(The Center Square) – Augusta-Richmond County’s consolidated government apparently doesn’t track supplemental pay to employees in any modern, easily-accessible data-keeping format.
Several requests from The Center Square under the Georgia Open Records Act have been met with high cost estimates, indicating intensive labor needed to locate the records, or in some cases total silence. After seven weeks of haggling, the city finally backed off its high prices and said it will release the data before Christmas.
“I think it’s safe to say that they do not have recordkeeping on par with other large cities that you’ve dealt with,” said Clare Norins, a board member of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation. “That’s an accountability concern that they aren’t able to produce this data.”
Home of the Masters Tournament, Augusta sits along Georgia’s eastern border with South Carolina and has long been considered the state’s second-largest city. It lost that title to Columbus earlier in the decade, but may have regained it depending on different population estimates.
The population currently stands around 206,000 – a count derived from the city’s merger with Richmond County in 1996. Today, the combined city-county government employs more than 2,500 people, with a $1.35 billion budget.
Since mid-October, The Center Square has asked the city for spreadsheets of employee salaries, overtime pay, cash outs of sick leave or vacation leave, terminations, and annual pension payments – records other cities and counties across the nation often provide for little or no cost to members of the news media.
Atlanta, for example, whose government employs three times the number of people as Augusta’s, provided its information in four spreadsheets at no cost.
Augusta initially responded that assembling the information would require more than 187 hours of labor. The quoted cost: $2,969, required up front.
Ryan Mulvey, senior attorney for Americans for Prosperity Foundation called the records “pretty basic personnel data, that you’d think would be in a reasonably easy, retrievable format.”
“You might be able to get better insight into how taxpayer dollars are being spent in government – at least when it comes to personnel issues – when you are getting information like (overtime pay), than what you would get from base salary data,” Mulvey said.
As a case in point, New Orleans’ current financial crisis has been partly blamed on overspending on overtime.
“There’s always possibility of instances of fraud, waste and abuse,” Mulvey said. “Having a complete picture of the amount of money that’s being spent in government gives you a better idea of whether things are working efficiently, or whether there’s room for reform.”
Augusta’s records officer explained that the request was complicated because it asked for so many specific data fields that would have to be assembled and added.
So the Center Square amended its request, asking for the databases in whatever form they are currently kept, so that no additional labor would be needed other than producing the records electronically and removing personal information.
The city produced a salary spreadsheet – which did not include overtime or other payments to employees – for a cost of $33. But for the balance of the records, the city still wanted $1,883, for about 119 hours of labor.
Julie Schweber, of the Society for Human Resource Management, said most large employers and large government agencies use automated systems to keep up with payroll, overtime, retiree cash outs, terminations and resignations, and other workforce data points. Software programs allow for the data to be exported into spreadsheets, which leaders rely on to forecast future employee turnover, expected retirements, and department-by-department overtime spending.
“It doesn’t seem like a good way to manage a business if they can’t produce this information,” said Schweber, of SHRM’s HR Knowledge Solutions, speaking generally and not specifically about Augusta. “Otherwise, how do you do your budgeting for the year as the head of an agency – state, federal, local, city? It’s usually part of the standard labor cost when you’re budgeting for the next year.”
Hoping to find out why Augusta’s cost remained so high, The Center Square filed three new requests, separately, for the outstanding items.
The city quoted a cost of $416 for employee terminations data, saying that producing a spreadsheet would take more than 26 hours of labor.
For the pension payments, the city said this information is actually in the possession of the Georgia Municipal Employee Benefit System, not with the Augusta government.
For employee cash outs, the city said it needed until Dec. 1 to produce records. That date came and went, though, with no word from the city and no explanation.
The Center Square tried again to obtain some of the missing information – this time asking for overtime payments and other compensation to all city employees and elected officials dating back to 2023. Again, the request asked for the data in whatever form it is currently kept.
Georgia’s open records law allows government agencies three days to respond to requests. Within that time, they can turn over the requested records; respond that the records don’t exist; respond that they do exist but are exempt from release, citing the exceptions in the law; or provide a timetable for producing the records with a cost estimate.
After three days and with no response from the city, The Center Square sought an explanation. The city’s open records officer replied, “August (sic) currently has no update to provide on this request.”
Norins, of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, examined The Center Square’s requests and the city’s responses. She said she does not believe Augusta has been intentionally operating in bad faith.
“It seems like they can’t (produce the records), from looking at this,” said Norins, who is also director of the University of Georgia School of Law’s First Amendment Clinic. “Or they may not even have a great sense of what they actually have and where it is, so their estimate is coming somewhat out of the air.”
The Center Square reached out to the office of Augusta Mayor Garnett Johnson and a city spokeswoman, seeking to know why the city would have such difficulty producing the personnel data. No explanation has been provided, but late last week the city responded that its IT department needs ten more business days to create new reports, and the records will be provided at no charge.
When open records requests are filed through the city’s online portal, a boilerplate automatic response says, “Augusta, Georgia, recognizes that full compliance with the requirements of the Georgia Open Records Act is a vital and essential component of creating and maintaining public trust and enhancing the consolidated government’s effectiveness.”
