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Venice on the web
Resignations rock city hall's old guard Got a comment? Make it here. Related:
O'Connor calls it quits Venice Florida! dot com has previously reported that O'Connor is a likely peripheral target in the EPA's criminal investigation into the city's pollution control division. O'Connor was a key player in former City Manager George Hunt's witch hunts aimed at city workers who were cooperating with the EPA's investigation. As such, this web site reported that O'Connor may be being targeted by the federal agency for prosecution for witness tampering, most notably for her involvement in disciplinary actions against wastewater supervisors Troy Evans and Skip Pettit. Evans is currently seeking a hearing under the federal Whistleblowers Act and it has been rumored for some time that Pettit and several other city employees may start similar proceedings against the city (see attorney Tommy Meyer's letter to the city on behalf of Troy Evans, with attached disciplinary memo authored by O'Connor). O'Connor arguably did herself no favors when she promoted a plan to do a national search to recruit a new city manager. At the January 27th council meeting, O'Connor and Mayor Dean Calamaras cheerily put on a PowerPoint show touting the wonders of shopping around for a new city manager rather than just settling for whatever person could be dredged up from the pool of in-house personnel. With full knowledge that Marty Black was about to be promoted into the job temporarily (and with the strong likelihood that he would be keeping the position), O'Connor touted the ease and efficiency with which she would be able to assist council in any search endeavors they cared to make in replacing Black with a more suitable candidate. Council took a quick pass and instead voted Black to be promoted to Interim City Manager with a promise that the word 'Interim' would be dropped at the next available opportunity. While it has been rumored for quite some time that there was a goodly amount of friction between O'Connor and Black, most of the friction was attributed as situational due to Hunt's placement of the two in competing positions -- Black as Deputy City Manager, O'Connor as Assistant to the City Manager. If O'Connor ever had any hope of reconciling whatever differences the pair had, that hope went out the window when she agreed to throw herself on Calamaras' hand grenade (according to statements made by Calamaras and O'Connor in front of council, it was Calamaras who asked O'Connor to put the national search PowerPoint presentation together). O'Connor's departure is good news to many of the blue-collar city workers who view her as an obstacle in fighting what they believe is a hostile work environment under the current administration of utilities heads John Lane and Patricia 'Pat' Wilson. Ralph Hamann, local AFSCME union president, stopped short of saying O'Connor's exit was a blessing. "I wouldn't say that, but with O'Connor gone, we are hoping for a smoother, more open process of resolving grievances," Hamann stated. "She was supportive of the policies of George Hunt and the supervisors in pollution control," Hamann continued. "We [still] have some major issues to resolve -- the staffing at pollution control, overtime issues, costs of health insurance. Those are all important issues that are coming up. We have some grievances that are close to going to arbitration unless we can come to an agreement [with the city]," Hamann stated. The union president is currently taking an optimistic viewpoint, primarily due to the near-total change in attitude of the city's new administration under newly-appointed City Manager Marty Black: "Word has come down that the city is willing to work with us on the grievances." That's a statement from Hamann that was unthinkable just a few months ago when Hunt and O'Connor were overseeing personnel issues.
Siegmann and the First Baptist Church The church recently applied for various permits for five special events that are planned in the coming year. These included an annual sunrise service at the Venice Jetties and several events that would require closing off a street adjacent to the church. According to Lori Siegmann, she and another city staffer made recommendations for denial of several of the events that involved the closing of city streets. The church received notification of the pending denials on Monday, February 9 of this year, the day before the applications would be formally denied at a city council meeting. This allowed the church less than a day to straighten out any problems with the permits that were scheduled to be denied. First Baptist Church is understandably crying foul. Last year wasn't exactly a banner year for city/church relationships either: a sign-permitting debacle resulted in permitted signs that read "There is no God" (and other similar atheist messages) that were planted on city property in front of their church. To make this dark comedy even worse, the city had permitted the atheist messages so that the display took place on Easter Sunday, 2003. The current problem is a tired rerun of a previous disagreement between First Baptist Church and city hall that took place in 2002. At that time, the city denied several event permits and notified the church of the pending denials within a few days of the formal approval/denial process before council, thus denying the church any time to rectify the permitting problems. On July 23, 2002, Pastor Tom Hodge and the church's attorney, Jon Preiksat, appeared before council complaining about the approval and notification process as administered by the city. "There's supposed to be an administrative committee that makes a recommendation to the city manager. In the past, it's been city staffers who arbitrarily make a decision," Preiksat stated. "If they are going to shoot us down and deny us permission for various things, that's one thing, but they need to follow due process and their own rules and they still aren't doing that. If they are going to make us obey the rules, that's fine, but city hall needs to obey the rules as well." Preiksat stated that to this day he knows of no committee that's ever been formed to approve and deny special event permits as the city rules and ordinances require. When Preiksat raised the issue of the non-existing committee in 2002, something really odd happened: unsigned hand-written minutes of a committee meeting suddenly surfaced. Preiksat stated that he subsequently discovered that they were minutes for a meeting that had never taken place. Preiksat states that he was told by a staffer that the minutes were invented after the fact and they were written and were post-dated by a specific city official. Preiksat declined to name the city official involved or the city staffer who admitted that the minutes were fake. Preiksat complained of the current permitting woes to both Siegmann and Marty Black on Tuesday, February 10 of this year, stating that Siegmann wasn't following due process and that this was the same problem that the city had stated would never happen again. February 10 is, coincidentally, the same day that the Gondo is reporting that Siegmann turned in her request for retirement. Whether the two incidents are related is unknown at this time, but the First Baptist permits started turning into a PR flashfire as soon as the church discovered it had less than 24 hours to respond. As for the notification process of pending denials, Preiksat stated that it just isn't adequate, that the city needs to give applicants more time between the recommendation and the final approval or disapproval. In the current situation, the church was given less than 24 hours to respond after they had received the notification. The church applications were pulled from the council agenda quite literally at the last minute (although they still appeared on the printed copies), and a future meeting has been set up between the church and the city to go over the applications. Note to city hall staffers: George Hunt is no longer city manager. There was a memo issued a few weeks back to that effect. If you didn't get a copy of the memo, request one from the clerk's office.
More resignations? "That's a bigger problem than most people realize," Venice Taxpayers League prez Herb Levine said. "From what I'm hearing, the utilities department has spent the city down to the point where we are close to not having enough in reserve to qualify for the choice bond interest rates. If we spend ourselves down too low, that inexpensive bond we just voted for will become very pricey." The ongoing personnel battles in the utilities department and the ongoing EPA investigation have proven to be equally unamusing to council and the public. Council member Vicki Taylor was quoted in the newspapers a month or two ago as wondering how many other cities our size were facing a similar number of employee grievances and lawsuits. The answer she received: none that are known. Another pollution control supervisor, Bill Quigley, is also on the firing line. Quigley was the subject of a Venice Florida! dot com article last year when area residents accused him of berating and insulting them during a shout match that occurred in their front lawns. That incident happened while Hunt was still city manager and as a result, the city never looked into residents' complaints of Quigley's behavior. In fact, the mayor publicly accused this web site of making facts up in the incident. Quigley is currently under investigation by city hall for failing to report a vehicular accident that involved a city-owned vehicle. The accident reportedly took place a couple of weeks ago on city property and was filmed by a security camera. No official confirmation of the accident or the circumstances surrounding it were available at the time of this writing, but Venice Florida! dot com has confirmed the accident and the subsequent investigation by city hall. If it is determined that Quigley willingly did not report the accident, he could be fired.
John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times. |
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