Last June 17, Palm Coast government hired Amanda Rees as director of its utility department, a 166-employee operation whose $71 million rate-based budget is 15 percent larger than the city’s tax-supported general fund. The utility has been ground zero of the city’s challenges with growth, its capacity under strain–and under a state consent order as a result–with costly but necessary improvements ahead. Leadership at the utility had also been an issue. Reese was to address all that.
Five months later, the city fired her. The city had deemed “I was not the right fit for the position, and they were terminating my employment effective immediately,” Rees wrote in a nine-page letter to the mayor and council members dated Nov. 23, nine days after her dismissal.
“As she was still within her probationary period, this decision was based on performance and the determination that she did not meet the expectations required to complete probation,” the city’s chief spokesperson wrote at the time. The Observer on Nov. 18 reported that she’d been fired following complaints that included “yelling at employees, using a demeaning tone and discussing an employee’s performance with that employee’s peers or subordinates.”
Those are not usually outright firing offenses in organizations that apply progressive discipline. But Rees was a probationary employee. The letter informed her she was not eligible for an administrative appeal. Rees took the next step available to her.
The letter is a complaint filed under the state’s whistleblower law. Rees contends that she was fired in retaliation over a series of issues she raised or positions she took, namely: her refusal to sign a state consent order that she says made her criminally liable for past practices; her push for what would have amounted to a moratorium on some development, pending construction of more water and sewer capacity; and the administration’s perception that “I threatened the trust they had built with sitting City Council member Theresa Pontieri.” Rees names Acting City Manager Lauren Johnston and Chief of Staff Jason DeLorenzo as responsible for the retaliation.
The letter became public at a City Council meeting Tuesday evening when Ken McDowell, a frequent critic of the city who over the past year and a half has been calling on “whistleblowers” within the city to come forward, brandished the Rees letter as he addressed council members during the public participation segment at the beginning of the meeting. “The information in here is absolutely appalling,” he said. “It gives some insight and how business is conducted, not just in our utility department, but in our city government.”
McDowell was right about the letter giving insight, though as a portrait of the Palm Coast administration goes, “appalling” is an overreach. What Rees writes more accurately describes some dysfunction, personality clashes, discordant expectations, leadership issues–Rees says the acting city manager asked her to fire several “problematic employees”–poor diplomacy perhaps, none of which are foreign to large organizations. More pointedly, her letter points to a good deal of fearful or preemptive politicking among an administrative leadership clearly jarred by what had been an unpredictable and at times rash City Council.
“People making decisions that are motivated by fear are always choosing poorly,” she wrote. “The environment created by firing the previous city manager has the executive team paralyzed with fear, and this is evident in my wrongful termination.” The sudden firing of former City Manager Denise Bevan had unsettled the administration. But it was Bevan who had ousted Steve Flanagan from the post Rees took over, doing so less than two weeks before Bevan’s own firing, so the connection between Bevan’s firing and Rees’s may be more subjective than Rees makes it seem.
If, in short, McDowell was looking for “corruption in this city hall,” as he put it Tuesday, he wouldn’t find it in those nine pages, nor does the letter provide him with a smoking gun.
The law firm representing Palm Coast in the matter–calling it a “case” would be premature–swiftly dismissed Rees’s claim of being a whistleblower in a Dec. 16 letter. “[B]ased on the long narrative of allegations and accusations contained in your letter,” wrote Mark Van Valkenburgh of Garganese, Weiss, D’Agresta and Saltzman, the Orlando law firm that had previously been the city’s permanent counsel, “it does not appear that you are or were a ‘whistleblower’ under the law. Furthermore, the City does not intend to revisit the decision to terminate your employment.”
The city consequently downplayed the letter’s claims in a statement issued today. “While we understand that job separations can be emotional, it’s not uncommon for individuals to express their frustration in ways that paint a negative picture,” the statement reads. “The claims made in the letter are either untrue or misrepresented and do not accurately reflect the City’s operations or values. The City is committed to professionalism, fairness, and transparency in all employment matters. This letter reflects one person’s perspective and does not represent the dedication and integrity of our team or the work we do for the community.”
Nevertheless the statement downplays the city’s own response to the letter, which it has taken seriously, according to City Council member Theresa Pontieri–the only council member Reese singled out–even if not as a whistleblower action. “We’re looking into everything and taking seriously everything she put into her letter,” Pontieri said today.
Rees singled out Pontieri not to directly criticize her but to suggest that because Pontieri had been upset by Rees’s tone during a meeting, when Rees proposed that developers, not the city, should pay for PEP tanks. “Lauren Johnston, Acting City Manager, told me they had worked very hard to gain Councilwoman Theresa Pontieri’s trust over the years and implied that I was threatening it, by proposing solution to problems,” Rees wrote. No one in the administration supported the PEP tank idea. Pontieri pushed for some form of discipline, Rees claims, which contributed to her firing.
