Three months into Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ term, and she is already shaking things up at City Hall. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Bottoms on Monday asked for the resignations of her entire cabinet, including rappers T.I. and Killer Mike.
A city official tells the AJC that Bottoms told her cabinet she will decide whose resignations to accept and whose she will decline.
At the beginning of her term, Bottoms told former Mayor Kasim Reed’s staff that they could stay on for 90 days. Now the time period is up and she wants them to clear out their desks.
Bottoms’ move comes after a hit-piece was published by the AJC.com last week. The article detailed how Bottoms walked back promises she made during her 2017 campaign to wipe out corruption and restore ethics in City Hall.
Within hours after former city manager Rev. Mitzi Bickers was indicted Thursday on charges of bribery, money laundering, and wire fraud, the AJC.com repeatedly tried to reach out to Mayor Bottoms for an interview.
Bottoms, who eagerly took calls from reporters last year when she was running for office, refused to return any of the AJC’s phone calls.
Instead, she responded to written questions submitted to her office by an AJC reporter.
Her answers revealed that she has walked back at least 3 of the points in a 10-point plan she developed during her campaign to address corruption and ethics violations within the mayor’s office.
She apparently walked back her plan to appoint an outside independent auditor to look over the city of Atlanta’s bidding process. An independent auditor might have explained how Rev. Mitzi Bickers managed to steer a $5.5 million snow removal contract to a contractor in 2014 — a year after she left city employment.
Bickers’ ability to rig the bidding process — even though she no longer worked for Kasim Reed — would indicate that Bickers had connections inside Reed’s administration.
But according to the AJC, “Bottoms has not appointed an independent auditor, but instead appears to be relying on the city’s internal auditor.”
Is Bottoms protecting Reed by not appointing the independent auditor?
