Gabe Brown, the former Walton mayor who resigned last month, will be running for the position again this November.
He will be running against current Mayor Terri Courtney, who was appointed to the interim position by the city council following Brown’s resignation.
Brown said he’d like to finish what he started during his time as mayor by being re-elected for the seat. He specifically cited his work obtaining and developing 54 acres of land donated to the city from the late Dr. O’dell Owens for a public park, improving aging infrastructure and water and sewer systems, and planning for the future growth of Walton.
“I have a lot of unfinished projects that the city needs to see done and I think I’m the person to do that,” he said. “I just want to finish out my term as was intended and mandated by the voters.”
Brown resigned from his second term as mayor after serving in the role for nearly seven years. The move followed an investigation into his conduct as mayor, in which the city council made seven charges against him for misuse of city property and money, including hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of almost two-and-a-half years pertaining to work done on the Owens Park Lake project.
Brown, however, said the investigation was “making a mountain out of a molehill” and said the charges made about mismanaging city money are “inaccurate.”
At the time, city policy mandated that projects over $40,000 had to be brought before the city council for approval prior to making the payment.
In December 2021, Walton entered into a contract to complete work on the Owens Park Lake project, to be completed by May 31, 2022, for $107,000.
According to findings of the investigation, work on the lake continued past the specified date on the original contract, and the city was subsequently charged for the work, totalling over $300,000 in the years since.
Starting in June 2022, the city was charged for work on the park project. However, charges and payments were almost always made in increments under $40,000, with the exception of one change order for $63,000 in August 2022, which the city paid.
Earlier this year, the city approved an amendment lowering the threshold of projects that must be signed off on by the city council from $40,000 to $20,000.
“I wasn’t statutorily required to bring anything back to council for a change order — change orders happen all the time,” Brown said. “They made it seem like I had gone well over somebody’s contract … the original contract ended almost two years ago, this was a completely different thing.”
Further, Brown said that he doesn’t believe the “punishment fit the crime” and that if he is guilty of mismanaging money, the council should be as well for not reviewing the city’s financial activity.
Despite the last months, Brown said that if he is re-elected as mayor, he would want “bygones to be bygones” with the city council.
“If people genuinely look around, they can see the difference, they can see the things that I’ve accomplished in my time as mayor, and if they take that into account and think real hard about it, I think they’ll know that I’m the person for the job,” he said.