Pontieri categorically denies it. The council member said she worked with Rees, and the two shared the same concern about rapid growth. They were brainstorming ways to address the utility’s urgent capacity issues while limiting the financial burden on existing residents. If anything, Pontieri felt she’d lost an ally when Rees was fired, even though Pontieri acknowledges that Rees could have rough edges.
“After that meeting I in no way directed any reprimand upon Amanda Rees for her tone,” Pontieri said. “I think Amanda Rees’s natural disposition was always a little rough. I think you could see that at city council meetings when she presented. I didn’t take any offense.” Pontieri said Reese could have “improved in articulating in a more professional way how to overcome the challenges we were facing in the utility department,” but that she herself never directed any reprimands. “That’s not my job,” Pontieri said.
Personalities aside, Rees’s fundamental concerns were justified, and Pontieri shared them: the city was growing too fast and signing too many development agreement without having ready capacity at its water and sewer plants, and more especially at its older Waste Water Treatment Plant #1, which was the focus of the state’s consent order.
A serious if peripheral issue arose when Rees refused to sign the consent order. “I had concerns about signing two clauses in the document because it threatened my imprisonment for what I could understand was stating that the City of Palm Coast did not in the past or would not in the duration of the consent decree use sewer rates to pay for any other projects that were not capacity related,” she wrote. The city had, in fact, made a loan to itself out of the utility fund to pay for the Old Kings Road expansion nearing State Road 100 in 2010, the expansion built in expectations of a Walmart Supercenter Walmart never built. The city has since established a special taxing district along Old Kings Road to repay the loan.
Explaining the consent decree to the council in mid-October, Rees said the decree had not yet been signed only because “we have been going back and modifying just little instances of maybe a discrepancy, or trying to understand their wording in some areas.” The wording on the loan appears to have been one such “discrepancy” rather than the sort of grave concern described in Rees’s letter. (Johnston has since signed the decree.)
Rees in her letter also highlights discrepancies in growth projections between the city’s capital improvement plan and its new comprehensive plan, reflecting “many disagreements on the growth projections” within the administration. But again it isn’t clear how such disagreements play into an eventual cause for blowing the whistle: such disagreements are not extraordinary.
It was when Rees attempted to press for more prudence with growth and the language of growth and revenue expectations that she drew the sharpest blowbacks, surprising her. “I suggested that changing the ‘Growth pays for Growth’ line of thinking may be helpful because, in my review of the Utility financials, this was not the conclusion I drew from the numbers,” she wrote. “I had heard this phrasing echoed from the council podium, and my advice was that based on the financials and cost of new expansions, this needed to be more accurate to the public. I left this meeting thinking that we talked over serious, tough topics, but I was surprised to find out that it was a negative or bad interaction.”
Rees had expected that a resolution would be drafted and presented to the council to make future growth in certain areas feeding into Waste Water Treatment Plant #1 contingent on capacity–in other words, that the resolution would set up the possibility of a building moratorium. Reese appeared to be treading into policymaking at that point. “I do think that a lot of her letter touched on policy in general and it seemed she disagreed with policymakers,” Pontieri said. “But I don’t think that’s why she was terminated.”
“I think Ms. Rees was trying to convey she wanted to slow down development and she was fired because staff did not want to slow development. That’s the gist that I got,” Pontieri said. The administrative staff knows Pontieri’s own position on the issue, which is not much different: “They have been very helpful in brainstorming ideas to slow growth in a smart way so that we can work on our infrastructure. Therefore her overall sentiment in that letter, I have not felt from working with our executive staff.”
Of course the executive staff will defer to an elected official as it would not to a member of its own circle, especially a subordinate.
The last day of September Johnston confronted Rees with allegations that Rees had “addressed utility staff aggressively or inappropriately on multiple occasions.” Rees contested the claim and refused to sign a “write-up” issued by the human resources department. She describes in her letter recurring chain-of-command issues with Cynthia Schweers, the customer service manager, whom Rees repeatedly praises as talented and “a great employee,” but also as someone Rees had to address sternly, apparently causing the complaints to HR when Schweers took it as yelling.
There were related interactions with other utility employees–none of it minor, but none of it amounting to more than serious management issues, not “corruption” or malice or worse. At times, Rees’s letter reads like a consultant’s prescription to a dysfunctional organization: “Human Resources at the City of Palm Coast lacks policies to hold people accountable professionally; this leads to letting ineffective leadership sit in positions where they should be terminated for creating toxic work environments. The Human Resources department must support the utility department in achieving this goal.”
