(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.”…