Spending as much time as I do in the political arena, all too often I hear friends or family members generalize, stereotype, and say something akin to: “You can’t trust any politician; they’re all out only for themselves.”
Thankfully, and simply put, that just is not true.
I first encountered Michael Thurmondas a young state legislator from Athens. He was kind, humorous, and humble, as well as being an incredibly able strategist, author, public servant, and politician … and he remains all those things and more to this day.
Thurmond’s beginnings in rural Clarke County were quite humble, where he grew up in a large family, the son of a sharecropper and vegetable truck merchants Thurmond. As first in his family to graduate college and later earn higher degrees, Thurmond learned early on the benefits of building bridges, versus burning them down.
As DeKalb County CEO, he turned the annual State of the County address into a spotlight on others making a lifetime of contributions to the community. He calls this honor the Washington W. King Bridge Builder Award, named in honor of the son of a freed slave and another former resident of Athens, who designed, engineered, and hand-built wooden covered bridges across the southeast.
Thurmond championed recognition for W.W. King and one of his better-known and still-standing bridges remains on the back side of Stone Mountain Park, moved there in the early 1960s from Athens after two floods of the Oconee River had damaged the bridge and its original moorings.
Thanks to the efforts of Thurmond and the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, the W.W. King Bridge is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The three “bridge builders” for 2023 are former DeKalb Schools Superintendent Yvonne Tinsley, banker and businessman Jim Millerand minority entrepreneur, mentor, and fellow public servant, R.L. Brown.
After his work restoring accreditation to the DeKalb County School District while serving as superintendent of schools, and also turning an operating deficit into a $100-million surplus, Thurmond set his sights on bringing together a county increasingly divided.
Attending a fundraiser in the backyard of former DeKalb CEOLiane Levetan, two dozen current and former mayors of various DeKalb municipalities were all there to support Thurmond. This may not sound all that impressive, but in my home county in recent decades, a DeKalb CEO was more likely to be meeting a DeKalb mayor of one city or another at a venue in court!
Under Thurmond, though, relationships are being restored, fences mended, and work done – but broken fences do not rebuild themselves.
Most recently, serving on the board of a modest nonprofit, providing homelessness prevention services and affordable housing to nearly 500 residents and families across four different multi-family communities in DeKalb County, theInitiative for Affordable Housing has been working for more than two decades to convert an aging HUD loan into a grant focused on the restoration, combination, and management of 140 affordable housing units at the Sol Luna Apartments on Memorial Drive.
Three DeKalb CEOs and administrations came and went, the required decade of maintaining the property as affordable housing had expired, and yet the wheels of bureaucracy somehow ground to a halt, leaving the Initiative with a horribly expensive, floating construction mortgage loan and rate on an aging property.
As interest rates surged, the now-20-year construction loan was facing a critical balloon payment, so Thurmond kickstarted things in the right direction. The loan was converted to a grant and housing for many of DeKalb’s lowest-income residents was saved. Thanks also go to DeKalb CAO Zach Williams, Deputy County Attorney Matt Welch, and Housing Authority of DeKalb County President and CEO Pete Walker for getting the necessary paperwork completed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.
Running a government serving 750,000-plus residents, and with a budget greater than the City of Atlanta, is no easy task, and though we won’t have him in this chair forever, I for one, as well as many others, am glad we have Michael Thurmond as Dekalb CEO for now.