Augusta Commission members love to travel at taxpayers’ expense | The Augusta Chronicle

Augusta Commission members’ love of learning is exceeded only by their love to travel. For the third time in as many months, they’re at a conference. Five of them anyway. Alvin Mason, Corey Johnson, Bill Lockett, Bill Fennoy and Marion Williams are attending the four-day National Association of Counties conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

“I’m deep in the heart of Texas trying to get educated,” Williams said. “I’m trying to learn something to bring home. There’s a lot going on. We’re looking at their transit system. The bus system is working so good in Texas, they run every 15 minutes.”

Commissioners who love to get out of town are lucky. Because the city and county are consolidated, there’s only one governing body, but when it comes to travel, they act like there are still two. The city pays hefty dues to separate state and national organizations that represent city and county governments, and commissioners can go to any group’s conferences – expenses paid by you.

So far this year, local taxpayers have paid for commissioners and other city officials to attend the Georgia Munic­ipal Asso­ciation conference in Savannah in June; the Asso­cia­tion County Commis­sioners of Georgia conference in Savannah in July, plus their legislative conferences in Atlanta. Then there’s the NACO conference and the National League of Cities conference in Seattle in November. The only commissioner to attend the latter in recent years was Johnson, who went to Denver in 2010.

Commissioner Joe Jackson, who signed up for this year’s NACO conference but backed out, said he tried to get commissioners to agree to drop the pricey memberships in the national organizations two years ago, but then-Commissioner and Fi­nance Committee Chairman Jerry Brigham prevailed when he argued for continuing them.

via Augusta Commission members love to travel at taxpayers’ expense | The Augusta Chronicle.