By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter

Analysis/Commentary

                Things are going a little bit sideways in Williston City Hall lately under the command of the iron-fisted City Manager Jackie Gorman.

            The latest change is a robotic voice that responds to City Hall phone callers saying, “If you do not wish to be recorded, please disconnect at this time.”

            Having been warned, the robot apparently lets the resident connect to the menu or the person they want to speak to in City Hall. But the caller has been duly warned. They are being recorded if they continue with the call. They can choose to hang up.

            Warnings are commonly used to tell people they are being recorded when they call companies or perhaps large government agencies, but I have yet to see any other municipality in Levy County employ this technology. Maybe I missed one. A friendly human being usually answers the phone in other city halls.

            It’s hard to imagine why such a harsh warning is in place in a small city government like Williston. It wasn’t there before Gorman took over as city manager. It’s there now. The city has a new phone system. Perhaps Gorman saw an opportunity to gain more control over her growing empire by recording incoming calls at City Hall.

            Is Gorman so worried that someone in City Hall is ratting on her and tipping off the negative social media (Spotlight), as she calls us, that she feels compelled to record all incoming calls at City Hall? The recording also means all city employee calls are being recorded as they speak to residents and the media.

            There’s little point in asking Gorman why the recording was added to the new City Hall phone system. She doesn’t give interviews, doesn’t answer questions unless she feels like it, and she answers public records requests at a time of her choosing and in her own special way, cherry-picking the questions she will answer and ignoring the rest or ignoring them all.

            She seeks refuge behind City Council President Debra Jones who aggressively protects her.

            When I sent an email to Gorman on April 11 requesting information on how backroom decisions were made to give out thirty-eight $150 gift cards from Tractor Supply without including Williston police, fire, and airport in the giveaway, it caused a fiery reaction.

            Bear in mind, the request I made wasn’t for public records. I had texted Jones on March 25 saying nothing had been supplied to me through public records’ requests that answered my most pressing questions about the gift cards. We went back and forth in texts discussing what the city supplied to me through records’ requests including a so-called email report Gorman sent me in January of 2022 which didn’t answer my questions. I said I didn’t receive the answers I requested to write a complete story. Jones suggested former Chief Dennis Strow was feeding me information. I said the chief wasn’t my source.

            I told Jones the gift cards were public funds that were spent by the city and that no taxes were deducted from the cards at first, as required by law. I said I was a journalist asking these questions. She responded with a suggestion I agreed to follow.

            “Then you need to write down your questions and send them to the City Manager/or City Clerk, rather than fishing for things with public records’ requests and not getting what you want,” Jones wrote. “It is getting very annoying and they are trying to get you what you are asking for and still get their jobs done and all you do is accuse them of hiding things. As far as the City is concerned this issue has concluded.”

            On April 11, I sent a list of unanswered questions about the gift cards to Gorman, copying City Clerk Latricia Wright with the public information request. I wasn’t requesting records. I felt that Gorman was so familiar with the gift cards that she could give me the answers from memory without needing records. It wasn’t rocket science. She could have written a narrative explaining what happened.

            “These are my questions about the Tractor Supply Gift Cards given out before Christmas of 2021,” I wrote on April 11:

• “Please tell me who made the decision to sell the scrap?
• What was the sale price for the scrap? What individual or company purchased the scrap on what date?
• Did someone on staff come to you with the idea of using the scrap pile sale to fund the gift cards, or was it your idea?
• Who made the decision on which of the employees were to receive the gift cards? Was it you, or your staff, or a combination of the two? When was the decision made? Was the decision made in a staff meeting?
• Was the city council consulted regarding sale of the scrap? If not, why not? Was the city council consulted regarding who would receive the gift cards?
• Why were city police, firefighters, and airport employees left out of the gift card giveaway? Who made that decision? Does the city have any plan to compensate the remaining employees for a similar amount of money?
• Public Works handled the giveaway at a breakfast in the community center. The giveaway wasn’t part of the overall Christmas Party for all the employees. Why?
• Taxes weren’t taken out of the gift cards initially, according to Steven Bloom (financial director). He said the taxes were deducted later. How was that handled? Why weren’t taxes taken out initially?
• Who was in charge of the overall gift card giveaway? I know someone told me Public Works cooked the breakfast.
• What public policy or policies guided the city staff’s decision on how to handle the sale of the scrap and how the money was to be given away?

            Gorman and Wright responded by providing documents that weren’t requested and charging $61.80. I refused to pay for documents that weren’t requested. If the city had given a good faith estimate of the expected costs before retrieving the records, the answer from me would have been to cancel the information request. Instead, the records, which I doubt answered all of my questions and weren’t requested, were left at the front desk of City Hall. Wright emailed me the bill.

