Hamil: Political pressure led to ouster

Published 12:31 am Sunday, October 17, 2010

David Hamil looks comfortable on a tractor, but that doesn’t mean he spends a lot of time there.

The former Dalton municipal court administrator, who was forced to resign under pressure from the City Council less than two months ago, Hamil spent most of Saturday morning getting his 14-acre Westside farm bush-hogged and trimmed and ready for potential buyers to tour. Several signs — For Sale, Posted Property and Alarm in Use — stand at the end of a gravel driveway where a wooden fence makes a right turn.

“After my wife passed (away) in 2001, LaGrange didn’t feel right,” he said of his former home while relaxing later in the shade of a barn shed. “In 2003 a delegation from Dalton visited. They were not satisfied with the way their probation was going and they wanted to see what we had done. I was told by Butch (Sanders, former city administrator) that they were looking for someone to manage the court and bring probation back in (under city management).”

Hamil, who was working as the court services supervisor in LaGrange after serving as a chief deputy in the Troup County Sheriff’s Office, said he started as Dalton’s court administrator in December of 2003. Beginning in 2004, he said he began taking steps to untangle a city court “in disarray.” He said the moves he implemented with the help of Sanders and court staff eventually took the court from $500,000 in the red to $500,000 in the black.

When it was pointed out the figures amounted to a $1 million “swing,” he responded, “Yeah, you can do the math.”

But Hamil was asked to resign on Sept. 20 and did so, just hours before City Judge Jerry Moncus was fired by the City Council in a 4-0 vote. Council members cited “philosophical differences” with the way Moncus and Hamil were running the court, but would not elaborate what those differences were.

Hamil said he found a lot wrong with the court after he landed in Dalton, even though the prime reason he was hired was to get probation services back under the city and away from a private agency.

“At the end of 2004, the council directed us to pull probation back in-house, even though I had asked for two years to do that,” he said. “Probation was being farmed out to a private company, and the city had gotten comments about their management style.”

By then, Hamil said the court staff had been cut from eight people to four. He said he also found the city had been paying the city attorney’s office in excess of $100,000 a year for doing clerical work that should have been handled by court staff. That expenditure was cut to $4,000 and eventually less than $2,000 a year over time, he said.

To cut liability risks, Hamil said he brought community service workers under city management so that outside services like grass mowing and housekeeping could be done as part of their punishment.

“Benny (Dunn, public works director) did the numbers and estimated that we saved $380,000,” Hamil said. “He was tickled to death.”

Hamil said Moncus had “started trying to pursue” bond companies who weren’t standing for their forfeitures in 2006, the year Moncus began as city judge.

“We asked (Sheriff Scott Chitwood) to remove the bond companies without a line of credit from writing bonds, and he did,” Hamil said. “Rather than put the burden on law enforcement, we felt the people guaranteeing the bonds needed to be held accountable.”

A meeting in 2006 saw three bonding company representatives attending, and Hamil said they had a “legitimate beef” because paying the forfeitures had “never occurred.”

“(Moncus) said, ‘We’re going to draw a line in the sand’ and from that point forward, forfeitures were going to be paid,” said Hamil. “At that point we really started pursuing the collection of bonds. Some companies started satisfying the bonds and producing defendants, other companies snubbed their nose at the process.”

He said the only two companies that “ultimately satisfied” the court were A-1 Bonding and Huckabee Bonding.

So why were he and Moncus let go?

“It was very obvious in meeting with Butch, the mayor and individuals on the council what they wanted to accomplish,” Hamil said. “They wanted a court system that benefited the local citizenry, but they also didn’t want the system to be a financial burden on the citizenry. They wanted individuals to be dealt with fairly across the board. But after the current mayor and council came on, no one came to me — and my boss would be the city administrator — but no one came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’re kind of concerned with this direction, we want to go in a different direction.’ That never, never occurred.

“Ultimately, I think it was political pressure from the individuals involved in the bonding business and others — that really pushed the mayor and council.”

When asked who the “others” were, Hamil replied that he was not going to say “at this time.”

He said he never received direction from an annual or semi-annual review that the court needed to change direction from the way it was operating.

“No one came to me,” he said. “Until we started making some headway in getting these bond forfeitures from the bonding companies, it pretty much rocked along. But once it got to the point where the push was actually producing, that’s when the fire got real hot.”

Hamil, 55, is in remission from lymphoma, and said time on the tractor is “good therapy.” He started work back in LaGrange as the supervisor of court services not long after his resignation in Dalton.

“I’ve met people here I’ll never forget,” he said. “They’re friends and will always be friends. Coming to Dalton was a good thing at the time, and leaving Dalton now is a good thing at this time.”

He cited aging parents and family concerns. In July, Hamil was appointed by Gov. Sonny Perdue to serve on the state County and Municipal Probation Advisory Council. He said he could continue in that role, as well as in the court clerk and law enforcement professional organizations where he is a member.