Candidates competing to become the next chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners showcased their knowledge of government operations and issues affecting their constituents on Wednesday during a Jeopardy!-styled event.
Incumbent Chair Robb Pitts and two would-be successors — Commissioners Mo Ivory and Marvin Arrington Jr. — showed up for the forum. The event was attended by about 50 local residents inside the office of MBEC Global in Atlanta’s Pittsburgh neighborhood.
Capital B Atlanta and Atlanta Civic Circle co-sponsored the game show-styled gathering aimed at testing candidates’ knowledge of county government. Capital B Atlanta Community Engagement Editor Ann Hill Bond and Atlanta Civic Circle Executive Editor Saba Long co-moderated the event, peppering the commissioners with prewritten questions.
Organizers said Ivory won the competition, which underscored her and Arrington’s efforts to turn the page on Pitts’ tenure as chair of the board.
Pitts, 84, has served as chairman since 2017. He spent a lot of time Wednesday defending his tenure, during which the more-affluent, northern half of Fulton County has flourished economically while mostly Black residents of the territory’s southern and southwest areas have suffered through regional healthcare disparities, stagnant economic development, a backlog of cases at the county courthouse, and horrific conditions inside the county jail.
“It’s not a secret [southern] Fulton county is underserved,” Ivory said during the forum. “A hospital is coming, but there needs to be more than one. We need to place an emphasis on South Fulton. It has been underfunded.”
The commission chair sets the agenda for issues being voted on by the board, including whether to raise property taxes and how much money to allocate to county services such as the jail and courts.
Arrington voiced support for building a new Rice Street jail rather than rehabbing the existing one, which has been plagued with inmate deaths that led to a federal government consent decree.
“The place is filthy,” Arrington said during the event. “We have people that are crawling through brick walls to assault other inmates.”
Pitts clapped back at critics by pointing to Fulton County’s succes. The region has become recognized as one of the best places to live in the country.
“People are flocking here from all over the world to live here,” Pitts said. “Your local government has a lot to do with that.”
Toward the end of the event, news broke that a federal judge had denied the commissioners’ request to have the county’s 2020 election ballots returned.
It’s been nearly four months since FBI agents took the ballots from the county’s Union City-based Elections Hub and Operation Center at President Donald Trump’s behest in an apparent attempt to support the president’s long-held, baseless claims of widespread election fraud taking place in Georgia nearly six years ago.
All three commissioners disagreed with the decision, but Arrington said it’s irrelevant at this point because there’s no way of knowing if the ballots have been tampered with.
“There’s no way that anything can be trusted,” Arrington said. “Once the chain of custody was broken, the ballots are worthless. We might as well use them as Charmin tissue.”
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