            Regarding an unrelated issue, when Spotlight administrator Linda Cooper made a public records request of the city to clarify why and how Deanna Nelson was promoted to deputy city manager without the vacancy ever being advertised, Gorman copied the city attorney and the city council in an email and promised she would answer the questions she felt were relevant and leave the others unanswered.

            Going forward in time, at the June 7 city council meeting, City Attorney Kiersten Ballou said if someone doesn’t pay the fee for a public records request, the city has the right to deny the person or the organization access to public records in the future. She cited a Riviera Beach court case in which a judge made a ruling that future public records requests could be denied if a previous fee wasn’t

paid. Ballou made the statement in the public comment portion of the council meeting, not in a court hearing or a quasi-judicial court hearing. It was out of place and it was just another way for the city to fight public records’ requests while pretending to comply with the public records law.

            Ballou’s threat to cut off public records from Spotlight until the $61.80 fee was paid has apparently come to pass, or so it seems. Spotlight Administrator Linda Cooper’s public records request on May 6 seeking information on how and why Human Resources Director Deanna Nelson was promoted to a second position as Deputy City Manager without the vacancy being advertised to all city employees was never answered. Six weeks later, the records request still hasn’t been answered. Wright missed Friday’s promised deadline to provide the records and didn’t return a phone call. It’s not looking promising.

            The promotion of Nelson to deputy city manager means Gorman passed over every other employee in the city to promote an employee who had worked with the city for less than a year. She mentioned in one email that she had considered longtime Fire Chief Lamar Stegall for the deputy manager’s job but she felt that since the fire and police departments worked directly under the mayor, she didn’t want to hire Stegall. The city fire and police departments actually work for the city council and the mayor oversees them. It was a flimsy excuse for not hiring Stegall. Nelson is now HR director and deputy city manager, which is a bit odd as well. Why combine those two powerful offices into one position? Nelson is now the second most powerful administrator in city government.

            Gorman says the city’s Human Resource manual allowed her to promote Nelson without giving other applicants in the city a chance to apply. She says she doesn’t have to comply with a section of the Human Resources Manual requiring all department heads to advertise any vacancy for five days to all employees of the city before considering outside applicants.

            Gorman apparently ran off the city’s first deputy city manager, C.J. Zimoski, creating a vacancy in that position, but Gorman claims it wasn’t really a vacancy when Zimoski left his city position. She said the deputy city manager was an existing position she hadn’t filled until selecting Nelson.  It was another flimsy excuse for breaking with existing protocol and HR rules.

            The deputy city manager position was indeed a vacancy because no one was working as deputy city manager after Zimoski mysteriously left the position with a hasty resignation that didn’t explain what happened to him.

            The public records law in Florida isn’t a joke. Gorman isn’t allowed to play games with public records. She has a tendency to make up her own rules regarding the release of public records. She rarely responds to any of the core issues. She sometimes complies with the letter of the law, though not always, and frequently violates the spirit of the law.

            The gist of the Florida Public Records Law is: A public officer who knowingly violates the public records law is subject to suspension or removal for knowingly violating the law. Knowingly violating the public records law is a crime, a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a $1000 fine or both.

            Gorman has the full backing of City Council President Debra Jones. Sources say Jones spends a lot of time with Gorman and her pet dog in Gorman’s office, as though she and Gorman are best friends. The pet doggie lives in her office during working hours, we’re told. Gorman apparently has the full backing of the city attorney law firm, Folds and Walker, in everything she does as city manager.

            In the May 6 public records request from Linda Cooper regarding Nelson’s hiring, Gorman highlighted questions she was willing to answer and made it clear the other questions were irrelevant to her. She’s the boss. Dismissing questions that Gorman doesn’t want to answer amounts to playing games with a public records’ request. She is cherry-picking the questions she wants to answer and discarding the questions she doesn’t want to answer.

            In the case of the gift card information request made by me, Gorman’s decision to supply public records when none were requested and charge for those records is also playing games with public records. She was teaching me a lesson. She was sending a message that it’s going to cost me money to obtain information from her. Charging for records that I didn’t request is a punitive action on Gorman’s part. I am being punished for being an inquiring journalist. It’s a control thing with Gorman. She hasn’t figured out yet that she can’t control the media.

            As she builds her political empire in Williston, she changes the rules as she sees fit to make them fit her agenda. She makes sure she has three votes on the city council to ensure nothing backfires and she doesn’t get terminated. She does as she pleases, with Jones, the dominating city council president riding shotgun for her. Jones doesn’t have an actual shotgun of course. I was using a metaphor. I know you readers knew that. Just making sure.

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Enterprise Reporting by Terry June 18, 2022, Posted June 18, 2022