Part 2 of AJC's Investigation on Cleta Winslow

By Johnny Edwards - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Atlanta City Councilwoman Cleta Winslow faced a tough re-election bid last year, after being caught driving drunk in her district. But she bolstered her image in ways her opponent couldn’t match.

Winslow turned homeless people into human billboards. And she got Atlanta taxpayers to pick up the tab.

In the three days before her campaign kickoff, she used city money to pay workers she recruited from homeless shelters and off the streets to pick up trash and had them wear T-shirts emblazoned with her name. The same workers passed out her campaign fliers.

Yet no one at city hall raised a peep.

That’s because Atlanta imposes little oversight on how public officials spend discretionary funds — taxpayer-funded accounts they can control with impunity. That can allow officials to turn office budgets into slush funds to reward political cronies, circumvent bid laws and make personal purchases, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found.

Among records reviewed by the AJC, the starkest cases of egregious spending were in Atlanta and DeKalb County, where top officials have wide leeway to purchase supplies and services. There are no public votes when elected officials want to steer thousands of dollars to a pet cause, and they don’t have supervisors poring over transactions and demanding receipts.

As long as elected officials don’t overspend their annual budgets, their governments are often loathe to blow the whistle on even flagrant abuses, the AJC found.

Other local jurisdictions have controls that make misuse of public funds harder to hide. Fulton County commissioners aren’t issued government credit cards, and their spending, with receipts, must be routed through their clerk’s office, the Purchasing Department and the Finance Department, which has been known to flag unjustified expenses.

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In Dacula, when Councilman Gregory Reeves used his city credit card to pay for shoes, pizza and other personal items, city employees cried foul, but the mayor merely asked him several times to stop. Only after Reeves’ purchases topped $11,000 did the case get referred to the Gwinnett District Attorney for prosecution — a rare step when elected officials tap the till.

“It’s troublesome, isn’t it?” said Katherine Willoughby, a professor of public management and policy at Georgia State University. “People do fear that if they bring anything up, it’s going to come back on them.”

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Tapping the public



The city’s Ethics Office – an independent agency — three times found she had used taxpayer resources to help get reelected.

City officials spared her any tongue lashings, though.

She paid a political ally more than $20,000 in the last fiscal year to mow lots in her district, including the eyesore lot across the street from her home.

And she charged the city for $2,000 in gasoline last year, often filling up twice on the same day or on back-to-back days, and giving the city no explanation for buying enough gas to circle I-285 four times.

The city also didn’t bat an eye when Winslow sought reimbursement for paying her homeless trash-pickers $5 an hour for their clean-up work in the days leading up to her campaign kickoff.

They passed out her campaign fliers that same week. Winslow claims she paid them for that work through her campaign account, though at least one worker recalls handing out fliers on a day records show she received city money.

Winslow’s opponent, Torry Lewis, said Winslow’s use of city money made her impossible to beat. He took just 31 percent of the vote.

“When I’d knock on people’s doors and tell them what I’m going to do to help the district, they’d say, ‘I see Cleta’s people cleaning up the streets right now,’” Lewis said.

Winslow defended the work, saying she is serving her district, not benefiting herself or her campaign.

“I’ve said this to every reporter that’s asked me every time about my expenses: If I can’t help the people in the district that I serve with their tax dollars, and trying to do it the right way – I’m not putting that money in my pocket – then I don’t need to be down here,” she said.

Paying homeless people to clean up streets and lots is part of that service, she said, and she pays for such work year-round.

“I’ve helped a lot of homeless people,” Winslow said.

Trampling ethics rules

Ethics experts see it differently. Since voters who see people wearing Winslow’s T-shirts and doing campaign work would figure anything else they do is campaign-related, there’s likely a city ethics ordinance violation, they said.

“If the same people doing the cleanup, wearing the T-shirts, are also the people who are handing out the fliers and doing all these other express advocacy activities,” attorney and election law expert Bryan Tyson said, “then I think that’s what pushes you over to the side of saying all of this is campaign-related activity. Not some segment of it.”

The burden is on Winslow to prove that she kept their hours and payments divided between cleanup work and campaign work, city Ethics Officer Nina Hickson said. None of the homeless people the AJC tracked down said they received two sets of payments for their labor.

