By: L. Cramer
Has accountability died in America? Are we so far down the corruption hole that even local government officials aren’t willing to push for morality and justice for the sake of being reelected?
That may be the case in Cobb County’s 2024 Superior Court Clerk scandal.
It all started when Connie Taylor became the Superior Court Clerk in 2020, and began collecting passport fees. In the state of Georgia, it is legal for Superior Court Clerks to collect passport fees as personal income; in most places it helps supplement a small salary while also keeping the County Court Clerk’ office running. However, from 2020-2022, Cobb County saw an unusually high number of passport renewals which resulted in Connie Taylor collecting an outstanding $425,000 of additional personal income.
Taylor’s predecessor collected personal income from passport fees also, but it was broken up in three different percentages throughout her tenure as the Superior Court Clerk and shared the excess with the office – first starting at 25% for personal and 75% for the office, then a 50/50% split for the majority of her time served, before switching to 100% personal collection prior to the election where she ultimately lost.
According to a letter and documents submitted to the Cobb County Commissioners office, when Maya Curry, an accounting manager, was hired at the Superior Court Clerk’s office in March of 2022, she asked Ms. Taylor in May of that year if she would like to continue the 50/50 split of the passport fees. Taylor reprimanded Curry for asking her that question over email and that she (Taylor) would maintain 100% of the fees personally. In October of 2022, Ms. Curry generated a report of all passport fees collected after an open records request from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution which detailed the $425,000 collected. The report also found that of that amount, nearly $84,000 in expedite fees was also given to Taylor; a seemingly odd carve out.
Allegedly upon seeing the report’s findings, Cobb County Superior Court Clerk Connie Taylor instructed Ms. Curry to not only delete the correspondences that included this report but any other filings in the entire county filing system that link Taylor to the payments. When Curry refused to delete information off of government servers, what some might call a manufactured incident was then used as the basis to release Curry from her duties and sully her name in what has otherwise been a stellar career in Georgia government offices.
This is hardly a new story, but there are still more questions than answers.
According to the Cobb County Commissioner’s Office’s Communications Director, Ross Cavitt, expedite fees are “not carved out in either federal or state law on passport fees.” If that’s the case then why did the Superior Court Clerk’s office send a memo to the Cobb County Manager’s office in November of 2022, stating that the overage in expedite fees was “mingled with execution fees” and that the whole amount, roughly $84,000, would be remitted to the “General Fund” along with future fees? Sources confirm that nothing has been remitted back to the general fund, to the best of the sources knowledge.
Furthermore, why did Maya Curry lose her job after refusing to delete information on what is being explained as a perfectly legal transaction? And why did any of the documentation of these transactions need to be deleted at all? It seems odd to this reporter that this story fell off the map two years ago with no real solution presented to the public.
There are a lot of people running for re-election this year. It only seems fair that the voters of Cobb County get answers so they know exactly what kind of people for which they are voting.
The Cobb Voice reached out to the Superior Court Clerk’s office, but as of this publishing has not received a response.
The saga of the Cobb County Superior Court Clerk’s office is not over – stay tuned.
