Palmer city clerk terminated during special council meeting

During a special meeting of the Palmer City Council on Friday, May 30, called by council member Victoria Hudson earlier in the week, council members voted to terminate city clerk Shelly Acteson.

The move comes amid the absence of two members-Jim Cooper and Ken Erbey-though still enough for a quorum. Mayor Steve Carrington was also not present, and therefore did not vote.

Hudson, seconded by council member John Alcantra, called for the meeting to review and evaluate the clerk in an Executive Session, which are private among the council members.

This comes after months of ratcheting tension between the clerk and Hudson, as well as several other council members including council member Carolina Graver, who voiced her frustration during the May 27 meeting that she had requested agenda items only to find them pushed back, saying it’s a request of city council and that the clerk works for the council. “It’s your boss asking for that, and so I’d appreciate it if you listen to the request and do what needs to be done…instead of, frankly, coming up with excuses.”

Tensions have further been aggravated after questions about the votes in the recent special election to recall Mayor Steve Carrington, efforts led by Hudson and a small group of conservatives in Palmer.

During the May 27 meeting to certify the election results, Hudson echoed Graver’s complaint, saying that Acteson had failed to put items on the agendas for council meetings that Hudson had asked for, leading to Hudson being the sole no vote on adopting an agenda for last Tuesday’s meeting because an item Hudson requested was not included. All other members voted yes, so the agenda was adopted but not until after discussion.

Hudson and Alcantra had called for a review of the role of the clerk and her performance, to take place during the May 27 regular City Council meeting, and when questioned why it was not on the agenda, Acteson said that she read it the same way and had passed the information to the agenda-setting team, but that days later, two council members suggested that it would be wise to call all three people that work for the city council-the city clerk, the city attorney, and city manager-and their roles be reviewed at the city council meeting.

In a review of the email sent to Acteson from Hudson, which was included in the May 27 meeting packet, Hudson only requested a review of the role of the clerk.

For her part, Hudson said that she believed “review” and “evaluation” were synonymous terms in the corporate world. “I guess not,” she said. Hudson also argued that in her email, she asked if any additional information was to proceed, she was inferring that if there were any questions about her request, the clerk was to reach out to her. “Um, there was no, um, questions that were asked about what I was asking for in the email. Then, we did clarify at the end of (the) last meeting, and it still showed up as on this agenda as a review of the role of what their jobs were. So we did clarify that, and it still wasn’t added.”

During the May 27 meeting, Alcantra said the idea was to get to a point where the “folks that work for the city council know they work for the city council, and not for one individual or two individuals.”