Final update: 12:50 pm - Note : I just added the County's official press release at the bottom
Note: Also added yesterday's article by Lauren Ritchie at the bottom
Monday, Oct. 5, 2009 - Leesburg, FL - Today, the Lake County Board of Commissioners voted 5 to 0 to terminate County Manager Cindy Hall. They were at a special meeting held in Leesburg to discuss plans, objectives and other issues. however after some emotional discussions, the Board Chairman, Welton Cadwell, after talking to County Manager Cindy Hall during a break, returned to the meeting and said he wanted a motion to terminate Cindy Hall. In my opinion, it was a mutual decision.
I was there at the meeting, which had been publicized in an article written by Lauren Ritchie in yesterday's Orlando Sentinel Lake section. All five members of the Board were there, plus Cindy Hall & the County Attorney, two members of the public, myself and Orlando Sentinel reporter Steve Hudak.
The meeting was not publicized in the Board meeting section of the County website, and if Ritchie had not written this ARTICLE HERE (also added below), I would not know about the meeting.
The "Retreat" meeting agenda was vague and listed subjects such as "Open Discussion, Space for Constitutional Officers, Space for Alan Grayson, "Goals, Priorities and Vacant Positions".
However, after a discussion regarding changes in building space for the Sheriff & US Rep. Alan Grayson (see my post on this later this week), the meeting evolved into a discussion of management issues related to Cindy Hall, who was at the meeting. The discussion was driven by Commissioner Jimmy Conner, and input from Elaine Renick and Linda Stewart. Commissioner Jennifer Hill and Board Chairman, Welton Cadwell were more reserved.
My Summary:
The Board in the past has been receiving pressure regarding Hall's "management" style and various problems reported in the press. Recently, there was the settlement of a lawsuit where a receptionist was fired by Cindy Hall and the manager had made a statement that seemed to be age discrimination. Then there was the most recent case where Hall's staff laid off 12 employees by offering a severance package that promised they were "eligible" for unemployment, although they also received severance and health benefits. The employees were not fired, but agreed to leave based upon what was offered them. Then, it turned out the State would not give them the unemployment coverage, and one or more employees are working with attorneys to obtain compensation for the "lost" unemployment they would have received. One of those people was at this meeting and told me she had hired an attorney from Ocala. She said she tried three attorneys from Lake County but they all claimed there might be a conflict of interest and would not take her case.
Additionally, there has been friction in how the County staff and managers that report to Hall have acted on such issues as procurement decisions (i.e. hiring vendors from outside the County vs hiring local vendors), and personnel issues (even going back to the Lee Johnson studies we have covered on this blog), At the meeting, Jimmy Conner also brought up the issue of hiring management and staff who were never required to move to Lake County. Conner compared that practice to one used by Lake County Tax Collector Bob McKee, who apparently requires most new hires to move to Lake County if they do not already live here.
Board member Jimmy Conner has been vociferous in demanding improvements from Hall.
After the discussion today, it seemed clear that Conner and Renick wanted more involvement in County Management decisions, and more "change" in how some business decisions are made. In comparison, based upon today's discussion, it seems that both Welton Cadwell and Cindy Hall prefer a hands off management approach where the Department managers are not "micro managed", and where Hall backed up her manager's decisions, even if some Board members wanted changes. Thus, in my opinion, Hall could have agreed with Conner, Renick and possibly Stewart and micro managed her direct report managers and developed improvement action plans, but after discussion with Welton, decided to accept termination procedures rather than possible future "micro managing". Hall has an employment contract with the County, and according to what I heard, it may include a 6-month salary severance provision (which is less than I expected).
Issues discussed included:
- The apparent unhappiness with Hall's management style by two or more Commissioners may have started as early as the firing of the receptionist about two years ago, which resulted in the fairly recent out of court legal settlement. That case was documented in this blog in the Lee Johnson research study, which is in the "pages" section of this blog.
- Jimmy Conner was adamant that "Hands off" management style "won't work with me. I won't ever be satisfied with a hands off style".
- Commissioner Hill explained that about two years ago, County Manager Hall gave up a "deputy County Manager" position in order to hire more qualified managers, and rely upon their skills, thus the philosophy of hands off really started then. (Note: We have previously written in this blog that there didn't seem to be a top level management control system to detect problems like exceeding overtime budgets and other issues that a sound business management system would have detected and reported. After this meeting, it seems that Hall would back up managers no matter what mistakes happened, and she may not have then implemented stronger management reporting or systems to detect and prevent repetition of the same problems. We had also mentioned before that Hall's group did not have a Controller position, thus there didn't seem to be anyone who ensured good management controls were in place.). Hill also explained that Hall's style was more like a "Board of Directors" where each department manager ran their department without micro-management.
