.”

Lancaster also told the committee of some 490 violations of the Georgia  Open Meetings Act by the commission he and other citizens had compiled and sent to Attorney General Thurbert Baker requesting an investigation. “Nothing has transpired from that,” Lancaster told the committee.

Lancaster also pointed out that the Attorney General had a conflict of interest in investigating the Open Meetings violations since he also represents the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority, the state agency that loaned the county some $19 million to build the first phase of its water and sewer system, since many of the Open Meetings violations alleged pertained to actions on the GEFA loans.