AUGUSTA, GA – Apparently, last week’s Insider column about who was behind the balance of power in the city’s consolidation bill surprised a few folks out there.

It appears many people were under the impression that “felons” such as former state Sen. Charles Walker and former state Rep. Robin Williams were the ones who crafted the 1995 bill intended to promote “shared power” between the black and white community.

While Walker surely played a major role in ironing out the bill, some Augustans were surprised that highly respected, former state Rep. Jack Connell was also behind establishing a 50/50 racial split on the commission.

And the fact that David Hudson, one of the brightest attorneys in town (despite the fact of also being the attorney for The Augusta Chronicle), helped draw up the bill was equally eye opening for some readers in Augusta.

Now, Hudson will be the first to tell you that creating the consolidation bill was not easy.
Hudson, who served as the legal advisor to Augusta’s consolidation efforts in the mid-1990s, had a battle on his hands.

“Well, let me tell you, it wasn’t an altogether pretty process,” Hudson once told the Augusta Charter Committee, which was formed in 2001 to review the city’s 1995 consolidation bill to see if changes were needed. “There were a series of meetings, maybe 20 to 25, with a delegation from the business community and a delegation from the black community consisting of (state Rep.) Ben Allen, Charles Walker, some ministers and labor union folks. And most of the debate was, ‘Well, we are going to consolidate the government but the whites are in the majority and how are we going to protect minority interests?’ And that was negotiated back and forth.”

When a draft of the bill went before the General Assembly in Atlanta, Hudson explained that it went nowhere.

So this is what happened: Hudson, who at the time was arguing a case before the Georgia Court of Appeals in Atlanta, happened to stop by former state Rep. Jack Connell’s office to inquire about the status of the bill.

“Connell said, ‘We’ve got logjam. We don’t have anything to protect minority purchasing power or equal access to the government,’” Hudson told the charter committee in 2001.“So, we sat around a table over there [in Atlanta] one day — Charles Walker, Connell and myself — and we wrote it [the consolidation bill] out long-hand and Connell gave it to his secretary to type up.

“Then, Walker took it around to members of his delegation and Jack [Connell] took it around to members of his delegation and that broke the logjam.”

The consolidation bill was eventually passed, but it wasn’t a thoroughly researched and planned out process, Hudson told the charter committee.

“It was just about sitting around a table and negotiating,” Hudson said. “It was not the best of circumstances.”

And the truth of the matter was that the financial state of the city put a lot of pressure on trying to get the consolidation bill passed.

Because, simply put, the city was going broke.

“That’s what drove us to do it,” Hudson told the charter committee in 2001. “As much as there were provisions in the bill that nobody really liked, everyone was aware that the financial situation of the city of Augusta was so poor that the two governments had to be put together. So, that’s how it happened.”

So, for those who want to blame our famous “felons” Walker and Williams for creating a bill that has deeply divided this city, you may need to point your fingers elsewhere. There is enough blame to go around.

The truth of the matter is the goal of the consolidation bill was to establish a 50/50 split on the commission and that goal has been achieved for the past 13 years.

That is why the outcome of the District 1 race between Matt Aitken and Bill Fennoy is so worrisome to some in theblack community.

Barbara Gordon, former charter committee member and publisher of The Metro Courier, probably summed it up best when she tried to explain how the black community views possible changes to the city charter.

“We like to think that Augusta is just one big community, but the reality is we have a black community and we have a white community. It’s unfortunate, but true,” Gordon said in 2001. “And when we look at the history of consolidation from a black perspective, we knowwe have to take that fact into consideration when making our decision because we have acommunity that is still very much racially divided.”