DeKalb County’s chief procurement officer, Cathryn Horner, during a recent meeting of the Board of Commissioners’ infrastructure committee conducted via Zoom.
By Tyler Estep
The leader of DeKalb County’s purchasing department is stepping down.
Chief procurement officer Cathryn Horner — who has led the department that oversees hundreds of millions of dollars in county contracts since late 2019 — notified DeKalb officials of her intent to retire in a May 26 letter.
Horner’s departure comes at another difficult time for a department that has been long beset with allegations of mismanagement and corruption. And her retirement notice was given just days after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution began asking questions about the county’s ongoing relationship with CamKen Consulting, a sewer contractor whose founder pleaded guilty in 2020 to bilking a federal COVID relief program of almost $8 million.
In the letter, a copy of which was obtained this week through the Georgia Open Records Act, Horner said the “difficult decision” was based on her doctor’s advice.
In a subsequent acceptance letter, DeKalb COO Zach Williams praised Horner’s efforts throughout her tenure and especially during the pandemic, saying her administration had been “a model.”
“Your contribution to DeKalb County government will be long-standing,” Williams wrote.
The county recently notified CamKen that the remainder of its current $2.6 million contract to assess manholes and sewer pipes throughout DeKalb would be terminated. A formal vote on the termination was passed unanimously by the county’s Board of Commissioners Tuesday morning.
CamKen has also long been listed on county documents as part of a “joint venture” on a much larger sewer and water contract that dates back to 2017. But the county has recently said the other party on that contract, The Renee Group, provided documentation showing that it bought CamKen Consulting out of the venture years ago.
A new extension for that Renee Group contract — which also involves two unrelated contractors — was on Tuesday’s county commission agenda. The commission approved moving forward with additional work for the other companies, but sent the portion dealing with the Renee Group back to committee for further consideration.
Infrastructure committee chair Lorraine Cochran-Johnson said it “concerned [her] tremendously” that Renee Group didn’t inform the county about its apparently years-old separation from CamKen until questions were asked about the criminal charges surrounding CamKen founder Chandra Norton.
“For me,” Cochran-Johnson said, “those documents raise more questions.”
While federal prosecutors have not publicly named any other suspects in the wire fraud case against Norton, court filings do allege that she conspired with an “Individual 1″ to seek fraudulent payments from the federal Paycheck Protection Program.
And a separate civil lawsuit filed by an insurance company accuses The Renee Group founder Shelitha Robertson, and others, of working with Norton to shuffle money among several LLCs to avoid paying off bond debt.
Horner, meanwhile, has been with DeKalb County since 2004, working her way up after starting as a contract administrator. She took over as chief procurement officer under less than ideal circumstances.
Her predecessor, Talisa Clark, resigned in 2019 after being featured prominently in a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former employee. That suit alleged that supervisors ignored Teresa Slayton’s attempts to highlight conflicts of interest and potential bid-rigging in the purchasing department — and ultimately fired her for doing so.
The county settled Slayton’s suit late last year, agreeing to pay her and her attorneys a total of $420,000.
Clark’s departure also came several months after the release of an audit that deemed DeKalb’s purchasing department to be “at high risk for waste, fraud, corruption, and abuse.”
Yet another audit released in early 2020 raised significant questions about the county’s Local Small Business Enterprise (LSBE) program, an operation within the purchasing department that’s aimed at increasing the participation of minority- and woman-led businesses in county contracts. The leader of that program, Felton Williams, was reassigned at the time to the facilities department, a move officials described as “part of an ongoing process to improve the effectiveness of DeKalb County government.”
Water and sewer contracts, like the one involving CamKen, have been a particularly frequent source of controversy in DeKalb as well.
A 2018 lawsuit by former Department of Watershed Management leader Scott Towler alleged, among other things, that multi-million dollar contracts were approved without going through the bidding process. That lawsuit was later settled for $40,000.
Former DeKalb Commissioner Sharon Barnes Sutton, meanwhile, is scheduled to stand trial next month on federal extortion and bribery charges. She’s accused of taking a total of $1,000 in bribes from a county subcontractor working on a project that documents suggest was the still-ongoing renovation of the Snapfinger Creek Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Horner’s retirement is scheduled to be effective Aug. 31. The county said it would be conducting a search for her replacement.
Read the original story on AJC.com.
