The latest Fort Lauderdale City Commission agenda was packed as usual, with discussions of beach basketball, the fate of the trees on Las Olas Boulevard, spring break security and other hot-button issues.
But another subject was on people’s minds that city leaders would not touch: the perilous future of City Manager Rickelle Williams. The ominous silence is more evidence of a city mired in political intrigue with too little transparency.
Hired a year ago, Williams stood out in a weak field of three finalists but seemed blindsided by the city’s cutthroat, lobbyist-driven politics. She inherited a mess and was forced to manage one fiasco after another, from the collapse of the ill-fated One Stop Shop project to an outlandishly expensive City Hall in the midst of a housing affordability crisis.
Williams, 40, faces a whisper campaign of criticism for communication lapses, meddling in police operations, and filling jobs with former colleagues from her previous employer, Miami Beach. Despite those missteps, it would be a gross injustice if she were run out of town on innuendo.
A weekly count to three
No manager can succeed for long with a shaky three-vote grip on a five-member board, which is what Williams appears to have.
She has the support of commissioners Pam Beasley-Pittman and Ben Sorensen, but Mayor Dean Trantalis and Commissioner Steve Glassman seem conspicuously estranged.
One reason is that she entertained purchase offers from owners of two downtown buildings to serve as a replacement City Hall that are much cheaper than the opulent, heavily lobbied project they prefer, despite intense criticism of its cost and design.
They doubted her judgment, cutting off Sorensen when he suggested the city explore buying 101 N.E. Third Ave. for $86 million.
“Why would we do that?” Trantalis asked Sorensen at a Jan. 20 meeting that ran past midnight.
There’s rich irony here. When Williams was hired at an eye-popping salary of $350,000, critics said Trantalis and Glassman were buying her loyalty. But the opposite seems to have happened.
Williams, mindful of the city’s precarious finances at a time when property taxes are at risk due to Tallahassee politics, was doing her job by exploring less expensive options. She should have told commissioners about that much sooner, but didn’t.
Damaging headlines
A long email recently circulated in the city, signed by anonymous “concerned citizens,” claims Williams “has fostered an environment of fear and micromanagement.” If that is true, Trantalis and the others who voted to hire Williams have a responsibility to acknowledge that they made a disastrous mistake.
Tensions rose after a story surfaced on the Florida Politics website that read as if it had been written by Williams’ worst critics. The unsourced story said she “lost her way” and that “trust (is) broken” at City Hall. No one spoke on the record.
Trantalis should have come to the defense of the manager he hired, but he didn’t, and his silence spoke volumes. Is it any wonder that people in Fort Lauderdale have lost trust in their leaders?
The fifth commissioner, John Herbst, the only one who voted not to hire Williams nearly a year ago, has been candid with her. He said he warned her that she was in over her head politically, that she could not trust some of her bosses, and that she should not buy a house in the city because she couldn’t predict how long she would be around.
‘A coordinated attack’
As rumors swirled last Monday that Williams would be fired, with Herbst as the presumed third vote, he told constituents on Zoom that such a plot was “reprehensible,” assuring them: “I will not be a party to that.”
Herbst called the online story a “coordinated attack … by somebody inside City Hall” to damage Williams — a reference to Trantalis’ top aides. More irony: Herbst, who opposed Williams’ hiring, is now defending her against a whisper campaign to force her out.
Williams is the third city manager in Fort Lauderdale in less than four years. Under these circumstances, what manager in his or her right mind would want to take this job?
City leadership looks unstable. It’s a troubling signal to city workers and the business community. Editorially, we warned last year that Williams lacked requisite big-city experience and that the mayor gave her too much money.
We stand by that, but she deserves more time to prove her capability. The four city officials who hired her have a duty to see that she succeeds. If she fails, they have failed.
This Editorial Board offered Trantalis and Glassman the opportunity to make a statement in support of Williams, in this space. But neither official responded to our offer. Their silence is telling — and it doesn’t bode well for Rickelle Williams or for the city’s future.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.