By REID TUCKER
Newly elected DeFuniak Springs City Councilwoman Janie Griffith wasted no time getting to work, successfully passing a motion to return hiring and firing powers to the city manager’s office.
Griffith, along with reelected Councilman Ron Kelley and returning members Henry Ennis and Mac Carpenter, voted in favor of her proposal at the April 27 meeting, giving city manager officeholders the authority to hire or terminate employees for positions funded in the current budget. Unfunded or altogether new positions will still have to be approved by the Council, just as under the previous city policy. Griffith said her effort to restore these powers to the city manager was just her way of living up to a campaign promise.
“I feel like we have very capable administrative people,” she said. “They are put in positions they’re in for a good reason, because we all trust them and we feel like they can handle the responsibilities (of their offices).”
Only Councilman Kermit Wright, himself installed to another four-year term along with Kelley and City Marshal Mark Weeks after their successful bids for reelection, opposed Griffith’s motion. His reason for supporting the previous hiring and firing policy was that past personnel conflicts between City Councils and department heads lead to personal conflicts, and the way the situation was rectified was to bring supervisor’s employee recommendations before the board from the start. Wright said the Council almost always approved the recommendations of supervisors to hire or fire employees, but the Council’s authority to make the final determination in such matters added an extra layer of transparency to the proceedings.
“As long as the supervisors knew that it was going to come before the Council to be scrutinized it made them think long and hard before they took the action,” Wright said.
Carpenter tried to take things a step further by making a motion to put the city manager in charge of pay changes for employees as well – once again, provided that the position in question is budgeted – but the other board members didn’t get on-board. His motion failed for lack of a second.
The other big change proposed on the night of the meeting was a series of new rules impacting deadlines for the completion of meeting agenda packets and, additionally, when the agenda would be published. Kelley got unanimous approval from the rest of the board on a motion calling for agendas to be published by the Wednesday prior to City Council meetings, held the second and fourth Mondays of each month. Furthermore, the cut-off for compiling agendas will now be set for noon on the Monday the week before a meeting.
Kelley’s reasoning was to give board members and the public as much time as possible to review items on the docket at the next Council meeting while still taking into account the busy schedules of city staffers that put together the agenda every week. Carpenter pushed for a 5 p.m. Monday publishing deadline instead, citing his own experiences as a Walton County employee as evidence that such a plan was doable despite staff workloads.
“We had this problem at the county for years until our county administrator and our chairman of the county commission decided we weren’t going to have this problem anymore,” Carpenter said. “There was going to be a deadline. We were going to have a hard deadline for producing the agenda, and we’ve made it every single time since then.”
Griffith, a Walton County School District employee, agreed, saying that School Board agendas have to be ready for Tuesday meetings no later than the previous Thursday. If an agenda item isn’t ready by then, it simply has to wait until the next meeting to come before those respective boards, they said. City Manager Sara Bowers said a 5 p.m. Monday deadline was doable, but she did say that links for every item on the agenda would likely not be up on city website until the following day.
Carpenter’s motion failed 4-1 when put to the vote.
In other City Council meeting news, the board members approved attaching a five-question survey to monthly utilities bills mailed out in May. The survey is aimed at gathering public input as to what kinds of businesses, retail stores, entertainment or recreation venues, services and industries DeFuniak Springs residents would like to have in town. Kelley, who proposed the idea, said including the survey with utilities bills was liable to work best, as city staff would know exactly how many surveys were sent out and how many it could possibly get back from interested citizens.
“If we get these back from the citizens I think the Council certainly will have a good idea about what our people are wanting,” Kelley said. “I think we should hand those results over to our Economic Development Committee and get them to get busy on trying to contact those kinds of businesses.”
The Council also decided to extend the deadline for accepting applicants to fill the vacant city finance director position to April 30 in order to have as many choices as possible when it came time to select candidates for interviews. The board members will submit their selections by May 4, and staff will provide a list of rankings to them on May 8, the Friday before the May 11 regularly scheduled council meeting.
Finally, and at the behest of Planning Director Kelly Schultz, the Council members unanimously agreed to create a committee to evaluate the city’s existing sign ordinance, which has come under increased scrutiny of late due to its highly de-restricted regulatory approach. Each member of the Council will nominate two people to the committee. Schultz told the Council that revising the entire zoning ordinance – not just the portion related to signage – would be necessary, but this process would in all likelihood be quite time-consuming, hence the decision to tackle the sign ordinance first.
