Near the end of last night’s Flagler Beach City Commission meeting, Commissioner John Cunningham, who wants City Manager Dale Martin fired and is often at odds with the commission, told fellow Commissioner Scott Spradley to mind his own business.
After noting that Cunningham hadn’t met with Martin once all year, Spradley had suggested in cautious and respectful terms, and after a long preface about the virtues of conflict resolution, that Cunningham meet with the manager more often to talk things out and get things off his chest.
“First, Commissioner Spradley,” Cunningham said curtly when it was his turn to speak during the customary Commissioner Comment segment at the end of the meeting, “I’ll meet with Dale on purpose, and that’s my business, not yours. So that’s my answer to that. There’s a reason I don’t meet. But I’m not going to say it right now.”
As has often been the case with Cunningham, his criticism was cryptic. He did not respond to a call and a text asking what his reason might be. He has opposed numerous commission decisions and has echoed criticism of Martin by an ex-employee suing the city. But so had Rick Belhumeur until his defeat last March, though Belhumeur continued to meet with the city manager regularly.
An hour earlier in the meeting Cunningham was stung by a 4-1 vote rejecting his motion on a proposed measure to end the automatic annual renewals of Martin’s contract. It would also have given Martin a 60-day notice that his contract, due for renewal this month, would not automatically be renewed this year. The motion had gotten a second from Commission Chair Eric Cooley only “because I want everybody to vote on record about how we move forward.”
It was an emphatic vote that rejected the Cunningham proposal, reaffirmed the commission’s confidence in Martin, and put to rest an anonymous cabal against him. (See: “In Flagler Beach, a Bogus Petition Calling for Accountability Echoes ‘Isolated’ Cabal Against City Manager Dale Martin.”)
Cunningham’s proposal had provoked a 30-minute discussion among commissioners about renegotiating the contract. Spradley, an attorney familiar with contract law, didn’t think the agreement could be amended without Martin’s consent, unless it addressed a future contract. Other commissioners weren’t comfortable with the proposal or its timing.
Commissioners weren’t opposed to moving the August evaluation period up a few months, so it precedes the contract renewal. But Commission Chairman Eric Cooley said the evaluation falls at the end of the fiscal year to give commissioners a full view of the year’s accomplishments. Otherwise, it would evaluate the manager only at the beginning of a year when he has been handed a set of goals. The better approach, Cooley said, would be to move the contract renewal to be concurrent with the evaluation at the end of the fiscal year. Removing the automatic renewal becomes moot since the evaluation process addresses any issues, including, potentially, a non-renewal. “This is more of a process improvement thing than it is anything else,” Cooley said.
“Putting it in that order makes sense,” Spradley said. “I’m fine with leaving in the automatic renewal with the 60 day notice to the employee if it’s not going to be renewed, provided that the 60 day notice period does not begin until after we’ve evaluated him.”
Martin agreed: “I’ll look forward to renegotiating the contract if we get to that point,” he said.
That left Cunningham’s resolution on the table. Had Cunningham read the room, he would have withdrawn it. He made a motion, Cooley seconded, and the motion failed.
Commissioners dealt with a few other matters on the agenda before returning to the question of Martin’s confidence in and Cunningham’s conflict with the manager.
Spradley described a process called alternative dispute resolution, or ADR, which focuses on arbitration, mediation, encouraging parties to talk it out and avoid litigation. It was a new method when Spradley graduated from law school in 1988 but is now a routine part of the legal system. He related ADR to how commissioners each individually meet with the city manager once a week for an hour.
“That means that 50 hours a year we have the city manager’s undivided attention,” Spradley said. “I use that time to both discuss upcoming agendas, agenda items that are already handled, and how we have to have certain things implemented, and to get things off my chest, and so for me it’s a very good way to get things resolved, to get things off my chest, things off his chest, and it is a matter of resolving to some degree any differences of opinion or things like that.”
Prefacing his next remark with the disclaimer that he wasn’t picking on Cunningham, Spradley continued: “It’s my understanding that Mr. Martin and Mr. Cunningham don’t meet, and I don’t think they’ve met a single time this year. We’re sitting here at the end of May, so that’s over 20 hours of time. And you know, Commissioner Cunningham has been consistent nearly from the beginning about his desire to change city managers. I just can’t help, it just screams to me that those criticisms are coming from Commissioner Cunningham, and some may be valid, they all may be valid. I don’t know. But I know that we’re missing 20-some hours this year of potential conversation, head to head. Have a conversation. So all I’m suggesting is that I think it would be a good idea to at least consider having these meetings and see if things can be worked out. I think it may definitely help.”
After Cooley spoke in support of the manager, Cunningham responded to Spradley before moving on to an unrelated matter about the sewer plant.
Cunningham’s statement may have sounded like that of a commissioner asserting his independence. In fact, it widened the divide between him and his colleagues and emphasized the extent to which Cunningham has not yet grasped the scope of his role as a commissioner as a representative of constituents and responsible to them, and as a member of a board rather than an individual maverick.
At Thursday’s meeting, Cooley, as chair, wanted to make support for Martin explicit. He spoke of “toxic” and “phantom profiles” that are attempting to stir controversy and portray an atmosphere of public discontent with Martin before dismissing the idea that a change in manager is necessary. He recalled the city’s string of manager and manager changes going back to Bruce Campbell a decade and a half ago. “We plan to gain much more by working with the city manager than what we will put at risk by making a change,” Cooley said. “If you want to put the city two years behind on stuff, that’s how you do it, because once the city manager is out, the city goes into instant survival mode.”
He was not intending a backhanded compliment about Martin: “For better or for worse, there’s more now getting done than any of the times I’ve been attending meetings, and I’ve been coming to this meeting room for 12 years now,” Cooley said. Referring to the late Larry Newsom, whose five-year tenure had started strongly only to peter out and end with his death during Covid, “I was a big fan of Larry. Larry was getting stuff done. He had to deal with hurricanes and all that, and that’s what slowed productivity there.” With Martin now, he said, “it’s not really up for debate, because nobody will be able to prove me wrong on this one. We are getting more done than going all the way back to when I first started sitting in this room.”
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