JOB OPPORTUNITY: City manager, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Excellent pay and benefits in a thriving coastal city. An unstable political environment may include anonymous online smears. Must placate influential lobbyist for real estate developers, or suffer consequences. Generous severance package — and you’ll need it sooner than you think.
The turmoil in Fort Lauderdale city government shows no sign of letting up. For the sixth time in eight years, someone else will be in charge at City Hall.
Rickelle Williams took the unavoidable step Tuesday. She abruptly resigned after 15 months as city manager, ending a turbulent and increasingly miserable tenure. For weeks, Commissioner John Herbst said he urged Williams to leave. “The turmoil was starting to have an effect on the morale of employees,” Herbst told the Editorial Board.
To Williams’ credit, she leaves with her dignity intact — which is more than we can say for the mayor who helped drive her out.
Her hasty exit with one day’s notice is the latest sign of a city’s political dysfunction. It also shows the painful consequences of a too-superficial search, as we foreshadowed in an editorial in 2025 (Three’s not much of a crowd for Lauderdale manager).
Williams was gradually finding her way, but this is a grueling, high-stress job in a lobbyist-driven culture and she was undercut by petty, vindictive politics.
In the job search, Mayor Dean Trantalis pushed for a local candidate, even though Williams, an assistant city manager in Miami Beach, seemed too young and inexperienced for the rigors of running a city as large and politically volatile as Fort Lauderdale.
The mayor and Commissioner Steven Glassman blocked efforts by Herbst to expand the pool beyond a field of three in which Williams excelled.
A campaign of innuendo
Hounded by innuendo, Williams’ fate was sealed by February. An email signed by “concerned citizens” castigated her for micromanaging and fear-mongering. An unsourced online news account said she had lost the support of police and fire employees. It was all anonymous.
Rather than defend Williams, the mayor responded with silence, which led to speculation on the commission that the attacks had come from inside City Hall itself.
By April, the commission refused to give Williams a perfunctory cost-of-living raise, yet her chief detractors, Trantalis and Glassman, did not call for her dismissal, either.
Only about a year after the mayor enthusiastically backed Williams’ hiring, he publicly disparaged her as “imperious” and as a “disrupter.” She was accused of withholding timely information on a possible building purchase for a City Hall, but her later efforts helped to greatly lower the cost of building the new one.
She showed skepticism toward P-3s, the public-private development projects that are much more popular with lobbyists than with residents.
But despite concerns about Williams’ lack of communication and for stacking former colleagues in high-paying city jobs, no citizen stepped up to publicly criticize her performance. Commissioners even avoided giving her a public job review that she and taxpayers deserved.
Ignoring civic leaders
Another consequence of the Williams mess is that City Hall ignored advice of a long-time civic voice, the Council of Fort Lauderdale Civic Associations. In June, the group issued a letter that strongly defended Williams, criticizing unspecified “actions and public comments” calculated to undermine her. It did no good.
“When professional administrative decisions become subject to political interference, it weakens the effectiveness of city management, creates uncertainty within the organization, and ultimately impacts the quality of services delivered to residents,” said the letter signed by council president Bill Brown.
At a meeting Tuesday, the city commission hurriedly approved a “mutual separation agreement” for Williams. Only Commissioner Ben Sorensen, a strong supporter of Williams, voted against it. Deputy City Manager Chris Cooper was placed in charge on an interim basis.
In the end, the campaign to sabotage Rickelle Williams worked — with complicity by City Hall. It leaves an ugly residue.
Unless things change, the next city manager who runs afoul of city politics risks the same fate as Williams. Only a naïve fool would think otherwise.
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.