On the eve of “Toy Story”’s 30th anniversary, Flagler Beach City Manager Dale Martin should not expect City Commissioner John Cunningham to break out the chummy Randy Newman song for his evaluation. Martin does not have a friend in Cunningham, the rookie commissioner who slapped Martin with the lowest annual evaluation score any manager has received in recent memory, including the short-tenured William Whitson.
Martin got a 1.32 out of 5 from Cunningham–who was elected last March–rating him “unsatisfactory,” itself an understatement compared to the bold-type phrases Cunningham used to summarize Martin’s performance: “poor management practices, lack of transparency, and limited accountability,” “ineffective oversight of city operations,” “inconsistent and questionable hiring and firing practices,” “limited understanding of how the city is perceived externally,” and “lack of leadership, accountability, and strategic oversight.”
“Without significant corrective action and stronger leadership presence,” Cunningham warns, ” continued performance at this level poses a risk to the city’s reputation, effectiveness, and long-term stability.”
Cunningham is seeing something his five colleagues do not. His comments find little to no echoes in any of the other evaluations, making the evaluation a particular outlier.
Compare it, for example, to Commissioner Eric Cooley’s sum-up. Cooley is the bluntest of the commissioners, and without his counterweight there anymore–Jane Mealy–he’s gotten more blunt. He summarized Martin’s year as one of “continued improvement,” with progress in “some areas.” His applause directly contradicts Cunningham’s boos: “Very impressed with the continued communication strengths. [Let’s] put them to work with county and multi-municipality interactions to get improvement there. I appreciate your focus keeping all of us elected on track throughout the year. I also appreciate your always timely responses to needs I might have. You are very engaged and it shows. [Let’s] leverage that and get you out of the office more with both the staff and the public. Thank you for your last year of service.”
Cooley rated him 3.75, up from 3.51.
Overall though Martin lost ground compared to last year’s evaluation, going from an average of 3.65 to 3.17, and leaving him barely meeting job expectations. If Cunningham’s evaluation is excluded, his average rises to 3.53, still a decline from last year. He is now meeting job standards (or better) for a bare majority of three of the five commissioners–not a secure position for a manager.
He gained ground with two commissioners, lost ground with two, three if Cunningham’s score is compared to Mealy’s last year (she’d given Martin a healthy 3.8), and stayed even with one (Mayor Patti King, who managed to repeat her 3.37 score down to fractions). Chances are he is not about to get the kind of 10 percent raise the Bunnell City Commission shamelessly awarded its manager, Alvin Jackson, last month.
Martin’s best score was a 4.04 out of 5, from Commissioner Scott Spradley, down from last year’s 4.45, but still in the “exceeds job standards” category, if barely. Spradley, now in his third year on the commission, contrasts sharply with Cunningham when he finds that “Dale brings a lot to the table with initiative skills and what I see as fair and capable management,” or that his “communication skills with other governmental units is excellent.” Spradley is more critical, as commissioners were last year, too, regarding Martin’s interactions with residents–or lack thereof.
Martin can be short or non-responsive and isn’t at ease either backslapping or shooting the breeze, preferring the grindstone instead. More responsiveness, Spradley suggests, “will pay great dividends to his professional status,” though from Commission Chair James Sherman’s vantage point, Martin has been doing just that in the past year while keeping the broader community informed with his Friday Notes, which are published online. (Martin has always been accessible to FlaglerLive, and his staff, the city clerk and her deputy especially, are almost immediately responsive to records requests.)
Sherman would rather not be asked about the manager’s effectiveness in leading his staff: “In the future, we may need to consider removing this from the City Manager’s performance evaluation,” Sherman writes. “As elected officials we are not to involve ourselves in the day-to-day operations of the city, which makes it hard to rate the city manager. I haven’t seen anything to sway my rating one way or the other.” Elected officials are barred from being involved in day-to-day management, or in interfering with the manager’s work with his staff.
Until last spring Martin’s toughest critic was Commissioner Rick Belhumeur, who’s in his ninth year on the commission. For Belhumeur, Martin barely met job standards last year, with a 3.19 rating. Not this year. Belhumeur rates him a 2.9: Improvement needed. His written comments had not been completed by the time the evaluations were included in the published agenda at the city’s website. He said he was completing those this evening.
Notably, Belhumeur’s lowest scores for Martin were in the very area Sherman said commissioners should not be addressing–internal management.
The mayor finds the manager “fair in all decisions and is always able to explain or defend his decisions with facts and appropriate details.”
Last year Martin summed up his evaluation as “tough love.” This year’s love is tougher. A self-evaluation from the manager may yet become part of the record before commissioners discuss the evaluations at Thursday evening’s meeting–a meeting leaden with weighty agenda items, including the annexation of Veranda Bay/Summertown, the sale of the city’s golf course, and the approval of a construction contract with the builder of the city’s wastewater plant, a $46.3 million bill.
The meeting will also consider merit pay increases for staffers, whose raises range between 2 and 5 percent, depending on their evaluations.
The detailed evaluations are below.
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