Albany’s mayor and Ward 6 commissioner renege on deal; disadvantaged business chief again being attacked by city’s Big 3
My, what a difference a week – and an election – can make.
Weeks before voters re-elected Albany Mayor Willie Adams and Commissioner Tommie Postell, the two incumbents appeased a local black businessman by offering to let him piggy-back on a local property management project by serving as a protégé to the winning bidder.
It was a true love-fest that undoubtedly earned Adams and Postell some votes.
Now that the election is over, Adams and Postell have backtracked and the businessman has been left in the cold.
“That right there was politics at its best,” Victor Edwards, who advocated for businessman Harry James at this week’s City Commission meeting, told The Albany Herald “A couple of weeks ago, you have a commissioner and the mayor changing their votes in what we thought was an attempt to help local minority businesses. Now that the election is over, the minority business owner is overlooked. How did we lose those two votes?”
Edwards also criticized Pinky Douglas Modeste, who directs the Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization consortium, for not standing up to Adams and Postell.
“She’s a good lady, but at some point she’s got to put away her fear for her job and do what’s right,” Edwards said, according to The Herald.
Edwards is right; Ms. Modeste – who coordinates local governments’ efforts to ensure that minorities have a fair shot when taxpayers’ money is being spent – has been and apparently still is a target of the city’s powerbrokers: Adams, Postell and City Manager Alfred Lott.
And considering what she’s been through with them, it would be a wonder if Ms. Modeste isn’t intimidated by the Big 3.
Postell and Lott say the city should overtake Ms. Modeste’s office from the other consortium members – Dougherty County, the Dougherty Couny School System, Albany Tomorrow Inc., and the Albany Water, Gas and Light Commission. And last year, at Postell’s behest, Lott mandated a retaliatory witch-hunt veiled as an “investigation of inappropriate conduct” that targeted Ms. Modeste.
That’s right, the city manager was directed by a city commissioner to conduct an investigation. Crazy, huh, since the city manager works for the City Commissioner – not a single commissioner? What’s crazier is that Mr. Lott complied with Mr. Postell’s directive.
What should have happened as a result of the so-called inquiry is that Mr. Lott himself should be investigated for inappropriate conduct.
In October, Ms. Modeste recommended that James be included as a protégé to an Alabama company to manage the city’s 262 rental units at a cost of $132,000 a year. And Adams and Postell obliged, changing their votes for the deal to happen.
When the Alabama company this week withdrew its management offer, James – the only other project bidder, whose bid came in at a lower price – expected to receive the work. But Adams, Postell and three of their colleagues voted to seek news proposals from property management firms, instead.
The fuss over the Vantage contract started when Postell ridiculously and without challenge demanded to know how many black employees were on Vantage’s payroll – an answer Modeste’s staff couldn’t provide. Then, last week, one day after the election, Lott sternly cautioned Ms. Modeste to be careful with her words during a hostile question-and-answer volley with Postell, and also suggested that Ms. Modeste misled commissioners during a discussion about a potential mentor-protégé program involving James.
Also during that meeting, Postell relentlessly attacked Ms. Modeste.
“The city pays 60 percent of the cost of Ms. Modeste’s office and I am going to see that she is put under the city’s jurisdiction so that the city can mandate and know how her office is being operated,” Postell said. “Unless there is a law stating that she must stay where she is, I will work diligently to put her under the city. I am not going to give her 60 percent of the city’s money of just floating along and bringing the same information over and over. As of today, that is something that I will be promoting.”
