Chatham Commission chair: Who best to manage growth?

Back in his office after a recent one-day trip to Washington D.C., Chatham County Commission Chairman Chester Ellis eagerly ticked off his efforts to bring federal government money to the county.

“We laid the foundation for multiple infrastructure grants. I’m asking for total about $950 million,” he said — for transportation, beach erosion, and affordable housing for soldiers stationed at Hunter Air Base and low-income people. The list of projects, government agencies consulted, and meetings held goes on.

Although he rejects the label, Ellis is a pork-barrel politician through and through. He appears to have mastered the craft of finding money in federal and state coffers for projects in Chatham County. But now, as Ellis seeks a second, four-year term as chairman, the question is whether that’s enough.

Everywhere is evidence of the unprecedented growth sweeping Georgia’s fifth-largest county, fueled by expansion of the Port of Savannah and the construction of the vast $7.6 billion Hyundai electric vehicle plant in neighboring Bryan County.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic. Sprawling construction sites crawling with dust-belching earth-moving equipment. Empty fields and swaths of towering pines sprouting “For Sale or Lease” signs at their edges.

Wrangling federal, state and private funds for Chatham’s gnawing infrastructure needs is one thing. Having a vision of how the pieces should fit together for the benefit of Chatham’s burgeoning population of 306,000 people is another.

In a more than 90-minute interview with The Current, the Democratic chairman admitted that he and the commission were caught flat-footed by the port expansion and the Hyundai Metaplant and their ramifications for the county, though he faults state officials for keeping county officials out of the loop. “Are we behind? Yes. Are we catching up? Yes.”

Still, Ellis said that the eight-member commission has “changed its way of doing things” during his four-year term as chairman. He insisted he and the panel are up to the challenge of navigating the county through the hurly-burly — and no doubt fateful — years ahead.

His Republican challenger in this fall’s race, Joel Boblasky, a commercial realtor, disagrees.

“Chatham needs a vision of what its residents want,” Boblasky told The Current. “It needs a leader who will be proactive, see where  the county is going to be and try to address it now, as opposed to reacting to the growth.”

The clock is ticking, Boblasky suggested, citing one outside developer after another converging on Chatham in search of large swaths of land to capitalize on the boom in southeast Georgia. “You’re not going to recognize this area in 15 years.”

For good or ill?

“It depends on leadership and planning.”

The stakes, not the odds

To oust Ellis, Boblasky faces an uphill climb.

A Savannah native who attended the same elementary school as his father, the 53-year-old Boblasky has never held elected office.

Furthermore, Democrats have held the county chairmanship for at least 18 years even though historically, the post hasn’t been hotly partisan.

Boblasky said he was partly prompted to enter the race despite the chances of winning after witnessing a woman being assaulted in the parking lot of a local shopping center.

Twice he called the emergency call center, only to have the phone ring for a half-minute, unanswered. The center called back 20 minutes later. By then, the beaten woman and her assailants had left. “It was scary,” he recalled.

Boblasky’s candidacy now enjoys the support of roughly the same group of well-to-do Savannah business and local Republican political figures seeking to oust both Ellis and Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones.

They hope Democrats, who form roughly 60% of Chatham’s registered voters, split their tickets and vote for Boblasky and Republican district attorney candidate Andre Pretorius.

Boblasky doesn’t view himself as an underdog in the contest for chairman’s job. He’s focused instead on the stakes, not the odds.

In an interview in his southside Savannah office, Boblasky listed as priorities the county’s as-yet unbuilt emergency command center and complaints about fire fees on residents of unincorporated Chatham, as well as what he describes as the proliferation of panhandling on busy county streets.

Still, with Chatham’s population expected mushrooming in the next decade from its current level of 306,000 people, the main pillar of Boblasky’s campaign against Ellis is the need to plan the future of a county that spreads across some 420 square miles.

“I’d like to pump the brakes,” he said. “There’s no point putting a shopping center somewhere if the roads aren’t in place and you’re going to have a traffic jam.”

The important thing, he said, is to “not let the development come and dictate what you do. You have to steer it. You have to say, ‘This is where we want things to be.’ ”

“Developers come in, do a deal, sell it, and leave. They have no ties to the community. It’s all about just doing the deal.”

“I want growth. I just want to make sure it’s done the right way.”

‘He sets the agenda’

When asked during his interview with The Current about his major accomplishments as chairman, Ellis listed his successful effort to prevent the closure of Savannah’s Combat Readiness Center. He also notes that he secured a total of more than $500 million for projects ranging from $450 million for upgrades of C-130Js deployed at the center to $1.9 million in federal funding to map the location of all fire hydrants in Chatham County.

“You don’t hear my name called about none of this stuff, because I’m not a bragger, okay? I don’t go out and sing a song, but I just get something,” he said.

Ellis’ tenure as chairman hasn’t been without controversy.

The Current spoke with more than a half-dozen county officials about Ellis’ chairmanship. Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the commission’s internal deliberations, many described him as headstrong and secretive.

“He sets the agenda,” one official said. “Nothing gets on it unless he puts it there.” Said another: “If you have an opposing point of view, he just gets louder and more belligerent.”

In response to the criticism, Ellis said that while there’s room to improve the commission’s processes, its members “work well together.”

