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 \u2014 and you\u2019ll need it sooner than you think.<\/p>\n
The turmoil in Fort Lauderdale city government shows no sign of letting up. For the sixth time in eight years, someone else<\/a> will be in charge at City Hall.<\/p>\n Rickelle Williams took the unavoidable step Tuesday. She abruptly resigned after 15 months as city manager, ending a turbulent and increasingly miserable tenure<\/a>. For weeks, Commissioner John Herbst said he urged Williams to leave. \u201cThe turmoil was starting to have an effect on the morale of employees,\u201d Herbst told the Editorial Board.<\/p>\n To Williams\u2019 credit, she leaves with her dignity intact \u2014 which is more than we can say for the mayor who helped drive her out.<\/p>\n Her hasty exit with one day\u2019s notice is the latest sign of a city\u2019s political dysfunction. It also shows the painful consequences of a too-superficial search, as we foreshadowed in an editorial<\/a> in 2025 (Three\u2019s not much of a crowd for Lauderdale manager).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The mayor and Commissioner Steven Glassman blocked efforts by Herbst to expand the pool beyond a field of three in which Williams excelled.<\/p>\n A campaign of innuendo<\/p>\n Hounded by innuendo, Williams\u2019 fate was sealed by February. An email signed by \u201cconcerned citizens\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n By April, the commission refused to give<\/a> Williams a perfunctory cost-of-living raise, yet her chief detractors, Trantalis and Glassman, did not call for her dismissal, either.<\/p>\n Only about a year after the mayor enthusiastically backed Williams\u2019 hiring, he publicly disparaged her<\/a> as \u201cimperious\u201d and as a \u201cdisrupter.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n She showed skepticism toward P-3s, the public-private development projects that are much more popular with lobbyists than with residents.<\/p>\n But despite concerns about Williams\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Ignoring civic leaders<\/p>\n 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<\/a> Williams, criticizing unspecified \u201cactions and public comments\u201d calculated to undermine her. It did no good.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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,\u201d said the letter signed by council president Bill Brown.<\/p>\n At a meeting Tuesday, the city commission hurriedly approved a \u201cmutual separation agreement\u201d 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.<\/p>\n In the end, the campaign to sabotage Rickelle Williams worked \u2014 with complicity by City Hall. It leaves an ugly residue.<\/p>\n Unless things change, the next city manager who runs afoul of city politics risks the same fate as Williams. Only a na\u00efve fool would think otherwise.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JOB OPPORTUNITY: City manager, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Excellent pay and benefits in a thriving coastal city. 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