Atlanta City Council President (and mayoral candidate) Ceasar Mitchell knocked over a hornet’s nest when he called on term-limited Mayor Kasim Reed and Council colleagues to support a moratorium on approval of most contracts that begin services in 2018 so that the next Council and mayor can review them. (Council member Mary Norwood, also a mayoral candidate, endorses this approach.) Mitchell says Reed is rushing to finish contracts that don’t expire or won’t be enacted until next year.
Reed fired back with a harsh personal attack on Mitchell, and refuses to budge. But what this flap does is re-focus on the widening federal probe into a city hall bribes-for-contracts scandal that Reed doesn’t like to talk about. The Mitchell camp argues that, because of the probe and rumored forthcoming indictments, a cautious, fair contracting approach is prudent.
For the past couple of months InsiderAdvantage has been told by reliable sources that the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI have widened its probe of the city hall bribery/contracting scandal. It was a subpoena delivered to Atlanta’s law department in February that was the first indication of broadening the scope into pay-to-play bribery for numerous city contracts.
An 11-point demand by the feds required the city to turn over conflict-of-interest disclosures by fired procurement officer Adam Smith, as well as all documents he controlled relating to contracts of $1 million or more since Jan. 1, 2014.
This means that the probe’s focus will explore controversial airport contracting. And remember that Smith was close to Reed, who exercises tight control over the city airport department’s contracting. Remember, too, that Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport – the world’s busiest air terminus– ranks as perhaps the worst in the United States as measured by longtime cronyism and corruption.
