One of Jefferson's City Council members is resigning after recent disputes between a former city police chief and the current city manager.
District 2 City Councilmember Dawn Maddox said she turned in her resignation to the mayor and city council on Wednesday, July 16. She says she will attend the upcoming city council voting session on July 28 as her final meeting.
Maddox was first elected to the District 2 post on the council in 2021. She said she was led to resign after recent disputes involving the city's police department.
In February, a Jefferson City Police Sergeant, Reginald Lee New, Jr., was arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for alleged improper disclosure of information. According to former police chief Joe Wirthman, New had given information about one of the department's officers driving with an expired tag to City Manager Priscilla Murphy.
The officer who allegedly had an expired tag was Justin Stevens, who Wirthman had recently recommended for the vacant assistant police chief role. Murphy instead promoted then-Lieutenant Steve Bannister to the position. Wirthman said he was confronted by Murphy with information about Stevens' expired tag after New had given her the information, leading Wirthman to then report the sharing of that information to the GBI.
Prosecutors ultimately dropped charges against New and Wirthman later resigned. Bannister has since been named Chief of the department.
Maddox says the city council and mayor were then asked by city officials to indemnify New. She said, however, that she saw discrepancies in the stories of New and city officials.
"We were told that his actions were that of a whistleblower and that he had gone up the chain of command at Jefferson Police Department repeatedly to try to make his supervising officers aware that another JPD officer had an expired tag," Maddox said. "Apparently...they had been made aware of it for over a year, and no officer had said one to the other, 'hey, you have an expired tag.' I personally emailed all his supervising officers, which would have been Nate McDonald, Steven Bannister, James R. Wood and Chief Joe Wirthman. All of them, in email, said they were never made aware of an expired tag."
Maddox said she then went to City Attorney Rob Alexander and asked for a copy of the GBI's report on Wirthman's allegations against New. She said reading that report revealed further discrepancies.
"I made mayor and council aware of those discrepancies in an email, and I asked that we would be able to discuss them," Maddox said. "Those discussions did not go well, and I could not, in good conscience, continue to serve on city council."
Maddox would not go in detail about those meetings, only stating that she and the other council members "agreed to disagree."
"I apologized openly to the residents of Jefferson on our July 14 council meeting for choosing to indemnify Lee New," Maddox said. "I admitted that, had I read the GBI report first and that if I had done my own research first, that I would never have voted for that indemnification, and because of that I was truly sorry."
Maddox said she has made a recommendation to the mayor and city council for an interim replacement for her District 2 seat. Maddox's term was set to expire this year, meaning the seat will be up for grabs in the November General Election.
