Democratic Party of Georgia political director Rashad Richey has filed a libel suit against the webmasters of two political websites, claiming he has been labeled a repeat criminal offender and subjected to a concerted effort to force him out of his job.

Richey’s suit says online postings by Andre Walker, webmaster for Georgia Politics Unfiltered, and re-posting of those entries by Melanie Goux, who oversees the Blog for Democracy website, have falsely asserted that he is a “recidivist,” and that Walker’s multiple postings detailing Richey’s brushes with the law, coupled with assertions that he is a “criminal” and “jailbird” constitute slander, libel and defamation.

The suit, filed yesterday in Fulton County Superior Court, also names former DPG official Jane Bradshaw as a defendant, accusing he of emailing the stories around and organizing meetings to discuss them.

Since last month, Walker has posted several online stories detailing Richey’s arrests on misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and simple battery, and his court-ordered child-support payments.

The suit, filed by Bell & Washington partner Quinton Washington and Mabra Firm attorney Reginald Lewis, includes alleged quotes from Walker’s website lampooning Richey as “Rashad Richey the Recidivist on the Democratic payroll,” and a “criminal” who “has a history of making poor personal decisions.”

“The direct intention of [the postings] was to cause Plaintiff to be fired from his job and to injure him personally and professionally,” it says.

There was no immediate response to message emailed to both blogs or to a phone message left for Bradshaw.

A hearing officer for the city of Atlanta has turned down an appeal from SSP America Inc., whose bids to run several concessions at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport were denied last year by the city procurement officer in favor of other vendors.

In an order issued Tuesday, independent Procurement Appeals Hearing Officer George F. Maynard upheld that denial. He ruled that SSP had failed to prove its assertion that the bid process was flawed due to arbitrary scoring by the officials evaluating the bids, conflicts of interest and interference by Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.

Maynard held three days of hearings in March and this month, during which attorneys for SSP solicited testimony from 11 witnesses and presented numerous documents related to the bid process.

“[SSP] acknowledges its case relies almost entirely on circumstantial evidence gleaned from its exhaustive review of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents,” wrote Maynard in his 23 page ruling.

“Despite [SSP]’s contention that it is the leading Airport concessions company in the nation, it seems curiously focused on trying to reduce the municipal procurement process to a purely objective and mathematical process.”

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Four days after a weekend leak from an upper floor damaged dozens of files in the first-floor filing room for civil cases at the Fulton County Courthouse, a large area of the lobby remains off-limits and surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape, with several missing ceiling tiles leaving a gaping hole overhead.

Clerk of the Superior Court Tina Robinson said files are being accepted and processed as usual, but that the limited space means there may be delays for those who elect to wait for stamped copies.

“We are working on mail and walk-in customers with limited stations opened,” said Robinson. “Therefore, we will ask customers if they prefer to wait in line or receive a stamp-filed copy through the mail.”

Robinson said the filing date recorded on documents will be current with the actual filing date. She also noted that her office’s service
centers are available: the South Service Center is in College Park at 5600 Stonewall Tell Road, and the West Service Center is at 5440 Fulton Industrial Boulevard.

The leak was discovered Sunday, according to Fulton County Facilities and Transportation Services Director David Ricks, and occurred when a small “spot” hot-water heater connected to some courthouse bathrooms malfunctioned.

Fulton County Superior Court Clerk Tina Robinson said her staff is scrambling to contact dozens of plaintiffs and attorneys after a weekend flood soaked about 50 copies of files that were waiting to be sent to the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department.

Robinson said the original filings were undamaged but, because the suits were to be served on parties by the sheriff’s department, the filing parties will need to provide new applications for have the complaints delivered.

“The documents are the service copies that are going up to the sheriff’s office; the originals are here, they were scanned into the system,” Robinson said.  “These were civil actions that the other party needed to be served, so we’re going to have to notify those people that they’re going to have another entry of service. It has to be in their handwriting; I can’t have my staff do it.”

Robinson said she had contacted the Superior Court judges in order to prevent anyone being penalized for missing a filing deadline due to the leak.

The leak is the second one this year to damage files in her office, Robinson said; another leak on the fifth floor about four months ago also left some files wet, but they were not soaked through, she said.

The county director of Facilities and Transportation Services, David Ricks, said the leaks were the result of problems with small “spot” hot-water heaters connected to bathrooms in the courthouse.

“It’s like an instant hot-water heater for a kitchenette,” said Ricks. In the leak discovered Sunday morning, “the actual box failed, rather than a pipe bursting, so we’re looking into whether it’s a defective unit or a larger problem.”