For all that, Johnston commended Rees for her leadership during Hurricane Milton, when the city–and its utility, for all its challenges–survived a historic rain event with barely a handful of in-home flooding. City staff in general and the utility in particular were roundly celebrated by the City Council, if with some dissent from the public (it was election season). A few weeks later, Rees was fired.
JimboXYZ says
Sounds like the typical hatchet job HR’s are famous for. Funny they brought all the NDA paperwork to the dismissal discussion meeting. Who leads that discussion by asking how someone is doing. Yet another 6 month hire for the City of Palm Coast loking for a savoir to bail out years of what we’re looking at. The capacity of the STF’s has been directly a result of a flawed growth & Vision of 2050. Covid year, then the last 4 years of grossly underfunded projects of which STF’s were outright unfunded or so grossly underfunded projects. $ 200+ million for the new STF, there wasn’t enough funding to pay for even that from any of the grant lobbies. No wonder Holland resigned in May 2021, Alfin walked into that mess & approved the Vision of 2050 growth. We all saw how the smoke & mirrors of a flawed Vision that is an even bigger mess & didn’t even get to 2025. Whether it’s corruption or just incompetence, the results are devastating. Getting sued to grow West of US-1 over a STF. I think everyone in those Government buildings are in over their heads, promoted beyond ability/capability. I feel for Mike Norris, he’s going to have sort thru this somehow, if that’s even possible.
Percy's mother says
Jimbo,
It’s corruption AND incompetence.
And that goes for the City of Palm Coast Building Department and “inspectors” signing off on residential construction projects without actually doing a physical inspection . . . just signing off while sitting in their trucks. I know because I currently have a pending lawsuit regarding this particular issue.
Deborah Coffey says
I believe Ma. Pontieri is correct. All I know for fact is that we just a received a $281 utility bill…which is $150 more than four years ago and $100 more than 4 months ago. Stop voting for Republicans. They have absolutely no idea how to govern! None, zip, zilch.
Percy's mother says
Just like the City of Los Angeles mismanagement including cutting the fire department budget by $17 million to fund the sanctuary population, and now you see what’s going on there with the fires. Complete mismanagement and corruption by Democrat progressives who also have less idea how to govern.
Chip D says
Your blind hatred of republicans and blaming literally everything that has gone wrong in the world on republicans is quite disturbing.
Deborah Coffey says
You don’t see the hatred spread and the wealth transfer to the top 2% since Ronald Reagan? Oh, and how much money did you lose in The Great Republican Recession of 2008? You’re unaware that almost every recession in the U.S. has been caused by Republican administrations along with Republican Congresses? And now, they’re killing pregnant women and planning on rounding up brown people. My hatred is not blind. Evil is as evil does.
Percy's mother says
What about YOUR hatred.
Look in the mirror for God’s sake Deborah Coffey. Your venom never stops.
celia pugliese says
Of course plenty guns were fired against the best interest of Palmcoasters customers of our depleted utilities within the past and also current councils (approval of the expansion of the utility in OKR south off Rte 100) to serve new developers plans and or take over failing old county lift station services currently insufficiently serving that area!. Council should have voted NO as we do not have the capacity to add any more usage to our old plants or wells. Now we have to pay these usurers rates of our utility forced by city administrators to fund growth!
Furthermore the utility enterprise fund has been used for what not intended. Meaning the fees we pay to maintain our utility and funds reserves used instead for land purchases benefitting those well known connected wealthy owners and pay for roads benefitting their interest.. The 12 page Ms. Reese document just verifies what we have known for years:
Page 3. Consent Decree…….
TRANSFERRING UTILITY ENTERPRISE FUNDS TO COVER ROADS !
Page 2 Amanda’s Discovery…
OF ASSETS CLAIMED TO OWNED BY THE CITY THAT ARE HELD AS REAL PROPERTY BY OTHERS !
May not be smoke, but spent cartridges speak for themselves. Our current council shouldn’t seat idle as we need change!
celia pugliese says
First things first Ms. Reese needs to have this 12 page document presented under the whistle blower protection!. Or otherwise she will end up like our former Flagler SOE Mrs. Weeks an honest constitutional officer elected and re elected by landslide and dragged thru the mud by the powers that be and those in office intimidated to collaborate against her or else. She has endured great psychological and financial damage.
Lets remind those in the council now that reelection is around the block and should not be associating with the wrong administrators in issues they advocate against residents. This letter just makes public what we knew for a while and maybe we need an investigator back in our city like Jay Maher again. We need urgent changes in city administrators! And Pierre may not be a smoking gun, but sure guns were fired against the best residents interest since the Netts administration and DeLorenzo running this city. He has his eyes in our Palm Harbor Golf Course now too, obviously but he will bounce again!. Too bad that our favorite councilwoman Pontieri is failing us now. Hope she comes back into the right line. We do not need a YMCA without a pool that will cost us millions. We need that our two pools “refurbished” and if so they are ADA compliant! We can’t have anymore growth until our utility and road infrastructure catches up no matter what current city administrators telling council.
