Politics & Government
Watkinsville Mayor And Council At Odds Over City Charter
The Mayor and Council held two meetings last week. One went without major controversy. The second was full of conflict.
After an eight- hour retreat of the Watkinsville Mayor and Council on Monday of last week, Brian Brodrick, mayor pro tem and the longest serving member of the Council, praised his colleagues, including new Mayor Bob Smith, for their team play.
Brodrick made the comment even though Smith had surprised the Council at the retreat with a proposed revision of the City Charter that would that would reverse the action by the Council at the end last year–just before Smith took office–delegating to the city manager some of the duties of the mayor.
The existing charter allowed for that delegation. Smith’s new charter would reverse it.
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No one on Council at the retreat offered any support for Smith’s proposal, and the meeting closed with Brodrick’s upbeat assessment of the day.
At 4:31 p.m. on Wednesday, Smith sent an email to members of the Council calling a meeting for 6 p.m. on Thursday to give first reading to his proposed City Charter and to approve a forensic audit of city spending and of city zoning and planning.
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Council offered no support for either of these proposals at the called meeting, and Smith went to the citizen podium to make a nearly 40-minute-long impassioned recitation of his complaints about his first two-and-a-half months in office.
Brodrick, seated at the Council table, offered a just more than seven-minute response that was very different in tone from the one he gave at the end of Monday’s meeting, lamenting the “friction” between the Mayor and Council and saying that “true leadership requires us to work together.”
Marci Campbell, the only other Council member to speak, said she wanted “to echo what Councilman Brodrick said. I really want us to work together.”
Late yesterday, Watkinsville City Manager Sharyn Dickerson sent out an email indicating that the Mayor and Council’s scheduled March 18 meeting had been postponed.
The Oconee County Republican Party also will not hold its county convention as scheduled for Saturday, party Chair Steven Strickland has announced. Persons interested in serving as a delegate at the district or state convention should email Strickland at oconeegopchair@gmail.com.
For more on this story, with videos of the retreat and the called meeting of the Mayor and Council, please go to Oconee County Observations.