🌺 UNDER THE AZALEAS 🌺
Notes from Inside Augusta’s Political Garden
A New Column for The Garden City Gossip
From the Publisher
Beginning today, The Garden City Gossip introduces a new periodic column, Under the Azaleas, written under the byline Simone Raines.
Simone Raines is a pseudonym used by a longtime observer of Augusta city government with extensive firsthand knowledge of the personalities, history, and internal dynamics of City Hall. The column will examine the political forces that shape decisions before they appear on the public agenda.
Because the insights offered here come from someone with direct familiarity with the system, the author writes under a pen name. The purpose is to allow candid analysis of city politics without the professional and political constraints that often discourage insiders from speaking openly.
This column represents the author’s analysis and perspective. When appropriate, The GCG will independently report and verify factual claims that emerge from these discussions.
City government shapes development, taxes, infrastructure, and public safety. Understanding how decisions are really made is essential to holding power accountable. Please, Read on!
— Charles Rollins
Publisher, The Garden City Gossip
Alvin Mason Running Again?
Why is a commissioner who resigned for medical reasons suddenly back in the race?
By Simone Raines
AUGUSTA, GA – To longtime observers of City Hall, Alvin Mason’s decision to run for District 4 is a symptom of the partisan, power-for-power’s sake, no-holds-barred politics of the Mayor.
Remember that Alvin Mason took over after Sammy Sias won the all-inclusive trip to Club Fed for lying to federal agents. Alvin Mason, God Bless Him, never said one word when two would do. His use of colorful metaphors and long-winded stories was funny the first time you saw it – but after years and years of nothing but nonsense coming out of his mouth and no real result, you realized that it was all narcissism, all the way down.
There was one day, back before he had his surgery, when Alvin’s back pain kept him from sitting down. He would pace around the Commission chambers in a wide circle, annoyed (as everyone was) at the slow pace of progress on a Commission debate, saying to nobody, “Here we go round the Mulberry bush.” Look it up young uns if you don’t know what he’s referring to.
Alvin’s a big guy with a long military career, and so it’s not surprising that he has a bad back. Back pain is rough. If you know it, spinal disc pain can be debilitating. You can’t walk, you can’t sit – sometimes the only relief you get is from a Lay-Z-Boy, because that’s the one position you can sit in where there is no pressure on the discs in your lower back. The only thing the doctors can prescribe is the kind of pain medicine that puts people on the street looking for more.
Orthopaedic surgeons sell an answer: spinal fusion surgery. Now I say “sell” because the success rate of these surgeries are abysmal. Considering that in modern medicine most surgeries are close to 90–95% successful, spinal fusion surgeries are about 60–70%. And some people get much, much worse after the surgery.
Now Alvin hasn’t publicly disclosed what surgery he had, but we all know he had surgery and it did not end well. He was supposed to have surgery on June 20, 2024, and he didn’t return to the chambers until January 2025. He told everyone that he nearly died on the operating table – not a sign of a successful surgery.
We’ll cover the push and pull of the absences of the Mayor’s Party’s Commissioners in 2024 and 2025 in another column. Suffice to say, that was a necessary vote for the Mayor’s agenda that was taken off the table when Alvin went under the knife. And his unexpected poor recovery and prognosis took him out of the chambers for a long time, further delaying the implementation of the Mayor’s agenda. This was part of the push for the Mayor to get a vote himself, because he could not rely on his razor-thin majority with the health and moral issues of his coalition.
When Alvin returned to the chamber, you could see that the back surgery had failed — or at least it appeared the surgery had not resolved the problem. He still shifted in his seat. He still showed discomfort. And yet, in the spring after his back surgery, staff members would see Alvin dancing in joy in the parking lot. I imagine that he must have felt better – except that he resigned in June 2025 for medical reasons.
Which makes sense to everybody. I don’t know what happened to Alvin in the meantime. I don’t know why he resigned except for medical reasons. But one can guess that the failed back surgery and recovery were a lot for Alvin (I think they’d be a lot for anybody), and he needed time and no stress to do it.
So here’s where it gets sticky. His immediate successor, the interim District 4 Commissioner, is a longtime activist and political operator named Tanya Barnhill-Turnley. She voted similarly with Alvin, that is, with the Mayor’s agenda. Which is perfectly acceptable, except she then had to win in an actual election. She ran against Lonnie Wimberly, who beat her with something like more than 60% of the vote. In most communities, this would be considered a rout, a wave, an overwhelming consensus. And Lonnie is not aligned with the Mayor’s Party and the Mayor’s agenda.
So what happens? Alvin, with almost no explanation, returns to qualify for District 4 in a stunning move to challenge Lonnie Wimberly, who has to run for the full term. So let’s be clear: a Commissioner, with severe health problems, who missed nearly six months of his term when he nearly died, who resigned like eight months ago, is running against for the same seat.
Why?
Because the Mayor’s agenda requires a partisan in support of the Mayor in that seat. Nobody else will do. Alvin Mason is probably not healthy enough, not well enough, to sit through a whole term. Anyone in District 4 should be very wary of this arrangement. Alvin has served the District with stalwart honor, but he needs to come very clean about the circumstances about his resignation and the reasons for his return for the voters of District 4 – who overwhelmingly backed Lonnie over Tanya – to trust him again.
Editor’s Note: Simone Raines is a pseudonym used by a source with firsthand knowledge of Augusta city government. The author’s identity is known to the publisher of The GCG but is not publicly disclosed.
This column reflects the author’s perspective and analysis of public events.
