By the time Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms took office on Jan. 2, 2018, her promise to the citizens of Atlanta to run a transparent administration was broken, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigative report.
The AJC found that Mayor Bottoms broke with longstanding political practice by charging taxpayers for work her transition team performed before she took office in January 2018.
AJC reporters Stephen Deere and Dan Klepal interviewed dozens of people and reviewed thousands of pages of documents that showed Mayor Bottoms created staff positions that provided the salaries her transition team requested – even though they weren’t qualified for the jobs and did no work at all in those positions.
In November 2018, the AJC reported that former Atlanta City Council member Kwanza Hall was hired as a $137,000-a-year advisor to Mayor Bottoms (pictured), despite a city charter provision prohibiting the hiring of former elected officials within a year of leaving office.
That investigation led AJC reporters to discover new positions within Mayor Bottoms’ administration that were based on desired salaries, rather than the jobs they would actually perform.
Their investigation found that Mayor Bottoms gave her former campaign manager Marva Lewis the title of deputy general manager at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport with a salary of $275,000 per year.
But Lewis never worked at the airport.
Lewis, who became Bottoms’ chief of staff, held the airport title – and collected paychecks from the airport – while leading the mayor’s transition team, which included rappers T.I. Harris and Killer Mike.
Lewis’ airport position may have violated Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibiting the misuse of airport revenues for non-airport operations.
Last month, the mayor’s office used the city’s general fund to repay the airport $22,500 for Lewis’ compensation. The repayment was made two days after the AJC asked the mayor’s office why airport funds paid Lewis’ salary when she was not an airport employee.
Lewis, who announced her resignation in January, defended the use of taxpayer money to fund Bottoms’ transition team.
“We weren’t doing campaign work,” Lewis told the AJC. “We were a small team that came in to help with Mayor Bottoms’ transition.”
The mayor’s office attempted to blame a former Mayor Kasim Reed employee for the airport hiring snafu.
But that employee – Yvonne Yancy, the top Human Resources official under Reed, kept all of her receipts.
“I was asked by Mayor-Elect Keisha Lance Bottoms to process several potential candidates for hire and add them into the payroll system,” Yancy told the AJC in a statement. “I explained that this could not be done as hires for her administration could not go into effect until she officially took office on Jan. 2, 2018. I didn’t approve, hire, or finalize the employment process for any employees.”
Yancy told the AJC that then-Mayor Reed also approached her on behalf of Bottoms, who served on the City Council during Reed’s time as mayor.
On Dec. 27, 2017, Reed presented Yancy with a handwritten note on Bottom’s City Council stationary. The note listed campaign workers and their desired salaries and phone numbers.
Yancy provided the AJC with a cell phone snapshot of the note that was time-stamped Dec 27, 2018.
The list recommended six of Bottoms’ top campaign workers, including Marva Lewis who had “$275K” written next to her name.
Also on the list was former music exec Phillana Williams who had “$150K” next to her name. Williams once managed singers Ciara, K. Michelle and Miguel (pictured with Williams in June 2010).
Yancy had left City Hall before the first applications arrived in her former office.
According to the AJC, the paperwork for the six people on Bottoms’ transition team was finalized on Jan. 9, but was made retroactive to Dec. 14, 2017.
The next day, on Jan. 10, the city cut six checks totaling more than $26,000 for the pay period covering the last two weeks of Mayor Reed’s administration, records show.
One senior campaign advisor, Charlie Stadtlander, says he was offered a “placeholder” job on Bottoms’ transition team.
Stadtlander said Lewis called him two days after Bottoms’ narrow runoff victory over Mary Norwood. He said Lewis offered him a placeholder job until cabinet positions were created in Bottoms’ administration.
Bottoms planned to create two new cabinet-level positions: director of public health and director of education. He said Lewis asked him to pick one – even though he would not work at either position.
Stadtlander was concerned about the potential ethics violations. He took his concerns to City Council President Felicia Moore who advised him to speak with federal agents already in the process of investigating corruption at Atlanta’s City Hall.
“He wanted the council to investigate [Bottoms],” Moore told the AJC. “I thought it was bigger than that.”
Stadtlander declined to reveal to the AJC any discussions he may have had with federal agents.
“It would be inappropriate for me to comment on conversations I had with state and federal agents about issues that could be subject to the ongoing criminal investigation,” said Stadtlander, who currently teaches at the University of La Verne College of Law in California.
Lewis denied offering Stadtlander a placeholder job on Bottoms’ transition team.
Bottoms’ spokesman Michael Smith said in a statement: “Mr. Stadtlander’s accusations are just that – untrue accusations.”
Smith said “placeholder” jobs have been a long-standing practice at City Hall. But, according to the AJC, Marva Lewis’s placeholder job at the airport could run afoul of the Federal Aviation Administration regulations.
Last summer, the FAA opened an investigation after the AJC reported that the city had used airport funds to pay millions of dollars worth of legal bills related to the City Hall corruption investigation.
The AJC quoted Sandy Murdock, former chief counsel and deputy administrator for the FAA, who said that paying Lewis from airport revenues represented a “clear violation” of FAA guidelines.
“She had nothing to do with the airport, so that is a classic definition of revenue diversion,” Murdock said. “If it’s $20,000, that doesn’t rise to the level of ‘substantial diversion,’ but because they’ve gone through a previous episode, I suspect (the FAA) will take this seriously.”
Photos by Paras Griffin/Getty Images, Prince Williams/ATLPics.net
