A probe the GBI launched two months ago into invoices and bidding procedures at the Bulloch County Public Works Department remains “active and ongoing,” a Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesperson said Friday. The investigation began several months along in the county’s emergency expenditures of more than $10 million for debris cleanup after Hurricane Helene and hundreds of thousands more on road repairs since Tropical Storm Debby.

“The GBI is investigating financial discrepancies related to invoices and bidding procedures within the Bulloch County Public Works Department,” Nelly Miles, director the bureau’s Office of Public and Governmental Affairs, replied to an email May 2. “The Ogeechee Circuit District Attorney requested the investigation on February 28, 2025. The investigation is active and ongoing.”

The Statesboro Herald had sent several questions. The “active and ongoing” response was as close to an answer as we were going to get last week to the question of whether any findings had been released or charges filed. Judging from similar responses in an email from Chief of Staff Lindsay Gribble in Ogeechee Judicial Circuit D.A. Robert Busbee’s office and a phone interview with Chairman David Bennett of the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners, no findings have been reached yet, or at least none that officials are ready to make public.

Since the GBI has said all along that the district attorney, elected chief prosecutor for the four-county circuit, requested the investigation, one obvious question was what prompted Busbee to ask for this.

“We mirror what our policy is with cases in our office in that we do not comment on open cases/investigations,” Gribble replied in an email. “That is going to include, at this point, what led to this.”

But she added that this case is not the district attorney’s anyway.

“It is with the GBI,” Gribble wrote. “Therefore, I cannot, nor can Mr. Busbee, speak to where the case is in terms of progress. Simply due to the fact that we don’t know ourselves.”

Another question was whether, if the investigation results in no criminal charges or other action, the district attorney will release a statement to that effect.

 “I imagine that regardless of the outcome of the case (findings or no findings) at that point we can provide more of a statement regarding everything,” Gribble said. “But again that would be once the case is considered closed, and at the discretion of what D.A. Busbee wants to do at that time.”

Invoices & interviews

David Bennett, who took office as chairman of the county commissioners at the beginning of January after an upset primary victory last May, confirmed that the GBI obtained copies of invoices from the county government and has interviewed some county employees, particularly in the Public Works Department.

“I really don’t know anything about the scope of the investigation,” Bennett said. “I just know that they interviewed some folks in Public Works. And you know, they don’t tell us a whole lot about what they’re actually investigating. I know that we have cooperated with everything and provided everything that they’ve asked us to provide as far as the county goes, and we just haven’t gotten a lot of feedback from them, which I think is probably the norm.”

So that leaves unconfirmed, for now, whether the invoices involved are those concerning the hauling of crushed rock and dirt for road repairs after flooding from Tropical Storm Debby in early August, or something to do with the cleanup of fallen trees and other vegetive debris after Hurricane Helene in late September, or something else.

Originally, on Aug. 12, 2024, the then-commissioners approved a reappropriation of up to $5 million to for the county to purchase materials and hire contractors for a 120-day “rapid response plan” for post-Debby road repairs. Reportedly unable to interest road repair contractors but hiring some dump trucks to haul crushed rock, the county department reported making faster than expected progress with its own crews by the time Hurricane Helene hit, after which the board granted a 180-day extension.

Then the county contracted with Southern Disaster Recovery, or SDR, based in Greer, South Carolina, for removal of post-Helene trees and debris and a separate firm, Thompson Consulting Services, of Maitland, Florida, to monitor and quantify the debris collected. By the time of a February county budget amendment, the cost of this effort was around $10 million, but with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and perhaps its Georgia analogue GEMA, destined to reimburse the county for most of the cost.

Meanwhile, road repair efforts continued with “emergency” purchases of materials, such as crushed rock, and “rock hauling services,” frequently appeared on Board of Commissioners meeting agendas from August 2024 through the first quarter of 2025, eventually totaling about $500,000. A company named J.L. Derriso Trucking has been one of the most frequent haulers, for which commissioners have taken votes to “approve and ratify” the use of the company for various weeks, beginning with one set of invoices for $28,754 and another for $33,179 last Sept. 3.

Sand Creek concern?

Another hauler doing this work has been Sand Creek Land Construction LLC, a company of which Commissioner Toby Conner’s brother, Clay Conner, is an owner. The commission meetings from Sept. 3 show that Commissioner Conner abstained from voting on two motions then, which the other commissioners approved 5-0, to ratify payments of $23,976.92 and $16,226.75 to Sand Creek. The clerk noted in the minutes that Conner said he was abstaining “due to his relation to the owner.”

However, minutes from later meetings in 2024, those on Nov. 7, Dec. 3 and Dec. 17 show “ratifying hauling service” payments to Sand Creek of $17,066, then $23,310 and $21,918.75, respectively, as having been voted on as part of the “consent agenda,” in which commissioners approve supposedly routine matters together on a single motion, and list Conner as voting “aye.”

Beginning in January, he again requested that any actions regarding Sand Creek Land Construction be removed from consent agenda to “new business” so that he could abstain, and did so. Subsequently, the actions mentioning the company have been placed in “new business” on the agendas, and Conner has abstained.

This has been a concern for the commissioners, if not necessarily for the GBI.

“Well, there were several votes before the first of the year where he actually voted on some of those issues, and we’re working through that right now as far as figuring out what the county’s responsibilities are to that,” Bennett said Friday. “The reality is, even if he wouldn’t have voted, those things still would have been approved because there was not dissent among the vote.”

He said county officials are still working through what to do in situations like this.

“The ethics guidelines that we have now clearly state, you know, that you shouldn’t vote in those situations but that you should recuse yourself. The problem is, the same ordinance does not really outline when you have one of these incidences happen, what do you do with it,” Bennett said. “So, there’s not a clear process that’s outlined by the ordinance as far as, do you have an ethics hearing, or how do you go about dealing with it.”

Another possible concern is the way that so many purchases or service orders have been made by staff under an “emergency” justification, without bids.

“I think that the ordinances would typically require them to bid that work out, but given that there was a state of emergency, they were not required to bid anything out, and they could just go to a single-source vendor and get the stuff done,” Bennett said.

But he added that “nobody really understood the scope of the damage or the work that was going to be required,” after the storms.

“When it came to just the expanse of the damage with Helene, the county if we had depended on Public Works to go around and do all that storm cleanup, it would have taken us years to do it, not to mention the fact that it would have pulled Public Works staff away from doing their regular jobs, like road maintenance and solid waste pickup and things like that,” Bennett said. “It was a challenge for us as far as no one here had ever had to deal with FEMA and GEMA at that level and do these kind of things, and I think that there have been lessons that have been learned from it, and we’ll incorporate those as we move forward.”