County Administrator Heidi Petito barely survived an attempt by Commissioner Kim Carney to fire her Monday night before an empty chamber, at the very end of a meeting that had stretched past the three-hour mark, and in an off-agenda maneuver fellow-Commissioner Andy Dance said was improper.
Carney’s motion, taking place literally at the commission’s 11th hour of a pair of meetings that had started at 9 this morning, didn’t get a second, so there was no vote. Had there been one, it would have been 3-2 against, with Commission Chair Leann Pennington joining Dance and Commissioner Greg Hansen to oppose it despite Pennington’s numerous misgivings about Petito.
If the administrator survived, she did so without the majority’s confidence: even Pennington is not happy with her in her current role. But this was not the time nor the manner Pennington wanted her fired, especially without a succession plan or an explicit way for Petito to remain in the organization.
Petito was among the few people in the room. She remained stoically silent throughout.
“I’m open to it,” Pennington said of removing Petito. “I just want there to be a role for Ms. Petito in the organization.” If anything, Pennington, at times through tears, detailed more clearly why Petito should be removed than Carney, who fumbled when Hansen asked her for specific examples about Petito’s failings. Pennington described how the leadership culture had to change, the commission’s “decision constipation” ended and “core functions” addressed, and enumerated other frustrations.
“I am actually going to make a motion to terminate her agreement and contract with our county,” Carney had said moments earlier. “I can’t continue to work at my level, feeling the way I do and being treated the way I’m treated.” She referred to the evaluation of Petito, telling her colleagues to support her if their evaluations echoed hers. Pennington’s and Richardson’s evaluations did. But only Richardson appeared to support her, if also stopping short of a second.
Dance was made livid by the motion, saying the commission couldn’t act on it since it hadn’t been placed on the agenda, according to commission policy. Carney disagreed. (She could get two colleagues to agree to place it on the agenda for a motion, though Carney did not take that route.)
“You need support. And it’s bad faith, and it lacks transparency,” an unusually blunt Dance told Carney, who asked why.
“Because it does. On its face. It lacks–when nobody’s in attendance and nobody knows about it, it lacks transparency,” Dance said. Carney had on occasion carried out similar late-meeting, non-agenda maneuvers when she was a city commissioner in Flagler Beach.
Carney stood by her motion. She said she wasn’t interested in throwing Petito out of the administration, either, but she wasn’t sure what position she could fill. “We can’t make something happen that isn’t that isn’t happening,” Carney said. “We’ve all set our peace. I’m not going to change my position because I’ve gotten a couple of news articles, because that was one of my biggest complaints, was, if I didn’t have negative press, I’d have no press. So we immediately get Julie, we get ribbon cuttings. That’s not what a commissioner does. A Commissioner impacts the community they serve. So I want, I want positive community interaction. I just, it’s not happening. It’s just not happening.”
References to Jorge Salinas, the deputy county administrator who died with his wife in an October car crash, added an undercurrent of grief and led Dance at the very end of the meeting to call for compassion, an allusion to the grave loss Petito was still working through. By then it was clear that Carney’s motion was not getting support. But Pennington’s studied guardrails, not grief, made the difference.
Carney’s motion still was an injurious salvo that will make it even more difficult for the administrator to lead through this much pointed discontent: “I was not treated by the administrator the way I would hope I would be, too many times,” Richardson said, calling the review process that evaluated the administrator “deplorable.” She said there was no “on-boarding” when she arrived at the commission, she vaguely claimed to have been “insulted” in one meeting, without elaborating, and she cited preferential treatment and other issues that have made her uncomfortable. “I’m very disturbed about all the things,” she said, somehow managing after a longer screed of velvet bitters to conclude: “I hope we can resolve everything in a positive manner. That’s all I’m looking for, is a healthy environment for us to work in.”
But it was Pennington who defined the moment. “I don’t think there is a succession plan for change, and I don’t think that there is reason to let Miss Petito go from the county without finding her meaningful position here,” she said, even as she summed up an administration in paralysis: “We can’t make decisions up here anymore. Everyone’s spinning in wheels. She’s gotten to a point now because of way we’ve done our yearend [reviews], and just how unhappy in general some of us are, that she’s afraid to make recommendations because we’re not going to–if we’re going to react to her recommendations, because they’re not going to be what we want.”
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