“My concern is that this is an old building, and we house these records here,” Robinson said. “These things keep happening.”

The husband of a woman allegedly killed by a security guard last year as she walked through a Midtown parking garage, along with two more women who survived the alleged shooting spree, have filed suits in Fulton County State Court. The three complaints accuse security company AlliedBarton of continuing to employ Nkosi Thandiwe as a guard at the Proscenium even after he had “assailed” a courier with racial epithets in the weeks before the shootings, and later came to work showing off an unpermitted handgun he’d recently bought at a pawn shop.

Thandiwe faces 11 criminal counts, including felony murder, for the July 15 shootings that left Brittney Watts, 26, dead, and paralyzed another woman, Lauren Garcia. The third victim, Tiffany Ferenczy, was shot in the leg. All three women worked at the Proscenium, across the street from the garage.

At the time of the shooting, police said Thandiwe shot Watts in the neck and stole her car, then shot the other women as he fired randomly while fleeing through the garage’s entrance gate.

According to the suits, Thandiwe, who is black, “exhibited behavior and used language demonstrating an intensely negative attitude” throughout his employment as a security guard, and had to be physically restrained  when he accosted the courier about a month before the shootings. Two weeks before the shooting, he brought the gun he would use in his shooting rampage to work and “bragged about and showed the weapon to another employee of Allied Barton,” they say.

All three shooting victims were white.

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UPDATE: DeFoor told the Daily Report on Friday that she has also retained legal counsel, although she declined to say whether she was considering litigation regarding her own termination. Her attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

A whistleblower suit filed Wednesday in Fulton County Superior Court says Atlanta Director of Treasury Services Edward Tuohy was terminated last year after refusing to follow superiors’ repeated orders to violate city guidelines and transfer funds into and out of accounts, without proper documentation, and invoice accounts that should not have been billed.

Tuohy was fired Oct. 12, according to the suit, after he refused to transfer money from a city fund without telling that fund’s finance chief, despite being ordered to do so by his boss, Chief Finance Officer Joya DeFoor. (Although the suit does not mention it, DeFoor was herself terminated without explanation five days after Tuohy was cashiered. There was no immediate response to a telephone message left at a number listed as belonging to DeFoor.)

According to the complaint, Tuohy was recruited for the city job in March 2011 and within a month or two was repeatedly instructed to “circumvent City financial guidelines and to book invoices without proper approval procedures and to book the invoices to accounts which should not have been charged.”

In addition to demanding that he engage in financial misconduct, the suit says, DeFoor and her deputy finance officer, Stefan Jaskulak, ignored advice that could have saved the city hefty sums. In one case, it says, he pointed out that the city maintained cash balances exceeding $1 billion in accounts that earned “virtually no interest” and complained about the “millions of dollars in lost income.”

In response, according to the complaint, Jaskulak told Tuohy he “shouldn’t worry because the City Council has its head so far up its ass that they wouldn’t know what the actual cash balances were.”

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A Fulton County judge has thrown out a challenge to a series of increases in the retirement benefits of Atlanta’s firefighters, police and general employees that was filed in 2010 by the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation.

The foundation and its president, John Sherman, along with 10 co-plaintiffs, had sought class status in their efforts to reverse eight city ordinances between 2001 and 2005 that increased pension benefits. They argued that their property taxes had been raised to fund the increases.

Shortly after it was filed, attorney Mary Carole Cooney was retained by police, firefighter and employee organizations and pension funds to fight the suit as a third-party intervenor.

In her March 13 order, which Cooney said she drafted, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Kimberly M. Esmond Adams denied the request for class certification and ruled that the plaintiffs had provided no evidence that their property taxes had been raised to fund the increases.

Further, said the order, legislation signed into law last year by Mayor Kasim Reed revising the city’s pension laws overcame the bulk of the plaintiffs’ claims challenging the earlier laws, rendering them moot.

Cooney said she didn’t think the ruling left any grounds for appeal. The plaintiffs plainly could not satisfy the legal requirements for class certification, she said, and “because of the city’s comprehensive revision of its pension system, those challenges are now academic.”

Deputy City Attorney Eric Richardson hailed the “thorough and well-reasoned” order.

“In June of 2010, shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the city filed a motion for summary judgment seeking dismissal of the lawsuit based on plaintiffs’ lack of standing,” he said. “Judge Adams’ decision validates the city’s arguments from very early in this case that the lawsuit lacked legal merit.”

The foundation’s attorneys, Robert D. Feagin and John F. Woodham, did not respond to requests for comment.

