Snellville Battle Over City Attorney’s Job Ends Up in Georgia Supreme Court
It has been a bit of a soap opera at Snellville City Hall over the last two years. The mayor and city council have been in a very public power struggle which has now made its way to the Supreme Court of Georgia.Broadcast Version
Not long after Kelly Kautz was elected mayor of Snellville in 2011, she told City Attorney Anthony Powell she wanted to replace him. But the five-member city council wanted to keep Powell, and thus began a long series of events that ended up in court.
“This usually doesn’t happen in public,” says WABE legal analyst Page Pate. “These decisions are usually made pretty much by agreement or consensus. And I’ve seen plenty of city attorneys resign when they felt they no longer had the confidence of either the mayor or the city council. So I think this is a rare situation, but it points out a problem in the way these ordinances have been drafted.”
The problem: Snellville’s charter says clearly the mayor has the power to appoint the city attorney but does not say who has the right to fire the city attorney. Pate believes the law is on the side of the mayor, but the final word on the issue may come in the form of new law. “I think the ordinance itself is sloppy, but many municipalities have the same language,” says Pate. So it needs to be drafted better.”
Arguments in the Snellville case begin before the state’s highest court Tuesday, Jan. 6.
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