As of January 1, 2025, the chairman will draw an annual base salary of $57,500 and the commissioners, $25,000, following a unanimous vote by the commission last year to give themselves a $10,000 raise.

Contentious moments

During The Current’s interview with Ellis, he was asked to comment about some of his more contentious moments of his term as commission chair.

In July 2022, for instance, he promised to explain the suspension and resignation of county manager Lee Smith, but never did so. In response, he said that a non-disclosure agreement prevented him from fulfilling that pledge.

Later that year, Ellis pushed Chatham County and its eight municipalities — Savannah, Pooler, Garden City, Bloomingdale, Tybee Island, Vernonburg, Thunderbolt, Port Wentworth — to the brink in negotiations over shares of the billion-dollar Local Option Sales Tax (LOST).

That led an unidentified person in his headquarters, the former Chatham County Courthouse on Wright Square, to put a large blow-up figure of Bozo the Clown in the window.

“I met the needs of Chatham County,” said Ellis, looking back.

Earlier this year, Ellis led county officials in donning hard hats at a ground-breaking ceremony at the location for a much-delayed multimillion-dollar, new public safety center. Within two weeks, The Current reported that the county had no construction company under contract at the time of the ceremony.

Ellis acknowledged the deception but said the ceremony was held without a contractor so the airport commission wouldn’t lose a federal government payment of $8 million.

“What we did is save the money,” Ellis said. “The staff will tell you that when the feds started giving us money, one thing we don’t do is give it back.”

‘Nothing to disclose’

Perhaps most controversial of all episodes in Ellis’ term  as chairman was the county’s approval in August 2023 of $1.5 million contract for Program Management Services and Construction Management Services to a partnership made up of Atlanta-based companies AECOM, H.J. Russell & Company, and RG Media Affiliates.

Ellis urged the commission to award the contract to the partnership even though the president of RG Media, Robert Gould, served as Ellis’ campaign manager in 2020, a role he’s reprised during in the current election cycle.

Ellis also received campaign contributions from H.J. Russell vice president Paul Bryant, totaling $2,800 in October and November of 2020. His campaign received a $2,000 donation from H.J. Russell & Company on May 9, 2024, according to recent filings.

District 6 Commissioner Aaron “Adot” Whitely urged Ellis to recuse himself from commission’s vote on the contract but he refused, according to minutes of the meeting.

“There’s nothing I have to disclose in here. None of these companies are connected to me in no kind of how. No kind of way. . . . Nobody at AECOM . . . nobody at Russell is connected to me in no kind of how,” Ellis said.

The contract was approved by a vote of 6-3 and since then, the council has authorized change orders totaling $2.1 million for the same partnership.

“The [county’s] lawyer said I didn’t have a conflict of interest,” says Ellis, adding that the person who spread the allegations of such a conflict before the vote “was upset that the people that he partnered with didn’t get the contract.”

‘Don’t work that way’

Besides his duties as county commission chair, Ellis is senior minister of St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church on Savannah’s east side. He has presided over worship services and preached there nearly every Sunday for the past 11 years.

On a recent Sunday morning, there were only a smattering of worshipers in the pews. Still, they represent the county’s largely Black Democratic political base that powered Ellis to victory over former Tybee Island Mayor Jason Buelterman in 2020 and he hopes will do so again this year.

Just as he’s a hands-on commission chairman, Ellis is a hands-on preacher. His parishioners expect it and over the years he has delivered, which explains at least partly both his political success and the challenge facing Boblasky, his Republican opponent.  

During a Bible study preceding the formal worship service, Ellis recounted how he provided each of his three daughters with a car because he didn’t want them ever waiting for a ride.

As a school teacher for 37 years and a coach for 27, he said that he’d often stood outside with students waiting for up to two hours until a parent or somebody else came to pick them up. He wasn’t going to allow his daughters to go through that.

During announcements, Ellis warns against a scam aimed at the elderly by people pretending to be city or county workers and offering to pick up storm debris for $50. “Please don’t let folks separate you from your money.” He urges any witness to the scam to call or email him at his commission address.

He advises the men in the pews to get prostate exams. “Prostate cancer ain’t no joke,” he says, having suffered a bout of cancer but recovered.

His sermon, which stretches nearly 45 minutes, winds through the issues of the day.

“God had no respect of person. It got nothing to do with whether you black, white, blue, green, Democrat, Republican, Independent, huh? All those other things. What God wants you to do is God wants us to live together according to what His will and His plan.”

“I’ve been preaching this since I’ve been chairman of Chatham County: It does not matter which one of the municipalities you live in. You still only live in one Chatham. There’s only one Chatham County.”

“We’re voting in 2024, and some folk want us to go back to 2020, even back to 2016. We ain’t got time to looking back, Paul says. We need to be moving forward, because God has a forward plan and not a backward plan.”

After the service, a visitor notes that his role as a preacher reveals another part of his role as commission chair.

“I don’t believe I would be chairman of the county if I wasn’t divinely appointed and anointed to be there,” he replied. And that, he continued, is what other commission members don’t understand.

“I’m listening to what the Lord says and they’re trying to tell me” something else. And I say, ‘Hmmm, it don’t work that way. He didn’t say it like that.’ ”

UPDATE Oct. 27, 2024 at 11:56 a.m.: This story was updated to include another donation by H.J. Russell to Ellis’ campaign from May 2024.