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Mayor David Alfin provided the swing vote Tuesday evening to keep Lauren Johnston as acting city manager until a permanent replacement is found, after a powerful plea–and motion–by Council member Theresa Pontieri to ratify Johnston contract and respect council procedures, the charter and principle.
Moments later, the council rebuffed an attempt by Council member Ed Danko to hire Jerry Cameron, the former Flagler County administrator, in place of Johnston. Danko’s motion died for lack of second. It was Cameron’s third defeat in three years in his attempts to weave back into a city manager position–twice in Palm Coast, once in Flagler Beach.
The council’s agenda item today was only to ratify Johnston’s contract, since the council had voted 4-0 two weeks ago to install her as the acting city manager in place of Denise Bevan, whom the council fired in a 3-2 vote led by Alfin.
Alfin had barely announced tonight’s item before Danko said he wanted to make a motion. Alfin slowed him down, opening the floor to the discussion about the pending contract for Johnston, if she were to remain the acting manager. Johnston sat at the dais, in the manager’s chair.
Pontieri, a lawyer, wanted to ensure that Johnston could not be fired at will for the duration of her tenure in the manager’s chair. Pontieri, aware of the likely maneuvers to oust Johnston and install Cameron, also stressed the wording of her motion two weeks ago that had placed Johnston in that role: “she was to remain in place until a permanent city manager was appointed.”
To Danko–and contrary to the wording of the charter–Pontieri’s motion had been wrong, because (in Danko’s view) Johnston had automatically become the acting manager regardless. Anthony Garganese, the city attorney, corrected him: Pontieri was right. It had required an actual motion by the council to so name Johnston. He also corrected Danko on the distinction Danko wanted to make between “acting” and “interim,” a distinction Alfin had also adopted last week. The charter, the lawyer said, refers to the responsibility as “acting.”
Pontieri had motioned that Johnston’s contract should have a safeguard: if she were to be fired, she could only be fired with cause, but following Garganese’s analysis–and sensing the importance of ensuring a vote on her motion–she amended the motion “to accept the contract as is with the recognition that the motion that carried unanimously was to keep Lauren Johnston as our acting city manager until we permanently hire a city manager.”
Then something odd developed. Danko turned to Johnston, lavished compliments on her, but told her she wasn’t ready to be the city manager–a position Johnston said as recently as Monday she was not interested in: she was taking the acting manager’s job to help the city bridge the period to a permanent manager. Danko was setting up for his Cameron motion (he hadn’t mentioned Cameron yet, but his eagerness was a giveaway.)
Then it was Council member Cathy Heighter’s turn to do likewise. “I’ve had the privilege of working with you for several weeks now,” Heighter told Johnston, “and I absolutely think that you have done an amazing job as our acting city manager, and I look forward to working with you for a long time in the future.” Nevertheless, Heighter said she wasn’t sure Johnston was “completely ready” for the position of city manager.
A clearly livid Pontieri didn’t let that stand. She focused on Danko’s statement.
“To me your your comments are two, there’s two issues,” she told him. “One, feigning support of her in this position, and then almost threatening that she’s going to be put into the same position” as Bevan.
Danko said he wasn’t going to “sit here and tolerate this kind of nonsense.”
“Well, you know what the door is,” Alfin told him.
Pontieri resumed: “You say to somebody ‘I don’t want you to fall into the same trap as Denise did.’ We made a motion that Lauren Johnson is to remain the acting city manager until we hire a permanent city manager,” a position Pontieri said she wasn’t seeking anyway. “So if we accept the contract as is, which is what we all agreed to do two weeks ago, then we are sticking with our motion. We are doing what we said we were going to do, going to the well for the permanent city manager. To now do a 180 on that because there’s been backdoor talks and dealings is the last thing our city needs right now. What we need is light. What we need is sunshine. What we need is to stick with the motion that I made that passed, and to move forward to find a permanent city manager from the League of Cities, keeping stability and continuity in our city in the meantime. That is what is important. We are scaring off people from coming here, from developing here, from doing economic development here, because we can’t even follow a motion that was made and passed unanimously two weeks ago. It’s totally inappropriate.”
Council member Nick Klufas called on the council at least to hold a workshop in future before springing the sort of motion that Alfin did two weeks ago. “The most important thing to me is that we have this noticed to the public, but also that we have a discussion about this amongst our council,” Klufas said. “My biggest fear is that we are making moves up here that we haven’t actually discussed amongst ourselves to try to set the vision for how we’re going to be able to move forward.” Klufas said Pontieri’s motion would do that.
Pontieri, Klufas and Alfin voted for it, in that oreder as the clerk took the roll, with Danko and Heighter opposed. Only then Danko got up, distrubuted something to council members, and made his motion to hire Cameron in place of Johnston. “I spoke to several people before making this decision to make this motion,” he said, “people I thought would be qualified, people that were not inside the building that could bring us some sort of fresh view from the outside.”
The motion drew a peal of laughter from the audience and silence from the dais in place of a death knell.
Johnston will earn an annualized $189,000 salary in her position as acting manager, the same salary Bevan had been earning. The council will seek some direction from the Florida League of Cities as to how to proceed with a search for a permanent replacement. In that regard, there may be more agreement among council members to seek a search firm and a national hunt.
