Controversy over city manager’s departure continues in Palmer council

Palmer’s city council is ensnarled in continuing controversy over the departure of its former city manager. Disagreements led to accusations and finger pointing at the council’s last meeting, Oct. 22, which went for more than four hours.

Two council members, Carolina Anzilotti and Victoria Hudson, who was just elected, are critics of Stephen Jellie, the former manager who resigned. They are now criticizing Mayor Steve Carrington over terms agreed for Jellie’s separation.

Jellie said in a separate interview that Anzilotti was the sole city council member who did not meet face-to-face to discuss his ideas during his two months as city manager. Anzilotti said family travel prohibited a personal meeting but that an extensive phone call was made.

Anzilotti did have a chance to personally meet Jellie at a reception held at The Depot in Palmer for the new city manager. However, this was a social event not appropriate for a business discussion.

Hudson was not yet a member of the council so Jellie had no chance to talk with her.

From the start of the Oct. 22 meeting Anzilotti and Hudson asked sharply worded questions on the mayor’s role in setting the meeting agenda and a change over procedures for public participation in meetings.

Other council members tried to intervene to cool things down, for the most part unsuccessfully.

The strained relations come at a bad time as the council approaches decisions on the design of a new $15 million-plus public library and how to raise funds needed to pay for it. Council members must also finalize the city’s 2025 budget, which must be approved by the end of December.

Arguing over how meeting agendas are set and terms for public participation took time at the start of the meeting but most of four hours were consumed in debate, at times heated, over a laptop used by the former city manager and allegations that over 100 emails were deleted. There was also sharp debate over a request by Carrington of a review of the city’s procedures in handling similar disputes.

Council member Joshua Tudor said he noticed the laptop during a previous emergency council meeting and asked the city’s information technology manager to check it.

Tudor later said he was told that up to 120 emails were apparently deleted, and he asked for a more thorough check to see if there were potential liabilities for the city amid the deleted messages.

Carrington said he wasn’t surprised there were deleted messages. It’s not unusual for people to receive large numbers of email during the day, he said, and it’s common for people to clean out email in-boxes at the end of the day.

It shouldn’t imply wrongdoing, he said. But in such a heated environment that’s how some council members saw it. In a later interview Jellie denied deleting emails that could be important.

Deleted messages can be retrieved, however. Carrington said a review of retrieved emails will be done to see if there is anything of concern.

That prompted extended, and heated, discussion. Some of the council members want the emails to be made public, but city attorney Sarah Health said the emails must first be reviewed for confidential personnel information.

Copies of the messages with confidential material can then be made available, she said.

“We will treat this much like a public records request, where there is first a review by the city’s Human Resources staff, the city clerk and city attorney to see if there are any private emails,” Heath said, such as personnel matters that should not be released to the public.

Health said she hasn’t seen the laptop but that she had asked that it be sealed. It is now in the evidence locker with the Alaska State Troopers, she said.

Carrington had also proposed a formal inquiry of the former city manager’s relations with city employees and the city’s procedures in dealing with issues that were raised.

Anzilotti and Hudson took exception with how the review was to be conducted and who would do it. Carrington initially referred to it as an investigation, but the phrasing was unfortunate, he later said, because “investigation” can imply wrongdoing which he said wasn’t his intention.

Anzilotti and Hudson, however, interpreted the mayor’s idea proposal to be that current city employees be investigated since the former city manager has now resigned. “I’m all in for investigating the former city manager, but not city employees,” Anzilotti said.

In the heated back-and-forth Hudson suggested Carrington himself should be investigated.

Carrington said the inquiry was not to place blame on anyone but to give the council an unbiased critique of procedures, by a qualified third party, so future controversies like this can be averted.

Richard Best, a council member, said there are so many rumors and speculation, and feels an inquiry of procedures is warranted so that people, such as the mayor, and city employees can be exonerated from any allegations of wrongdoing.

“There’s just a lot veiled accusations on this,” with a lot of speculation and unknowns,” he said.

Anzilotti and Hudson also accused Carrington of requesting help for the city from the Matanuska-Susitna Borough attorney, which could create liabilities for the city, they said.

“You (Carrington) did go to the borough to ask them to investigate. That could put the city at risk,” Hudson said.

Carrington denied that. He said he did discuss the situation with borough mayor Edna DeVries, a former Palmer mayor, to get her advice, but did not ask for assistance from the borough. “I just wanted to brainstorm with her. I did not ask to borrow the borough attorney,” Carrington said.

After all the extended back-and-forth, issues were not resolved. The council agreed to put the matter of an inquiry, or an investigation, on hold until the council’s regular meeting on Nov. 22. That will give the interim city manager, John Diumenti, and Heath, the city attorney, time to have a review done of deleted emails.

In an interview, Anzilotti also said she was concerned at instructions she said Jellie, as city manager, gave Wolf Architecture, the architect on the new Palmer library, that seemed beyond his authority to do without approval of the council.

Jellie had suggested moving a city office into the library, which would either take up space for library purposes, which the librarians didn’t like, Anzilotti said, or would require the building to be enlarged and adding expense.

No approval for the library design or space allocation has been given by the city, but Anzilotti still felt Jellie went beyond his authority in discussions with Wolf.

Much of the angst among certain council members and the mayor over Jellie stem from lines of authority that can be blurred between a legislative body, in this case the council, and the executive, the city manager.

The tension between the executive and legislative branches is a problem common in almost all governments and even private corporations, for example between a strong CEO and a board of directors with director that have strong opinions.

In Palmer’s case Jellie was a strong-willed manager who, by his own admission, didn’t always wait for consensus before taking action.

Some members of the council liked ideas Jellie put forward but their execution, in a small tight-knit community like Palmer, irked people in the city.

There has also been a lot of talk about Jellie’s two previous employers and similar problems that led to separations there. In both cases, however, Jellie had been recruited to bring spending under control in local fire departments. When budgets were cut and layoffs occurred unions for the firefighters acted to get Jellie removed, according to local press accounts.