Percy's mother says
Pontieri’s image as a savior is way over-rated. Before being elected onto the Palm Coast City Council she was basically a failed attorney who’d also been fired by the FCSO.
The only reason Pontieri was able to get elected is because she was chosen and backed by the ever present and continually politically destructive Flagler County Republican Executive Committee. Bob Updegrave (chairman at the time) did his behind the scenes maneuvering to get her elected. (and before Lance Alred comments on getting the facts straight, I was there when this was going on . . . way before Lance Alred became a member of the Flagler Republican Executive Committee).
I think Ms. Pontieri thinks way too highly of herself and needs to be put in her place as basically being a failed attorney who got pushed onto the PC City Council . . . similar to Ty Vincent Miller who’s presently PC City Councilman District 1 (and who is closely tied to the Flagler Homebuilders Association).
TRUTH says
Reelections are coming up for Pontieri and some county commissioners
Pennington and we believe Hansen is going to retire thank goodness as
ineffective as he has been especially with the Regga Surf issue, many
from the Hammock are fed up with him for his lack of representation,
we need to vote Pontieri and Pennington out and get better representation
they both speak out of 2 sides of their mouths and then vote go along
to get along, we don’t need this nor did we campaign for the SOS but a
different day.
Tammany Hall says
She was fired for good reason. Don’t listen to this Ceila Pugliese lady always trying to stir the pot. You’re nothing but a trouble maker with you 12 my space followers.
This ex employee was not getting the employees motivated. She was a bully. The employees started to act-up to protect themselves.
This is not the way an employee should go to work everyday.
The City Manager did the right thing terminated the problem.
The problem is the problem wants to cause more problems.
She is not a whistleblower just a bad Manager that can’t believe she was fired.
Now that she continues to a pain in the ass try to go find a job. Nobody wants an employee like you.
This so called whistleblower letter is proof of your incompetent management style.
Veronica says
This must have been commented on by one of the people whom she spoke about. Hmmm?
CardinalCpt says
Sorry but if you read the letter correctly, Amanda was made to think utility is incompetent and she needs to remove people. She came in ready to remove and start fresh only to realize things aren’t what they seem. She was under the stress of fixing a utility on the edge of failing ( and it is close to) and being ignored by our current leaders and joke of a council woman who again was terminated by FCSO. She stood up to fix this and was tossed out when management saw her as a a threat. Flannagan was first but fortunately he stepped down before they treated him the same.
celia pugliese says
First of all is not Ceila but Celia are you Tammany Fake ID a mouth piece of the current omens in this city administration or probably one of them? Have the (b,,,s) before having the audacity to refer to my real name, to disclose who the hell you are..,why to hide? That speaks for itself!
Tired of it says
Keep electing Republicans and they will keep driving this city into the ground. How are all those higher utility bills, crumbling roads and traffic jams working for you? Still think the developers and all the new constructions are going to pay for all the needed improvements? Why shouldn’t the developers pay fpr PEP tanks?
Justice for all says
I don’t think the tax payers were ever reimbursed for the widening of Old Kings Road. Yes, there was a Community Redevelopment Area established so the property owners adjacent to the road could use their tax dollars to pay back the City. But when WalMart backed out of the relocation, the CRA went defunct. Seems like utility $ used for everything but utilities.
Doug says
“Set up to fail” seems like an understatement if the details in this letter are to be believed.
It sounds like failing to act on expanding a plant so close to its capacity limit for years and years caused an expensive problem that requires the political will to fix. If the paralyzed city leadership is afraid to take the most rudimentary steps (such as not continuing to further burden WWTP1 until it can be expanded), idk how the city will ever fix anything.
In the meantime, our utility bills keep going up, WWTP1 still hasn’t broken ground on expansion, and developers keep on chugging- but, hey, look over there. More places to play pickleball!
John Stove says
So the City “loaned” itself Utility Funds to expand Old Kings Road…..that is not how Utility Funds work, these funds are only to be used to maintain, repair and upgrade our Utilities. Then somewhere down the line the City claims they don’t have enough money to fix some part of our Utilities and they raise our fees again…..and again….and again.
Did you know that the City is taking and using $10 million dollars form our Storm Water fees (which have gone up well over 100% in the last few years) to build a new Storm Water Maintenance Building? How is this building fixing our failing culverts, dredging our fresh and salt water canals, control weeds in the canals etc etc
The City loves fees because they can raise them anytime they want without taxpayers voting on it….they just come up with more BS as to the reason.
Take about a flim flam way of using our taxes…..liars and incompetent management