Residents may voice their concerns regarding the statements made by Columbus City Attorney Clifton Fay by easily filing an Open Government Complaint with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.

COLUMBUS, Ga. — City attorney Clifton Fay openly admitted that he intends to hide city council’s agenda from the general public so that residents will not know what their city council is doing until it’s too late for them to do anything about it.

During the city council meeting on June 13, Fay specifically stated he did not want to make council’s agenda public until the end of the day on Fridays: just one business day before council meetings occur.

To make matters worse and remove all doubt, Fay went on to openly specify that his intent was to prevent residents and the media from being able to contact their elected officials to voice their concerns prior to actionable meetings taking place, as well as to prevent other questioning of government by the public through things  like the filing of open records requests.

In short: City Attorney Clifton Fay doesn’t want the public muddying up the CCG Deep State’s bureaucracy by being able to freely participate in their own city’s representative government.

How liberating of you, Clifton. 

Ironically, Fay’s totalitarianly-censoring statements came in response to a plea for the exact opposite sort of transparency.

COLUMBUS TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT ACT

At the very end of the council meeting held on June 13, Councilor Joanne Cogle (District 7) voiced an oral resolution asking for the City Manager’s office to provide city councilors and the public with more time to review the agenda for upcoming meetings before the meetings occur.

Cogle’s proposed resolution — which sought to finalize and publicly publish city council meeting agendas six business days before a meeting occurs — seemed very similar to an earlier resolution proposed by Councilor Walker Garrett (District 8) to provide far greater transparency in the operations of our city’s government. 

Known as the Transparency in Government Act, Garrett had previously sought a draft ordinance to accomplish much of the same: to get meeting agendas and presentations publicly available one full week before council meetings take place.

Currently, city councilors only receive the agenda on the Friday before the Tuesday morning meetings, leaving them only one business day to read the lengthy agendas and educate themselves on the topics-at-hand. 

With such an impossibly-short single day window, councilors have long voiced that it is absolutely impossible for them to perform the proper due diligence required for them to make educated decisions for our city.

FAY’S OWN WORDS

In response to Cogle’s oral resolution to make meeting agendas publicly available six days prior to meetings, Columbus city attorney Clifton Fay exposed the very reason why Cogle’s resolution was being proposed: because bureaucracies are — as a matter of absolute self-admitted fact — purposefully trying to actively prevent the public from interfering with their bureaucratic agenda by preventing them from being able to participate in their own representative government.

“Just one final caveat,” Fay began. “As long as we're all on the same page, the public will not get the posted agenda until Friday, as has always occurred — because we don't want news media and others sometimes to have ‘semi-confidential’ topics …  if you're going to post it publicly, you're going to start getting open record requests and calls from the media on Wednesday and you might not want that.”

Yes, Clifton. You get it. That’s the entire point: to provide the public and council with the city’s agenda so they may have more time to make educated decisions about their own self governance — and we are not sorry if that muddies up your bureaucratically-tyrannical plans. 

In fact, the very way in which Fay responded is the exact reason why councilors and the public are demanding the agendas further in advance: because Fay just stated that he is actively trying to prevent self-governance and is instead purposefully trying to blindside the public and councilors to prevent the public’s questions and inquiry through their elected officials. 

There are no such things as ‘confidential topics’ on a public meeting agenda. At all. None. It is a public document.

How do we know? There are two reasons. 

The first is common sense, since it is a public meeting agenda. 

The second: It’s Georgia state law, as dictated by the Georgia Open Meetings Act.

THE GEORGIA OPEN MEETINGS ACT

According to Georgia Code § 50-14-1.e.1:

Prior to any meeting, the agency or committee holding such meeting shall make available an agenda of all matters expected to come before the agency or committee at such meeting. The agenda shall be available upon request and shall be posted at the meeting site as far in advance of the meeting as reasonably possible, but shall not be required to be available more than two weeks prior to the meeting and shall be posted, at a minimum, at some time during the two-week period immediately prior to the meeting. Failure to include on the agenda an item which becomes necessary to address during the course of a meeting shall not preclude considering and acting upon such item.

Regardless of the blatant violation of state law, City Attorney Clifton Fay’s statements made it absolutely crystal clear that he intends to inhibit the public’s access to the city council’s agenda. Furthermore, Fay openly stated that he wished to purposefully not disclose the city council’s agenda ‘as far in advance of the meeting as reasonably possible,’ which is required by law under Georgia Code §50-14-1.e.1.

Additionally, Fay really exposed the city’s bureaucratic totalitarian censorship by openly admitting that his intent in not conforming with the Georgia Open Meetings Act was to prevent the public from being able to question the agenda and participate in their own representative government — which is quite literally the entire reason the Georgia Open Meetings Act exists in the first place.

THE BOTTOM LINE

If you ever needed proof of how your local government’s deep state bureaucrats are purposefully and willfully hiding information from you in order to prevent you from being able to exercise your basic rights under the law, you needn’t look any further than the self-exclaimed tyrannical words of Columbus, Georgia's City Attorney, Clifton Fay.

Great job, Fay. Way to go. 

Maybe unf*ck yourself and publish the agendas early as required by state law, you bureaucratic tyrannical dunce. Interpret that asterisk however you want, Mr. City Attorney. We’ll leave it up to u.

Residents may voice their concerns regarding the statements made by Columbus City Attorney Clifton Fay by easily filing an Open Government Complaint with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.

Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.

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