Last Updated: 2:03 p.m.
Flagler County Administrator Heidi Petito scored 84 percent on her latest evaluation, an improvement over the previous year’s 78 percent, if with some caveats.
Among them: sharp, almost lawyerly criticism from Commissioner leann Pennington, who blisters Petito’s handling of the recent River-to-Sea fiasco in Marineland and the political whiplash resulting from the wording of a Petito letter to the school superintendent suggesting, without commission approval, that the county was rethinking its commitment to school resource deputies. The commissioner was also critical of the administrator’s “slow-walking” of a proposed airport zoning ordinance. None of the other evaluations come close in tone or substance to the antagonism of Pennington’s review.
Other caveats: The evaluation period covers the 12 months between mid-October 2023 and mid-October 2024, the last year of then-Commissioners’ Donald O’Brien’s and Dave Sullivan’s tenures, and before the swearing in of their replacements, Pam Richardson and Kim Carney. So Carney and Richardson did not weigh in.
Sullivan sent in an evaluation. O’Brien had not (or the county had not forwarded it in response to a public record request; it did so after this article appeared.) The Sullivan evaluation was identical to the one he filed the previous year: perfect scores across the board, or 50 points out of a possible 50.
Commissioner Greg Hansen had yet to send in his evaluation. But he said he had nearly completed it, and that it would be identical to last year’s, which, like Sullivan’s, gave Petito perfect scores. (That proved to be the case when the county forwarded Hansen’s evaluation after this article appeared today.)
Petito’s latest evaluation got two 50 out of 50 results from Sullivan and Hansen, a 39 from Commission Chair Andy Dance, 47 from O’Brien, and 25 out of 50 possible points from Pennington, who was Petito’s harshest critic last year as well. Last year Pennington gave Petito a 50 percent rating. In the first version of her evaluation, Pennington’s score had fallen below that, to 46 percent, only for her second version to raise the score back to 50 percent.
If the Pennington evaluation seems like an outlier, perfect-score evaluations are no less so: they reflect less an effort to constructively analyze the chief executive’s performance than to suggest that all is well in the best of all possible worlds. Conversely, the Pennington review appears less interested in constructive criticism than in memorializing the sort of document organizations file in an employee’s human resources folder as a prelude to a firing. In that sense, three of Petito’s evaluations were not fair to her.
Overall, and Pennington aside, Petito received strong marks for her fiscal management, her relations with other governments and her marketing skills, lifting the county’s profile, and poorer marks for her internal staff management–a reflection of the poor morale and staff turnover in some departments–and her transparency with the commission, which continues to be wrong-footed on significant issues for lack of briefings. The Pennington review is no small matter, however, with both new commissioners in the wings and poised to weigh in this fall.
Sullivan commended Petito for reducing the property tax rate fractionally in each of the last three years (actually, a commission directive) while overseeing capital improvements such as a new south-side library. He also commended her “willingness to always listen to what others have to say and take their suggestions seriously.” His only advice was to “leave no doubt in your listeners’ minds as to the confidence they have in your decisions.”
Dance’s evaluation was thorough, complimentary, and an improvement from last year, when Dance gave Petito 69 percent. His 39 out of 50 points gave Petito a 78 percent this year, including a perfect score for fiscal management and superior scores for all categories but relations with the commission and staffing and management (3 out of 5 for both).
Dance is impressed with improvements in the budget process, some “innovative problem solving” such as the addition of a drone program, the replacement, after two and a half decades, of FireFlight, the emergency helicopter, and the completion of beach renourishment alongside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project, which extended that project by half a mile. Dance is also complimentary of Petito’s strong relationships with other local governments.
On the other hand he wants to see more updates on capital projects (Petito might take as her model the bi-weekly capital project update the Bunnell city administration presents to its commission, with pictures and percentages to show how far along each project happens to be, from City Hall’s construction to Commerce Parkway to commercial projects). Dance is also encouraging Petito to use staff exit interviews and internal employee surveys to “gauge the work atmosphere,” which has not been optimal, especially in human resources and, last year, in engineering.
If Dance was thorough, Pennington wrote the equivalent of a legal brief, a six-page, single-spaced “list of issues that resulted in the ratings given” as she headed it. (It was subsequently amended, with the segment on page 4 on “District 4 concerns/projects” removed.)
Pennington gave Petito 3’s for fiscal management, public relations, leadership and decision-making, and individual characteristics, and 2’s for commission relations, policy execution, intergovernmental relations and planning and organizational development. Pennington gave a 1 for staffing and management. “Quite honestly, I am worried that the culture that Flagler County has been plagued by in the past, continues today,” Pennington wrote.
“I recognize that our Legal department holds some responsibility in ensuring that the Administration is successful at accomplishing our goals and strategic plan, and I plan to address them,” Pennington concluded, ominously for the legal department. “I have been critical this year of performance, and trust me, [it’s] difficult to have to address.I recognize that in many ways, staff operates like a family. They appear to love their jobs and each other, but, the negative culture lingers and, at times, feels like a coup is at play against the Board and residents. I want very much to feel confident in what’s presented to us; however, I am not there. My desire is for real change so that the residents and the Board can have full confidence that the correct
decisions are being made on behalf of all of Flagler County.”
Petito, who had a meeting with Pennington tentatively scheduled for Friday, drafted her own list of accomplishments for the year. Those include, among other items, maintaining reserves equivalent to 5 percent of the operating budget, raising the county’s bond rating to AA+ from AA, creating “a culture of collaboration with community partners,” securing almost $50 million in state appropriations in the last two years (although that was really more the doing of then-Rep. Paul Renner, who used his leverage as Speaker of the House to steer pork the county’s way; significantly more went to Palm Coast), and creating a “transparency dashboard” on the county’s website (the dashboard includes some valuable documents, but they can lack context, making them unintelligible, as with the operating reserves, and links in documents are often dead).
Petito also points to the $74 million in ongoing construction projects, without incurring debt, an increase in the number of workshops and public involvement in creating the annual budget (that has likely more to do with Dance’s emphasis of more frequent workshops and deliberations before reaching decisions), developing marketing material to showcase the county, completing the expansion of high-speed broadband internet to the western part of the county, completing a stormwater management plan, and completing a beach-management plan–the latter one of the most challenging accomplishments of the past year.
In some cases, the accomplishments are really the doings of others that happened to fall on her watch, such as the addition of sheriff’s deputies (requested by and granted to Sheriff Rick Staly) and the replacement of three fire engines and five ambulances (the work of Fire Chief Michael Tucker) or the addition of an emergency management planner (requested by Emergency Management Director Jonathan Lord), and so on. (See the list of accomplishments here.)
Note: the first version of this article reflected only the first version of Commissioner Leann Pennington’s evaluation. The article has since been amended to reflect slight changes in the second version of the evaluation. FlaglerLive requested the evaluations on Feb. 6. The Sullivan and first Pennington evaluation were provided on Feb. 19, other versions in subsequent days, and 90 minutes after this article initially appeared, O’Brien’s and Hansen’s evaluations and a amended Dance evaluation were provided.
