The Chatham County Commission has suffered another legal setback in its attempts to reinstate the disbanded board of directors of the region’s transit authority.
Superior Court Judge Timothy R. Walmsley on Friday ordered the commission and its chairman, Chester Ellis, to immediately stop any attempts to restore Chatham Area Transit’s former, nine-member board, which was replaced July 1 by an expanded panel with broader regional representation.
Walmsley’s ruling is a victory for the reconfigured board, which asked the court for the emergency injunction. It is also the latest turn in a monthslong legal battle that has roiled the usually placid relations between the commission and Ellis, on the one hand, and the area’s legislative delegation to Atlanta and local business and political leaders, on the other.
At issue in Friday’s hearing was whether alleged efforts by Ellis and the commission to create a parallel board of directors posed “irreparable harm” to CAT.
Testifying on behalf of the new board, Faye DiMassimo, CAT’s former executive director, said such a board would cause confusion over who is in charge and “absolutely” inflict harm on the transit system and the more than 2 million trips it supplies to users each year.
Under questioning by David Dove, a lawyer for the Atlanta-based law firm of Troutman Pepper Locke LLP who represented CAT’s new board, the commission’s Ellis gave credence to that claim.
After concurring with Dove that his post as commission chairman was akin to a CEO’s, he conceded that Chatham County could not function with two CEOs — an acknowledgement that CAT could not function with two boards, either.
Walmsley evidently agreed with that reasoning, granting the current CAT board’s motion for a temporary restraining order. He scheduled a full hearing on the board’s lawsuit for Oct. 7.
Two-track legal strategy
At the center of the struggle over CAT’s board is a new law, House Bill 756, mandating its overhaul. With the backing of local Democratic and Republican state lawmakers, the legislation, was approved by the state legislature during this year’s session and signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp in May.
The measure’s supporters hailed its passage, seeing it as a long overdue shakeup of the transit authority, which had a history of dysfunction and scandal they said made it ill-equipped to address the transportation challenges of a rapidly growing region.
Even though CAT is an independent agency created by the state legislature, not Chatham County, Ellis and the commission view the reconfigured board mandated by the new law as a breach of so-called home rule provisions in Georgia’s constitution and an infringement of its rights as the county’s governing body to control a majority of the CAT board’s seats.
Unsaid, but no less important, for Ellis and the commission are the board appointments, job openings on its workforce of more than 300 people, and influence over contracts under its $30 million operating budget that serve as patronage in exchange for political support.
The commission sued CAT in late May to prevent the new law’s implementation, with Walmsley also hearing that case. He dismissed it, saying that since the state legislature had the constitutional right to modify transit authorities since it created them.
“None of the plaintiffs have a legal right to continue in those seats for any particular length of time where that board may be altered, amended, or dissolved by the General Assembly at any point,” he wrote in his 13-page ruling.
Undeterred, the commission appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court, where a hearing is scheduled for December.
Meanwhile, the commission and its lawyers also set out to restore the disbanded board through a vote of its nine members.
By a vote of 6-2, it approved the measure on second reading on Sept. 5, setting the stage for the current board’s request for an emergency injunction and Walmsley’s granting it.