Joint Sessions (Finally)
After Jeff and the City Manager had gotten the changes they wanted, they knew they had to repair the damage they had left in their wake. We were notified that the council wanted to start having joint meetings, to make sure we were all aligned moving forward. There was talk of “regaining trust”, and showing that we all wanted the same things for the city.
The SEDC (or maybe the city) hired Trent Petty to run the joint sessions. Trent had done some consulting work for the SEDC several times, so he had a good amount of familiarity with the SEDC and the city. Prior to the first joint meeting, Trent called each of the directors and I think each of the councilmembers, to get an idea of where everybody stood.
I recall that one of the directors called me after her call with Trent. I hadn’t spoken to him yet. She said that she had talked to Trent about Jeff’s poor conduct as board liaison. She was under the impression that the upcoming joint meeting would allow us to resolve a lot of her frustration.
When I spoke to Trent we had a rather long conversation about what had happened, and we discussed my goals for the city. Since he had worked with the CEO a few times, I asked him for his candid assessment of the CEO’s performance. He said that he hadn’t seen any problems and that she was really good at the aspects of the job that she was hired for, which was primarily marketing the city to developers. The CEO knew the limits of her abilities and that was why she had relied on outside assistance from experienced people like Trent when needed, which the BoD had fully supported. The CEO didn’t need to be 100% self-sufficient, as long as she knew to get help when it was needed.
When we finally got to have our first joint meeting, on April 5th of 2021, Trent Petty led the meeting. He started it off by saying that he wasn’t going to talk the whole time as he wanted us to have some dialogue, but it ended up being 90% Trent leading us through his analysis of the goals that each of us had given him during our one-on-one calls, and showing us that we all had fairly similar visions for the city.
At the end of the meeting, the BoD’s VP said something about wanting to address how the relationship between the council and SEDC had deteriorated. To paraphrase from my loose recollection he had said something like "I think in order to make sure we don't end up going through this again we need to understand how we got to this point." Mayor Felix quickly cut him off, saying “Look, I get it, somebody did something and somebody got hurt, but we just need to move on.” Tim tried to clarify that he wasn’t looking to point fingers, but that he wanted to make sure we weren’t going to have a breakdown of communication like we had had before. It was clear, however, that Mike Felix did not want to engage in any discussion of Jeff’s conduct as Board Liaison so we just dropped the topic. I recall being very frustrated about it. After waiting two months to get a joint session, the council, or at least Mike, still wasn’t going to listen to the BoD’s concerns about Jeff. I tried getting a recording of this meeting, but nobody has one. The minutes of the meeting say this:
“Concerns on communications between the EDC and the City Council and how the recent changes to the Bylaws occurred were expressed, but collectively they are ready to move forward in making the City successful.”
It was true that we all felt we needed to move forward. The city and the SEDC had important work to do, but it was hard to work closely with the city when we had a dishonest Board Liaison acting on his own behalf.
Over the next few months several councilmembers did privately mention that they were considering removing Jeff from his liaison role, but they never took any action to do so. In hindsight, I feel they were placating us with talk of removing him but I don't think they ever gave it serious consideration.
We had several additional joint meetings over the next year, to make sure we were “all on the same page” moving forward. They all kind of blended together, but I do recall at one of them Brett Franks said something like “I admit I’ve never really understood what the EDC does or how it operates.”
It was really frustrating to hear that for two reasons. First, I had tried to encourage councilmembers to get involved in the SEDC. I had actually asked to have a second councilmember assigned to the BoD, because I wanted the councilmembers to see first-hand what we were doing and understand why progress seemed slow at times. The fact that Brett, after 9 years on the council, had no understanding of the EDC was his own fault for not trying to learn. If he had any interest in improving the SEDC, he should have been pushing Jeff for updates and information. Second, he had just voted to change the structure of the SEDC, and had voted down an opportunity to have a meeting with the BoD to learn about how it operated prior to that vote, and now he was admitting his ignorance of the operations of the SEDC. I don’t know if the meeting where Brett said that was recorded or not. It was an in-person meeting, and I think it was in May of 2021.