- Commissioner Renick asked if Hall had attended meetings of the County procurement selection committee, not to micro-manage, but to understand how the system worked and Hall said no (or not in a long time.) Renick said "I admire her (Hall's) loyalty to managers and her defending them, but you don't do that if you don't know what they are doing...".
- Commissioner Conner brought up procurement issues, and said his problem was with the vague "rfq" (request for qualifications) process where they decisions could be subjective. Although Conner had been outspoken in the need for hiring local vendors at prior Board meetings, the Board had never really made a decision to define a policy, thus Hall did not change staff direction (i.e. by defining a local preference policy for suppliers). Hall mentioned that the current "business friendly" policy does not
contain a "local preference" condition in it, but the Board could add
one.
- Commissioner Cadwell more than once said they should not defer the issue because it is hard for a County Manager to only have only 2 or 3 Commissioners supporting her decisions.
- Although it might seem that some of the Board was trying to impact who was selected as vendors, that was not the case. The entire Board was cognizant of the need to maintain the "integrity" of the vendor selection process. Welton Cadwell said there was a time when in Umatilla he could have defined who got work (I assume he had an elected position in Umatilla many years ago), but that is not the case these days, and they need to protect the integrity of the system. Linda Stewart repeated her earlier recommendations that they need a scoring system to give some points in the selection process for local vendors (much like the Federal Government gives employment points to Veterans). Conner said that when he was a School District Board member, he sat on a vendor selection committee, but that is not done in the County government, so Commissioners have less input into procurement decisions. However, Conner later told me he was not in favor of a Commissioner being on the vendor selection committee. Attorney Sandy Minkoff said that some recent Grand Jury reports indicated there was a trend to remove non-procurement people from selection committees due to recent big procurement scandals occurring in other Florida Counties.
- After Cadwell announced his decision to request the decision to terminate Hall, Renick questioned the action, asking "if the problem is with some of the managers, and we know some managers are failing, can't we request that Cindy take corrective action"... The general consensus was no, because that bypassed the authority of the County Manager... However, in my opinion, it seemed like Hall didn't want to go that route, and had already decided to not modify her management style. Cadwell reflected that if they take that approach, then the challenges to Hall's direction might be endless.
Observations:
- The decision to accept termination seems to be one made by Hall as part of a professional and personal policy to not have to react to Board challenges which may not ever end. Welton also supported that action, saying the Board needs to do what is best for both the County and for Cindy. Another manager might have read the political winds, and adopted some of the Commissioner ideas, including sanctions or improvement plans for some managers, etc. but Hall did not. I have been in a similar situation twice, so you sometimes get tired of the problems and look forward to other opportunities.
- In my opinion, it seems that some of the Board members may complain
that a business practice is deficient, but they don't follow it up with
a resolution for action. For example, they have talked about the need
for local vendors to receive priority, but never acted by proposing or
implementing a policy for it.
- Existing County managers might want to pay more attention to issues discussed by the Board, EVEN if they don't initiate a policy change, because the days of "hands off" management style may disappear with a new County Manager and that Welton will not be the Chairman after December.
- I personally believe the County should hire a very experienced consulting firm like KPMG or others, to review the existing departmental management systems and reports, develop a "risk analysis" and develop an improved management control system that identifies management and performance indicators, then detects and reports exceptions to policy in time to PREVENT negative problems. Then they should hire a manager who will use such a system to identify and act upon needed changes. Currently, it doesn't seem like some managers know how to define risk or departmental performance indicators. Since there are also many apparent problems with personnel practices, a professional firm needs to review all those practices, and assess current management capabilities and make policy and staffing recommendations to the Board to bring Personnel practices in line with other major organizations. Under Hall's "hands off" approach, if she had a manager who lacked skills to define sound management controls and systems, the pattern of continued snafus would continue, either from lack of written status reports, or lack of ability to define and act upon needed improvements once a snafu occurred.
I may add more items HERE as I think of them later this week... you can post comments to this blog.
vj
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Click the link below to see 1) the County's official press release on the termination, and 2) Lauren Ritchies column from yesterday.
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