TOWNS COUNTY, Ga. -- So, how much did the taxpayers of Towns County shell out for perhaps as many as 20-years of unauthorized pay “supplements” to three leading county officials -- Sheriff Rudy Eller, Superior Court Clerk Cecil Dye and Probate Judge and Magistrate Wayne Garrett? Becky Landress, the editor and sole reporter of the Towns Sentinel, says she gets that question all the time from fellow taxpayers in her community. Truman Barrett, who served one term as Towns County’s sole commissioner before the supplements began, estimates the total could have run a high as $1.6 million. We asked the current commissioner, Bill Kendell, for help with this, and his clerk, Linda Hedden crunched some of the recent numbers.

In 2007, Judge Wayne Garrett’s authorized salary with benefits was $93,097.56 Instead, his total package was $118,876.99. That’s a difference of $25,779.43 in a single year. In 2008, the difference was $26,567.83, so in just two years, Towns County citizens paid one of their top elected officials $52,347.26 more than state law required -- with no record that the county government every formally approved the increase.

For Clerk of Court Cecil Dye, the two-year differential was $41,790.94.

For Sheriff Rudy Eller, we have only the partial numbers for 2007, because he left office in August of that year after pleading guilty to charges of making false statements, violation of his oath of office and hindering the apprehension of a criminal (all related to the case of a deputy charged with a drive-by shooting). The sheriff was on track in 2007 to make $80,088.73 instead of the authorized $67,242.79. That’s a difference of $12,845.94.

Because the issue stretches back perhaps as far as the late 1980s, Towns County officials have concluded they will never get the full story on the unauthorized payments. They know this much: They can’t find any legal record or document by which Commissioner Jack Dayton (he entered office in 1989 and died in office in 2005) granted the payments, and they’re confident they would never be able to calculate exactly how much was paid out without legal justification. So let’s make an estimate.

Take 2007, the last year that the sheriff, the clerk and the probate judge were all in office together. That year, their combined salaries and benefits would have been (remember, the sheriff left early to go to prison) $59,212.04 over their legally authorized salaries and benefits!

If this went on for 10-years, that would amount to $592,120 in excess payments by the citizens of Towns County to a small handful of powerful county officials. If it went on for 15-years, $888,181 in excess payments. That’s not as much as former Commissioner Truman Barrett estimates, but it is a significant amount of money in a county where the median family income was just $23,144 in 1990 (shortly after Commissioner Dayton took office) and $37,295 in 2000 (about halfway through Commissioner Dayton’s tenure). Put another way, the extra money in the paychecks of those three Towns County officials – not their clearly authorized salaries but just the extra or supplemental amounts – exceeded what a family right in the middle of the income scale would have earned.

The two men who got those supplements and who are not in prison tell Channel 2 Action News they see nothing wrong with what they were paid. As far as they are concerned, the late-Commissioner Jack Dayton had the authority to pay them more, and that’s that. Commissioner Bill Kendell, a former school superintendent elected the sole county commissioner in 2005, didn’t agree, so now those payments are history. But taxpayers will never know the real cost.