On Monday, Atlanta's mayor requested the resignation of virtually every high-ranking member of city government.
Now, 11Alive is looking into why exactly Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms made the move in the first place. In a statement on Monday, Bottoms said the call for resignations revolved around the idea of transparency.
She said her next step would be to go through each resignation, look at job performance and decide which resignations she would accept.
"When we are done with this re-evaluation, we will all agree that this is a team that I have assembled," Mayor Bottoms said. "And it will be a combination. There will be people who will remain, there will be people who may move on to other opportunities, there may be people who have other opportunities in the city that is appropriate for their skill set."
One thing she pointed out, however, is that the resignation request wasn't an attempt to get rid of everyone.
"I don't want to give anyone the impression that you will come in next week and the entire leadership of city hall will be gone," Bottoms said. "That is likely not to happen."
Councilmember Ivory Lee Young Jr. gave the following statement to 11Alive:
"When you look at our budget when you look at the enormity of the task before us as a government it is absolutely important that we get the best and brightest in every position from top to bottom. I think it is ill-advised to just assume that if you held a position previously that you would automatically just carry on."
This decision comes as Bottoms reaches a milestone in her administration - the first 100 days - and fits into a narrative set early on - and also alluded to just days before this government pseudo-purge.
"There will be additional announcements in terms of things that we are doing from my administration to make sure we are very openly operating ... openly and transparently," Bottoms said.
That comment came along with questions about an FBI investigation into city operations that plagued the final months of her predecessor, Kasim Reed.
For over a 2 years now, the FBI has been looking into a major bribery scandal that was a sticking point on the campaign trail for Bottoms and other candidates.
Now mayor, Bottoms has reiterated transparency in her handling of the investigation and other situations the city has faced such as the recent ransomware attack that crippled city computers.
The FBI investigation began with findings in 2016 that two city contractors, Elvin Mitchell and Charles P. Richards, allegedly agreed to bribe Mitzi Bickers, who served as head of the city's human services department.
Bickers ran the department for three years, from 2010 to 2013. It wasn't until 2016 that she became the focus of a major investigation and only a week ago that she was indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, money laundering and wire fraud along with witness tampering and filing false returns.
But Bottoms said she's working to determine just how far the bribery issues reached within city government walls.
"We are watching it [the investigation] closely to make sure that, as a city - to the extent that we can address whatever issues there are that may still exist inside the city hall," Bottoms said. "It's important that we know who the players are and what they are accused of and what they admit to so we can make our changes internally accordingly."
It wasn't long after this that residents and city officials alike found out exactly what form one of the biggest changes would take - the mass resignation request.
Mayor Bottoms, however, said that her hope is also for a fresh start.
"I'm looking for talented people and there are plenty of them in the city of Atlanta," she said. "And many of them are here today."
Bottoms has also announced another way she intends to differ from her predecessor in terms of financial transparency.
In the thick of the initial investigation into bribery and amid calls for more transparency into what was going on, Reed's administration responded with more than 400 boxes containing more than 1.4 million documents for the media to look through.
Bottoms is, however, taking a more high-tech approach going forward and announced, on Tuesday, the creation of a new web system that will house publicly available financial documents in the city.
"It will allow members of the public, literally, at their fingertips to easily search, follow and analyze the business and the spending of the city of Atlanta," she said. "It will allow all of our taxpayers and our interested media to see exactly where or how we are spending our money."
It's a system already in place in several major cities and Bottoms said the plan is to have it fully online in Atlanta by the summer.
