About The champion newspaper. (Decatur, GA) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 17, 2019)
LOCAL THE CHAMPION, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17-23, 2019 • Page 6 PROTEST Continued From Page 1 LARY Continued From Page 1 of violation of oath of office. Olsen was indicted by a grand jury in 2016 for shooting and killing veteran Hill in March of 2015. Hill was unarmed at the time and family members said he was suffering from a mental health episode. In the four years leading up to trial, social justice groups held protests, a DeKalb judge recused himself from the case without offering explanation and Olsen’s attorney Don Samuels called the grand jury trial a media “circus.” Olsen will be sentenced on Nov. 1. He could face up to 35 years in prison if DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Latisha Dear Jackson decides to sentence Olsen consecutively. Jackson set bond for Olsen at $80,000, ordered him to wear an ankle monitor and imposed a 7 p.m. curfew until sentencing. Hill’s mother, Caroline Guimmo, wiped away tears as jurors read the verdict. Olsen’s Olsen wife was escorted from the courtroom, crying loudly as she left. “It’s been four years that we’ve been waiting for this. My son is no longer here,” Guimmo said. Olsen’s defense team argued that Olsen was in fear for his life when Hill refused to listen to commands for him to stop and put his hands up. During the trial, witnesses stated Hill did raise his hands and slowed to a walk when approaching Olsen just moments before being shot. Samuels said Olsen was an excellent police officer with no history of excessive force. “After seven years on the police force, no citizen ever complained about [Robert] Olsen,” Samuels said. “What this case comes down to is, was Chip Olsen reasonable in fear on March 15 that afternoon? Was it reasonable for him to be fearful of imminent violence?” Prosecutor Buffy Thomas said Olsen could have used other means of subduing Hill. “He immediately reached for his firearm. The only lethal weapon on his belt,” Thomas said. “He yelled stop twice and then he shoots him.” ETHICS Continued From Page 1 the board’s current members were appointed unconstitutionally. Some of the amendments would require county employees to file complaints with human resource departments before filing with the ethics board, allow the county CEO to have a representative on the ethics committee and change the ethics officer position to an ethics administrator. Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, said the proposed changes weaken the structure of DeKalb’s ethics board. “My initial thoughts were that this is an attempt by the DeKalb administration to take back control of an ethics committee,” Wolpe said. “Some amendments are appropriate, but a lot, in fact, are problematic.” Wolpe said one problematic change is requiring county employees to file a complaint with human resources departments. “That breaks the confidence and trust of employees and deters people from bringing forth ethics complaints. That’s a breach of ethics and there’s no reasonable justification for it,” Wolpe said. Wolpe said he also takes issue with the change in roles of an ethics officer. Traditionally, an ethics officer is someone with an expertise in ethics, such as a lawyer, Wolpe said. The amendments changed the minimum requirements from someone with a doctorate degree in ethics to a bachelor's degress. “They turned an expert position into a clerical position. This person will have less authority and won’t be able to train county employees in ethics,” Wolpe said. Former board of ethics member Patricia Killingworth, a retired attorney, said she’s frustrated with the proposed changes. Killingworth, who worked for DeKalb’s board of ethics for a decade, said DeKalb residents made it clear how the ethics board should be run. In 2015, DeKalb residents voted to overhaul the former ethics board system. One of the major changes includes ethics board members being appointed by independent groups rather than being appointed by DeKalb’s CEO and commissioners. The changes were proposed by the DeKalb Government Operations Task Force, a group of community leaders and government officials appointed by then Interim DeKalb CEO Lee May, and Blueprint DeKalb—a group of DeKalb residents focused on ethics changes in the county. “The changes were researched for two years. It was an extensive process and one of the key points that came out of that was the clear preference for appointments to be made by independent groups,” Killingworth said. Killingworth said DeKalb voters need to educate themselves on the details of the bill. “If this amendment passes and goes forward, it will cost the county a lot more time and money. The ethics board will be back in the hands of the CEO,” Killingworth said. Killingworth said before changes were made to the ethics board in 2015, the board had issues performing basic duties. “It was frustrating,” Killingworth said. “I think board members were trying to do a good job but we didn’t have money or any funding. We didn’t have an investigator or any backup to pursue claims. I know it was frustrating for people filing the complaints. “I don’t think we were taken seriously by elected officials. That’s what it felt like. There were a lot of letters sent to board of commissioners asking for support.” Mall of Stonecrest corridor and $200 million in the city’s industrial parks. “That’s where the real jobs and money are coming from because distribution and light manufacturing are coming back on shore and it’s not being pushed out to China and these other places like it used to be,” he said. “So, we’ve done an excellent job of marketing our two industrial parks— Panola Industrial Park and Stonecrest Industrial Park [formerly Lithonia Industrial Park], People are building and constructing and contracting over there. “We’re exploding in residential construction,” Lary continued. “We have more construction going on than any city in DeKalb County. Everyone wants to come to Stonecrest.” He added that he is “flat out more than confident” that the city will create several thousand jobs and add more than a billion dollars in infrastructure over the next two to five years. “And that’s what we’ve been waiting for,” Lary said. Lary is being challenged by former city councilwoman Diane Adoma and Charles Hill, who ran against Lary in the 2017 mayoral race, in the Nov. 5 election. Both opponents have been critical of Lary’s leadership and point out that the city has lost businesses, specifically big-chain businesses such as Sam’s. Lary said he believes he has been a good leader and that he can’t help that national businesses are going out of business. “What people don’t understand is that every time one of these big boxes goes out of business, there’s two more distribution companies looking to move in there,” he said. “We have the [former] Sam’s building under contract and it’s going to be a good central mechanism of the downtown that we’re building for the center of Stonecrest.” Lary also mentioned the city’s recent purchase of the former Sears building at The Mall at Stonecrest, which will be Stonecrest’s new public safety building. The city plans to share the public safety building with DeKalb County Police Department. “I’ve done all of this with a zero tax, zero millage rate,” he said. “So, the people that are saying that I haven’t done a good job, or talk about my leadership, how can that possibly be when I had all of this created without a tax?” Lary said he hopes voters put him back in office so that he can continue to fulfill the promises that he made to residents. “Give me a chance to finish the work I started,” he said. “Two years is not enough to achieve the goals that the people want in southeast DeKalb. At least give me another term to do what I said I was going to do because I’ve kept my word on everything.”
