July 18, 2017

Author:  Tim Becker

We are posting video of last night’s Council meeting.  Council Member Karen Thurman went on a tirade that lasted over 10 minutes.  She insulted, patronized, and attacked the citizen-audience and embarrassed her fellow Council members.  Once again, she digressed from issues of policy and made personal attacks on citizens, even calling out one citizen by name multiple times.  It was a sad spectacle for the City.

About 30 Milton Coalition supporters attended; no one attended in support of Ms. Thurman.  Several citizens walked out in disgust before Ms. Thurman even finished her comments.  The attacks from Ms. Thurman elicited pushback from the audience several times.

The purpose of the Council agenda item was to discuss the City’s response to the Milton Herald’s story about changing District 1’s boundaries.  Council Member Matt Kunz pushed for this agenda item citing a single tweet from a citizen as the impetus for the agenda item . . . that’s right, a single tweet.  So please tweet your agenda items to Mr. Kunz . . . that is now how we are drafting City Council agendas . . . government by tweet.  You could tell from the City Attorney’s initial comments (in City-Attorney speak) that he was trying to wave off Council from pursing the redistricting topic.  He could clearly see the risk of embarrassment to the City—a risk that became manifest as the discussion proceeded.  However, Ms. Thurman came loaded for bear and was determined to fire all her ammunition, which she did.

Milton Herald Story: Milton Coalition Questions Redistricting

Ms. Thurman returned immediately to her themes of hatred, bullying, and negativity.  However, this time she did so without verses from the New Testament; this time, it was pure old Testament fire-and-brimstone stuff.  It was quite a nasty and personal attack on her critics.  At one point, the City Attorney, backed by the Mayor, warned Ms. Thurman that some of her comments were inappropriate and that she needed to restrain herself.

We suggest watching the video at least twice.  First, watch it with a focus on Ms. Thurman and ask yourself:  Is this really how a Council Member should interact with citizens, even those who have pointedly criticized her on policy?  The second time you watch it, focus on the other Council members.  If there is any doubt about Ms. Thurman’s impropriety, Council’s expressions, body language, and gestures demonstrate their shock, disgust, discomfort, disapproval, etc. of Ms. Thurman’s tone and comments.

Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, Ms. Thurman’s current stance is “That’s my story and I am sticking to it.”  We do want to address some of Ms. Thurman’s points.

• Thurman contends this district change only affected Council members because it did not affect how a single person voted (as voting is at-large), so there was no need to get citizen input. However, this is backwards logic.  At-large voting means all citizens vote for all 6 Council Members, regardless of district.  That means all 6 Council Members represent all citizens.  Therefore, there is no need to change district lines in order to represent any particular set of voters.  However, the district change did affect how citizens vote.  Ms. Thurman should have relinquished her seat because of her move, and an election should have been held to fill her open seat.  This did not happen, so the district change essentially disenfranchised all of Milton’s voters. Furthermore, it denied all of the voters in District 1 the opportunity to run for Ms. Thurman’s District 1 seat.
• Repeatedly, Ms. Thurman stated that at the time of the district change, she did not intend to move to the lot she purchased in The Estates at Atlanta National. She even stated that she did not know whether the lot was even buildable, but who pays $115,000 for a potentially unbuildable lot?  However, consider the following:
  • Thurman bought the lot in EAN on December 18, 2014.
  • By her own admission, Thurman lobbied Representative Jones to change the district lines before the legislative session began on January 12, 2015, so within a month of her purchase of the lot in EAN.
  • Thurman implies that this was purely coincidental. She contends she had no intent to move to EAN at the time the bill (to change the district lines) was introduced and passed.  However, consider this e-mail excerpt with Jan Jones on March 22, 2015 (3 months after she purchased her lot in EAN and a mere 4 days after the district change bill passed the Georgia House.)

We are still hoping to be able to build another house. The soil is not good on the lot so we are waiting to see if we can get another plan drawn up that will include bringing in soil that will perc.

So in the 3 months after the lot was purchased, Ms. Thurman clearly had a plan drafted for her new home . . . this shows she did have an intent to move to EAN while district lines were being changed.  Because of septic issues, she had to have new plans drafted, which clearly solved the septic issues.  Furthermore, the e-mail excerpt implies that Ms. Thurman and Ms. Jones had previously discussed the home at EAN.  So it astounds us that Ms. Thurman continues to assert there was no intent to move at the time the bill was drafted, introduced, and passed.

• Thurman mercilessly attacked the Milton Herald. She accused the newspaper of creating fake news, of numerous factual errors, and of being a tabloid.  She went on to threaten the Milton Herald by asserting that the City should drop the newspaper as its outlet for legal notices.  She complained that the newspaper would not run her letter-to-the-editor at the same time as the story about the redistricting.  She also complained that she had to limit her letter-to-the-editor to 500 words . . . BTW, citizens are limited to about 300 words.  She complained about the length of comments from citizens at the on-line article, although she is free (like anyone else) to post comments there.  She complained that the newspaper did not follow her directives about how to write the story and that her comments were too few and provided too far into the story.
• The City Attorney revealed that he was not aware of the district change at the time it occurred. This was shocking as the City Attorney is the person most responsible for ensuring that Council follows good governance practices.  We did notice that Thurman left the City Attorney off the correspondence in the matter of the redistricting.  Had the City Attorney been in the loop, he likely would have steered Council in a different direction—e.g., urged Council to put the redistricting on a Council Agenda.  Was the City Attorney purposely kept in the dark?
• Thurman refused to conduct a town hall meeting with citizens to answer their questions. She explained that she had invited one citizen to meet with her and that citizen had refused.  That apparently was the public’s one opportunity to ask questions.  We don’t really understand the connection between one citizen’s refusal to meet with Ms. Thurman and Ms. Thurman’s refusal to hold a town hall meeting.  We suppose it is easier to just rant and rave from the City Council dais than engage citizens in honest dialogue.

We are also including Ms. Thurman’s speech from the citizens’ podium on July 10, 2017, which is also disconcerting to watch.

We are deeply concerned about Ms. Thurman’s behavior in the Council Chamber.  Ms. Thurman’s behavior seems designed to bully citizens into not speaking in opposition to her policies and her actions as a government official.  Screaming from the Council dais, calling out citizens by name, and referring to her critics as “hateful” is completely beyond the pale of appropriate behavior from a government official.

Also, we have become aware that Ms. Thurman has filed an Open Records Request (ORR) to obtain, for a two-year period, all communications between all members of all committees, commissions, and City Council and a member of the Milton Coalition.  This is clearly an attempt to dredge up information to discredit and disparage a citizen advocate.  Many hundreds of hours of government officials’ time will be wasted on a fishing expedition.  We will provide a future post on this issue, once we obtain a copy of the ORR.