In my last article, I highlighted a highly suspicious timeline first detailed in the August county commission meeting: immediately after Audia Group sued Walker County over a broken expansion agreement, county workers began secretly testing soil and water at the industrial park. (Audia is the company that invested nearly $90 million here after the county lured them in with promises the county now disavows.)
Now, in a new article from Tamara Wolk, the county’s PR department has finally issued a statement. The spin is breathtaking.
The Phantom Complaint and the Tap Water Distraction
First, the county claims this whole episode was triggered by a “citizen complaint” about plastic beads. Oddly, they didn’t include this supposed complaint with their press release. I guess it’s classified under “Top Secret Plastics Emergencies.”
Then, county spokesman Joe Legge made a emphasized how they did not sample the public drinking-water system.
Thanks for clearing that up! Unfortunately literally no-one claimed the county tested the tap water. Citizens wanted to know what was in the soil and surface water tests your team actually collected. Answering a question about undisclosed soil and water tests by bragging that you didn’t test the drinking water is like getting pulled over for speeding and telling the deputy, “Officer, I’ll have you know I didn’t steal this car.” It’s technically true but definitely raises some red flags.
And quick question . . . where does the county think stormwater runoff goes? A alternate dimension? No, it eventually feeds right into the streams and groundwater that supply our drinking water.
Sewer Shenanigans
The PR statement conveniently glossed over the fact that county employees tried to access the company’s private sanitary sewers—twice.
The county defends itself by saying it has authority under Chapter 16 of the county code. That basically gives them the legal right to monitor outdoor runoff and investigate illicit discharges into the stormwater system.
Nobody is debating that. But having permission to regulate everything concerning a drainage ditch doesn’t grant an unrestricted right to access a private sanitary or combined sewer over the owner’s objection. Walker County doesn’t even run a sewer utility! Additionally, the county’s own ordinance provides a search-warrant procedure if inspection access is refused. They didn’t use it. The county’s statement doesn’t address any of that.
Then comes a neat trick to withhold the actual lab results. While Chairwoman Angie Teems first claimed litigation as the reason for witholding records, the county now claims it can’t release the data to the public because it’s tied to an “ongoing investigation by a regulatory agency.”
Do you know who triggered that state investigation? An attorney representing the Walker County Development Authority. . .the county’s own co-defendant in the federal lawsuit. . . .who called the Georgia EPD on July 1 to lodge a complaint.
So their transparency playbook looks like this:
Quietly take soil and water samples.
Have your own defense attorney call state regulators.
Tell citizens you’d love to show them the lab reports, but state law says you can’t because of an active investigation by the state regulators thanks to that phone call.
It’s a completely self-manufactured curtain of secrecy. And by the way, the state law they’re hiding behind says the county may withhold those records; it does not say they must. They are actively choosing to keep the public in the dark.
At the end of the day, Walker County’s PR strategy boils down to two words: “Trust us.”
Think about the sheer audacity of that request.
They want citizens to just blindly trust their secret lab results and pure motives. They are demanding this absolute faith at the exact same moment they are sitting in a federal courtroom, defending themselves against a company that is potentially out tens of millions of dollars simply because they made the grave mistake of trusting Walker County’s word a decade ago.
The entire lawsuit only exists because the government’s legal defense is that its own signed contracts, promises, and official handshakes are and were from their genesis legally void and worthless.
If a multi-million-dollar investor and major employer was a fool to trust the county’s word, why on earth should the taxpayers trust these officials and this government . . . much less their press release?
Why not just release all the records?