Call with Brett Franks in June of 2021
Around the end of May, one of the other SEDC board members called me to tell me that Brett Franks had called her, and that he was planning to call me and some of the other directors to discuss the SEDC. Brett and I spoke on June 5th. Brett said he was calling board members to make sure we could “move on”. We discussed what had happened, and I gave my point of view.
I said that I had been caught off-guard by Jeff’s criticisms of the SEDC, and that I believed we were on the right track because the council had just recently unanimously approved our Strategic Plan. Brett replied “That’s not true, from what Jeff told me.” He said that Jeff had told him that he [Jeff] had critiqued the Strategic Plan several times, indicating that the BoD should have known he was not happy. I responded that that wasn’t the truth, that Jeff had hardly given any critique or even input while we were building the Strategic Plan. Brett then said that Jeff shouldn’t have been giving input, that as board liaison Jeff should have left the Strategic Plan to the BoD.
I tried to point out to Brett how odd this situation was. That on one hand, Jeff had told Brett that he had critiqued the Strategic Plan, but Brett didn’t feel like Jeff should have. And at the same time, I was saying that Jeff had never critiqued the plan and indicated that Jeff was lying to Brett about having done so.
Brett said that other directors had told him the same things I had told him, but that it did not match what Jeff was telling him. I said that if he wanted to believe Jeff’s side, he would have to believe that the board had conspired to lie about Jeff’s conduct. Brett replied “I’m not that guy, I promise I’m not that guy." I told him “You should want to find the truth, and if you asked all the board members you would find get that truth, or you would have to believe that we’re all conspiring against him.”
He refused to support a meeting to resolve it, saying that a meeting wouldn’t fix anything. He refused to invest hours of his time to find out who was lying to him. Brett knew Jeff’s story was contradicted by the board, and that even if Jeff was telling the truth it meant that Jeff was overstepping his bounds as Board Liaison and inappropriately meddling in the SEDC’s affairs.
Brett also said that he felt that the breakdown in communication was at least partly the fault of the BoD, and that in particular I, as President, bore some fault. Communication was the only duty that Jeff had as liaison, and he was failing at it, so I was a bit floored that Brett felt the board had some responsibility for the issue. We had no idea that Jeff wasn’t giving the council updates, but the council was aware of it. Anytime we had a question for Jeff he got an answer for us, so as far as we knew communication was happening properly. I have no idea why Brett would blame the BoD for the liaison not doing his sole job, communicating.
Brett said that if he was going to remove Jeff as liaison in response to the communication failure he would also want to remove me. While it was absurd to indicate that anybody other than Jeff was responsible for the communication breakdown, I made it clear to Brett that I would fully support that trade. I even came back to the point later in the conversation to voice my support for the removal of both Jeff and me, and I stated clearly that I did not trust Jeff with the SEDC. I was willing to sacrifice my spot on the board to have Jeff removed from the position he had abused. He had used lies in order to get the CEO removed and to get the by-laws changed, and I worried that he could be capable of worse if he stayed in his position.
As far as I know, the council never took up the issue of removing Jeff as Board Liaison. Once he was elected Mayor in May of 2022, liaison assignments were shuffled and the SEDC finally got a new liaison, as the Mayor historically does not serve as a liaison.
It seemed paradoxical to me that Brett was willing to invest his time calling directors one-by-one to discuss this issue, but wasn’t willing to have a joint meeting to get to the bottom of who was lying to him. He was against a joint meeting, just like he had been when he voted down a meeting in March prior to giving Jeff exactly what he wanted.
Yet, at the same time, Brett wasn’t doing nothing, and if he had called me to explicitly cover for Jeff he was doing a horrible job of it. He had been frank with me about what Jeff had told him, though other directors had already told Brett that wasn’t the truth, and he had said that Jeff shouldn’t have been meddling in the first place.
The only reasonable conclusion I can draw from this is that Brett had been heavily manipulated by people he had trusted, Jeff and/or Gina, to go along with the plan, and that Brett was now struggling to make sense of everything that he had been told because he was realizing that the BoD was telling him a completely different version of events than he had been led to believe.
Up to this point, I don’t believe Brett’s actions had been intentionally supportive of Jeff’s misconduct. Brett should have known better than to vote down a joint session just hours after receiving my email asking for one, but I have no doubt that Jeff and/or Gina had convinced him not to allow one, for whatever reason they could use to justify such a position.
But after he had spoken to several directors who directly contradicted Jeff’s version of events Brett had a choice to make. Either he was going to demand integrity and accountability and investigate, or he was going to do nothing and let the dishonesty go unchecked. His refusal to support a meeting to address this matter shows which path he chose.
Doing nothing was the easier path for Brett to take. He had served on the council with Jeff for seven years, and had spent six years with Gina as City Manager. Exposing the fact that they had manipulated him with their lies, and the fact that he had allowed himself to be manipulated, would have been painful.
If you've read the earlier blog entry about the EDC's March 18th, 2021 board meeting, the recording of that meeting makes it clear that Jeff was the one lying to Brett. In that meeting every board member was critical of Jeff for not letting the board know that he had concerns about the CEO earlier, and Jeff admitted that he hadn't. Yet he told Brett that the board was aware of his concerns. If Brett had investigated who was lying to him, that recording would have been Exhibit A that the board was telling Brett the truth about Jeff's conduct as liaison.
The recording of that phone call is available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/s9E7xgE_fiI.