Floyd Griffin, mayor of the City of Milledgeville, filed suit seeking injunctive relief to prevent Milledgeville’s city council and its six individual members from changing the city’s form of government from the existing strong mayor/weak council system to a strong council/weak mayor system in which most of the mayor’s substantive administrative duties would be handled by a city manager answerable only to the council. Griffin appeals from the superior court’s order finding that the office of mayor was not abolished in violation of OCGA § 1-3-11, that the local legislation passed by the General Assembly to accomplish the change was not unconstitutional and that the defendants were entitled to judgment as a matter of law. For the reasons that follow, we affirm. The record reflects that under the prior city charter, the mayor of Milledgeville was given the power to, inter alia, appoint the members of all city council committees; to nominate persons to perform all the major official duties of the city,1 all of whom would thereafter serve at the mayor’s pleasure; to prepare the city’s budget with the advice and approval of the council; to veto the amount budgeted in any category for any department; and to veto any ordinance, rule or regulation adopted by the council. For the performance of these and other duties the mayor was paid $525 per month for a two-year term of office.
The facts, as presented in the record or unchallenged by the parties in their briefs, reflect that in the 1990s the city council had tried to move the city to a city manager form of government but the attempt was vetoed by the then-mayor who had enough support on the council to block the votes needed to override the veto. In 2001 Griffin ran for the office of mayor on a platform that included the employing of a city administrator to run the day-to-day operations of the city; the council members ran for election on a platform to install a city manager. Griffin was the first African American to be elected mayor of the city; half of the council members elected are also African American. In September 2002 after Griffin vetoed the council’s unanimous resolution to introduce legislation to create the office of city manager, the council unanimously overrode his veto. Several public council meetings were conducted on the issue as well as a public hearing led by the local legislative delegation attended by the council members. Once the details of the proposed amendment to the city charter were finalized, the council unanimously passed a resolution to present the amendment language to the local legislative delegation. Griffin vetoed the resolution, which the council thereafter unanimously overrode. In 2003 the proposed amendment to the city charter was presented to the General Assembly as House Bill 800; the local legislation, Act No. 33, was passed unanimously by both the House and the Senate and was signed by the governor in May 2003. The Act was then submitted, along with other documentation, to the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice for preclearance, see 42 USCA § 1973 c, which issued a letter of approval in August 2003. Griffin filed suit two weeks later asserting, inter alia, that the Act “will strip the first African-American elected mayor of Milledgeville of his executive powers in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution and diminish the power of the African-American electorate in Milledgeville.”2