“It does raise these issues of whether there has been improper co-mingling of campaign funds and expenses related to her carrying out her city council responsibilities,” Hickson said.

That’s not the only problem with what she did, the AJC found.

Invoices she submitted to the city for reimbursement showed she paid $5 an hour for the work. That’s a violation of federal labor law, which requires a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, according to the local U.S. Labor Department office.

She may have put the city on the hook to pay back wages to about a half dozen homeless people, plus damages and civil penalties.

“We would most likely be looking at that as an employment relationship type thing, even if it’s a one-day activity,” said Eric Williams, director of the Atlanta labor office’s Wage and Hour Division. “So we would definitely be looking at federal minimum wage in that situation.”

While Winslow said the workers agreed to the wage, some recalled the situation differently, saying they were shooed off if they asked for more pay.

“She said that’s all she had to pay the workers, the type of workers that we are,” said Samantha DeLoach, 35, who’s been living on the street for three years.

Lyndell Banks, who lives in the shelter at Central Presbyterian Church, said he knew he was being shorted. He said he spent hours in the summer heat cleaning up around bridges, picking up paper, cutting weeds along sidewalks and handing out Winslow’s fliers door-to-door. When finished, the workers weren’t allowed to keep the Winslow T-shirts, he said.

“At the time, I didn’t have a place to stay,” Banks, 45, said. “And the little bit I do get, it’ll help me get some cigarettes and something to eat.”

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s office would not make anyone available from the city’s legal or finance departments to talk about Winslow’s spending.

“The Law, Procurement and Finance Departments, in collaboration with the Ethics Office and City Council Staff, are reviewing and researching the issues raised,” Reed spokesman Carlos Campos said in an email. “Upon completion of this joint review, these groups will help determine the appropriate next steps.”

City Auditor Leslie Ward audited council member expenses in 2009 and found questionable record-keeping by council members and staff. Among her recommendations was that council members stop being allowed to carry over money in their discretionary accounts from one year to the next.

Nothing has changed since then. By policy, each council member gets $43,000 a year, including postage funds. But by rolling over unused funds, they can fatten their purses by tens of thousands of dollars to use in election years.

In the two years examined by the AJC, Winslow spent $165,000 in discretionary funds, topped by Councilman Kwanza Hall at $218,000 and former Councilman Lamar Willis at $174,000.

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The AJC questions expenses that governments didn’t

Atlanta City Councilwoman Cleta Winslow:

— used taxpayer money to pay Samantha DeLoach and three other homeless people a combined $320 in the three days leading up to her Saturday, Aug. 24, campaign kickoff. DeLoach said she did some trash pickup but spent most of her time handing out fliers for the event.

Winslow maintains that she paid workers out of her campaign fund for campaign work. Following AJC inquiries, she sent a handwritten document to the city’s Ethics Office which she says proves she used campaign money to pay the workers $240 earlier in the week. But her campaign finance disclosure covering the time period doesn’t show any such payments, and she lists only $140 in non-itemized expenses.

— repeatedly charged taxpayers for $30, $40, sometimes $70 in gasoline at a time. The city’s travel policy prescribes mileage reimbursements for use of personal vehicles.

In October 2012, Winslow submitted a receipt for $20 in gas, writing on the top that it was for an AIDS walk at Piedmont Park, about 6 miles from her house. That’s enough fuel for her to circle I-285 twice. She submitted two receipts dated Sept. 2, 2013 — one for $50, listing meetings, a picnic and a race she attended; another for $20 for meetings. That’s enough gas for her to drive to Disney World.

“We move around,” Winslow said. “We take community service workers, moving them from one location to the other. Gas is very expensive. So I’m not wasting taxpayers’ money.”

— charged the city $11 for a bottle of white zinfandel in January 2013 for a “West End business meeting.” City policy forbids alcohol purchases, but no one at the city flagged the receipt. Winslow said she didn’t recall the purchase.

“If I did, I’ll reimburse it,” she said. “Normally, what I do is I usually scratch that out. But everybody makes a mistake every now and then.”

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