The case is Fulton County Taxpayers Association v. Atlanta, No. 2010CV182203.

A Fulton County judge has turned down efforts by frustrated would-be concessionaires at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to halt the city from signing contracts with the winning bidders.

Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Cynthia D. Wright ruled Monday morning that the losing bidders must exhaust their appeals protests to a city hearing officer before seeking relief in court.

Four losing bidders — SSP America Inc., Midfield Concession Enterprises Inc., Take-Off Concessions LLC and Atlanta Airport Restaurants LLC – asked Wright last week to order Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed not to finalize the contracts with their rivals. They argued that their efforts to have the contracts voided and re-awarded would be irreversibly damaged if the winners began operating at the airport, where a new international terminal is slated to open in May.

The city has already turned down the challengers’ protests, and a specially-appointed hearing officer is due to hear their appeals next month. Lawyers for the losing companies said that because they are not granted the authority to subpoena witnesses and documents for that hearing, they will not be able to gather all the evidence they need for Superior Court challenge.

Wright’s order conceded the point, but she noted that the city has provided a wealth of documents related to the bids. She also urged the city, “in the interest of transparency and public confidence in the process,” to grant limited subpoena power.

While the judge’s order favored the city, she also took issue with a bidding process that has been marked by inconsistencies and false starts, including last year’s wholesale re-bidding of contracts related to more than 150 food and beverage and retail outlets at the airport.

“Undoubtedly,” Wright wrote, “a City cannot spend months developing a record prior to rendering a decision, or the business of the City would grind to a halt.”

Even so, she continued, “providing frustrated bidders with independent subpoena power, controlled by the procurement appeals officer, would certainly be a step forward in the furtherance or procedural due process and the promotion of public confidence in the decisions made by the city.”

“One could only hope that in this way, perhaps, fewer airport cases would land before the Superior Court,” she concluded. “But then, as the saying goes, you can’t get anywhere without going through the Atlanta airport, and apparently, the Atlanta Airport can’t get anywhere without going through the Superior Court.”

The Georgia Court of Appeals has granted an emergency stay to the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, whose director and officers were ordered to vacate the homeless shelter at the corner of Peachtree and Pine streets earlier this month.

In an order issued Monday, the appellate court stayed the recent dispossessory order from Fulton County Superior Court Judge Craig L. Schwall. He decreed that Task Force Director Anita Beatty and her staff leave the building Feb. 15 and that the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta assume responsibility for the shelter’s operations and the hundreds of homeless men who sleep there every night until Aug. 31. At that time, Schwall ordered, the building is to be turned over to investors who bought the building’s note and foreclosed in 2010.

In granting the motion for an emergency stay filed on Friday by Task Force lawyer Steven G. Hall of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, the appellate court delayed enforcement of Schwall’s dispossessory order “until such time as this Court resolves the appeal filed by the Task Force, either on the merits or on procedural grounds.”

Testifying in a hearing in which a failed airport concession vendor is seeking more information about the bidding procedures for contract awards worth more than $3 billion, Deputy Atlanta City Attorney Peter J. Andrews estimated that the city will spend at least $800,000 responding to Open Record Act requests filed by disappointed bidders.

During testimony Tuesday afternoon in Fulton County Superior Court, attorneys for Atlanta said that in the wake of last month’s contentious round of contract awards, the city began researching, vetting and printing hundreds of thousands of documents and put together a crew of more than 60 people, including 45 city and private lawyers , to compile and vet the materials.

Andrews said the city had been billed $300,000 by Global Legal Discovery to print and preserve in e-format hundreds of thousands of documents, and that he expected the city to be billed “in excess of $500,000 from private attorneys” hired to handle the document requests so far.

“I don’t want to be around when we get that one,” said Andrews.

The hearing was called by one of the unsuccessful bidders, international airport concessionaire SSP America Inc., to address the company’s assertions that the city had failed to completely respond to a judge’s order earlier this month to provide Open Records Act materials it needs to prepare an appeal of the denial of its bid.

SSP’s attorney, Ashe Rafuse & Hill partner Kenneth B. Hodges III, asked Judge T. Jackson Bedford Jr. to hold the city in contempt and rule that it was in violation of the ORA. But Greenberg Traurig partner Mark G.  Trigg – an outside attorney the city hired Monday– said that the list of documents and materials Hodges was seeking had largely been provided, did not exist, or were protected by attorney client privilege.

Bedford called a halt in the proceedings late Tuesday afternoon when a court staffer had a private emergency.