Call with Mayor Mike Felix in January of 2022
In January of 2022, after Mike Felix announced he wasn’t running for another term as Mayor, he messaged me on Facebook asking me to call him. The BoD and council were scheduled to have a joint meeting that evening. I had tried to get a phone call with him the previous February, but he had refused to call me then. Now he wanted to talk. (See this blog post about how I had emailed him the previous year.)
I think this phone call turned out to be the most damning, because the mayor makes it clear that what Jeff had told me wasn't the truth, and he refused to hold Jeff accountable for his lies. I think you'll see that as I go through it below.
I dreaded calling Mike. I had no idea what he wanted to talk to me about, but I knew what I wanted to talk to him about.
When I called him that afternoon, he said he was calling to make sure that I knew that if I had any lingering concerns about the SEDC we could discuss them at the meeting that evening. He did not outright say it, but it was clear to me that he was feeling out whether or not I still had an issue with Jeff. Jeff had already announced that he was going to run for Mayor. Mike wanted to hear my concerns, I assume to try to resolve them prior to the election, or to at least hear what I was going to say in advance. Finally, he was willing to listen, but it was only to pave the way for Jeff’s election for mayor.
I just replied to Mike’s statement with an “okay”, but then I brought up what I wanted to talk to him about. I asked him why he hadn’t called me back in February when I reached out to him. He seemed surprised by the question and said that he must’ve gotten busy and forgot.
I didn’t argue with him, as I at least got an answer out of him. I was fine with dropping the topic, but I think I had caught him off-guard. He had called me hoping I’d discuss my concerns about Jeff, but I had brought up an issue that I had with him personally.
Though I didn’t press him beyond my initial question, he asked what I wanted to talk about back in February. I recounted that Jeff had reached out to me saying that the council wanted the CEO removed and I had wanted his opinion on the matter, and I had wanted a joint session. He said that as far as he recalled the council had never even discussed having the CEO removed so he didn’t know why Jeff would have said that they wanted her removed, which backed up what other councilmembers had told me as well.
At one point during the call, when I was recounting that Jeff had said the council wanted the CEO removed, Mike told me “Then y’all shouldn’t have listened to Jeff.”
It was crazy to hear the mayor tell me that the BoD should have ignored the Board Liaison. It was a sign of a serious breakdown of communication. The boards have to be able to rely on their liaison to communicate, and for the mayor to indicate that the board should ignore a liaison’s guidance was unconscionable to me.
I told him that if he had called me back then and told me that then things would have gone differently. He got very defensive and said he wasn’t responsible for what other councilmembers do.
I told Mike that Jeff needed to be held accountable for his actions, and Mike responded indignantly “Who put you in charge of accountability?” I responded “I’m the president of the Board of Directors” (or something to that effect).
The answer to Mike’s question was that his City Council had put me onto the BoD, and the BoD had elected me as its President. Accountability comes with that role. I had to be accountable to the City Council which had entrusted a board position to me, I had to be accountable to the BoD to lead it with integrity, and I had to be accountable to the CEO as her employer to see that she was treated fairly. I wish he had felt the same weight of accountability that I had felt.
At some point in this call he said “You’ve changed, you used to be reasonable”. I didn’t know how to process that, and it took me quite a while to understand why he would say that. I was being reasonable. I had been lied to by a person in power, to get a woman forced out of her job, and wanting to have that addressed was completely reasonable. Why couldn’t Mike see that? Wanting Jeff held accountable for his lies was reasonable.
At some other point in the call he said something along the lines of “You’re not the only board member who seems to be out to get Jeff.” I don’t recall what my response was on the call, but I think it was something along the lines of “I’m not out to get Jeff, I’m out to get the truth.” Whatever the exact wording was, it was clear that Mike knew I wasn’t the only board member who took issue with Jeff’s conduct as Board Liaison.
He said that while he didn’t want the CEO removed he did have concerns about her. He listed 2 that I recall well. One was that she "wasn't coming to her office, ever" (meaning that she was working from home due to Covid, which is a topic I’ll come back to later in this document), and another was her move to “get rid of Ben”.
I pointed out that the CEO hadn’t fired Ben, that he had quit. He said something like, “well I still don’t think Ben was treated very well.” I asked him if he knew why Ben had quit, and he said that he had “no idea”. It was crazy that he seemed to have no facts at all about Ben’s departure or why he had quit, but he had listed Ben’s departure as a concern that he had about the CEO. It seemed very much like somebody had told him “You should be concerned about Ben’s departure from the EDC”, but hadn’t told him why he should be concerned, and they didn’t give him the facts so he could make his own assessment of whether or not the issue warranted concern. All they had told him was “You should be concerned about this”. It was exactly like the issue with Mike VanBuskirk’s complaint to Jeff. Mike had been told enough to know he should be concerned, but he had now confirmed to me that he knew no facts about the matter.
I knew at this point I wasn’t going to convince Mike of anything on the phone call, so I didn’t want to keep the call going, but he kept pushing back at me. I made it clear to Mike that his refusal to call me when I emailed him allowed Jeff get away with what he had done, and he took great offense that I was pointing a finger at him. I said something like “You’re not responsible for what Jeff did, but you chose to not call me and that’s on you.”
I felt he became very defensive. I had made the conversation about his own failure to address Jeff’s conduct and he wasn’t happy about it, even though all I wanted out of the call originally was an explanation of why he hadn’t called me. I eventually just started trying to end the call, saying “We can talk about this tonight”, but he kept pushing the conversation.
Throughout the conversation I felt like he had not even known that Jeff had asked for the CEO’s dismissal. After trying to end it several times, I just said “bye” and ended the call. He messaged me something like “Thanks for hanging up on me.” The recording of that phone call is available on Youtube at https://youtu.be/GePc8W4PwGM. I haven’t gone back to listen to verify the exact quotes from the call.
(If you listen to this call you should also read the blog posts about the follow-up emails I sent to Mike at Spencerforsachse.com/blogpost-emailtomikefelix-022222 and Spencerforsachse.com/blogpost-emailtomikefelix-02252022)
Prior to the meeting that night, Mike motioned me over to him, pulled up our email chain on his phone and said “See I never agreed to call you. It’s not like I said I’d call you and then didn’t.” I told him I was frustrated that he hadn’t called a joint meeting after I made it clear that I wanted one, and he responded curtly “I didn’t want one.” I failed to ask him why he had been opposed to a joint meeting. I didn’t want to get back into an argument, so I dropped it. Then he said “You should be nice to Jeff, you know he might be the next mayor.”
I think Mike had moved past hoping to resolve my issues with Jeff, because he realized he was culpable for not intervening when I had asked him to. He needed my issues with Jeff kept quiet.