Toccoa’s 2017 Mayor and Vice-Mayor Selections Remain Unresolved in Public Agenda

Toccoa’s City Commission was scheduled to choose a mayor and vice mayor for calendar year 2017 during its Dec. 19, 2016 meeting at City Hall, but the meeting agenda leaves the outcome unresolved. The agenda identifies the annual leadership election as business before the commission, yet it names no selected officials and records no motion, vote or disposition for the item.

The unanswered result matters because those designations show residents how the city’s governing body was organized in 2017. The document establishes that commissioners planned to consider the selections; it does not establish that they approved them, postponed them or rejected them. Without a record of action, the public account cannot determine who held either role or how the commission reached a decision.

The meeting was the commission’s final regularly scheduled session of 2016. WNEG Radio reported that commissioners moved it forward by a week because Dec. 26 was a city holiday, and that the 5 p.m. meeting was expected to include an election from among the commissioners for mayor and vice mayor in the coming year. The official agenda then placed that election before the body, but does not document what followed.

The principal participants were the city commissioners, who were expected to select the mayor and vice mayor from among themselves, according to WNEG Radio’s pre-meeting report. The agenda also set aside time for public comment and included other city business, including alcohol-license renewals, a setback-variance hearing and consideration of a 2017 planning meeting. Neither the agenda nor the report identifies candidates, nominations, individual commissioner positions or public comments about the leadership posts.

What is established is limited: the Dec. 19 agenda proposed consideration of the 2017 leadership election. No result, motion, vote count or selected mayor or vice mayor appears in that agenda. The absence of names does not show that the commission failed to choose leaders; it shows only that this agenda does not document whether the action was completed, delayed or handled another way.

The next concrete public step is to locate an authoritative city record from the Dec. 19 meeting that states what happened to the election item. Until such a record is found, residents cannot resolve whether Toccoa named a mayor and vice mayor for 2017, which commissioners received the designations, or whether the commission took a formal vote or another type of action.