COMMENT: Was It Enough?
After just one year, Mount Dora is again without a city attorney. But does that remove the animus against city government?
Mount Dora city council met on April 10 to decide the fate of city attorney Lonnie Groot, who had found to have committed workplace harassment in an investigation by labor attorney Dorothy Green.
Council approved the following motions:
1. The the City retains present law firm of Stenstrom, McIntosh, Colbert & Wigham P.A., however Mr. Groot not to be directly involved in any Mount Dora business.
2. Within one year the firm must has a board certified attorney in municipal law.
3. All attorney communications will henceforth go through City Manager or City Council.
4. City Council will direct their legal requests through the City Manager to eliminate duplicate efforts.
5. City Council will accept letters of apology from the law firm of Stenstrom, McIntosh, Colbert & Whigham, P.A., to City Staff, with copies of the the letters to be placed in Mr. Groot’s personnel file. Furthermore, the letters be read at a public meeting. And finally, City Council will accept a letter from Stenstrom, McIntosh, Colbert & Wigham, P.A., accepting the findings set forth in the investigative report.
Mayor Girone’s report to council that was attached the agenda for the 4/10 meeting (you can see it here, along with city manager Robin Hayes’ statement) is profoundly disappointing. Girone gives no credence to labor attorney Dorothy Green’s investigative findings, calling the complaints of employees “allegations of harassment” where Green clearly stated her conclusion that workplace harassment had occurred.
Weirdly, Girone then blames all the trouble on staff departures which he says left a breech in communications between attorney, city manager and council: As if management disruption was the cause of mistrust and low morale of city employees, not thenew city attorney’s confrontational attitude in dealing with city staff.
Before Lonnie Groot began the work with a fervor that eventually got him fired, there was already a hostile attitude toward City Hall. It was in the campaign rhetoric of those running for council in the fall of 2015, fanning flames of voter resentment over oak trees and tall buildings downtown. (Issue which seemed to turn into vapor just after the election.)
Behind all that was an angst against city government. It was in campaign statements by Nick Girone as he made it clear that city manager Pastue, city attorney Shepard and planning manager Reggentin were all targets for removal. (Talk about harassing conditions!). It was the drumbeat drumbeat of action by Mayor Girone and some members of council against senior managers when they took office in November 2015. They announced radical changes to the city’s organization chart, placing citizens at the top, followed by elected officials and bottomed by city employees. There was more than a tang of vengeance in the air.
Girone did nothing when Pastue’s concerns for the welfare of city employees forced the city manager to offer his resignation unless the problem was addressed. Girone’s statement that he did everything possible to resolve Pastue’s concerns simply isn’t true; Girone read a memo in the Jan. 19 meeting accepting Pastue’s resignation, and it was council who asked for more time to deliberate Pastue’s resignation. (It was discussed over several meetings with no substantial ground gained between the parties, and Pastue resigned.)
For Girone to blame Pastue’s departure and interim management transitions for Groot’s behavior is the height of hypocrisy. He smelt it because he dealt it.
At a point still in the future, we have to ask why Lonnie Groot was so aggressive in the first place. Why did he go after a review city policies with a prosecutor’s zeal at a time when senior leadership was so weak in transition? Who gave him his marching orders?
Lonnie Groot was selected as the city’s new attorney amid acrimonious dissent by council, with the new majority rejecting Cliff Shepard’s sterling and accomplished tenure with the city for an attorney who already had a track record of difficult relations with other city governments. (In September 2013, Groot resigned as Bunnell City Attorney after just three months after a commissioner complained that Groot was trying to tell the city how to run its day-to-day operations; in Feb. 2015, Groot resigned as attorney for Lake Helen over what the mayor termed “differences in philosophy and personality” with city administrators. Stories here and here.)
Blaming staff vacancies for Groot’s “misunderstood” attempts to right city policies, Girone in his memo tfails to agree with Green’s finding of harassment by saying that employees “took Mr. Groot’s comments as overbearing.”
So city employees are now relieved of further pressures from Lonnie Groot, but they are still saddled with the same mayor and members of council who will resume pressuring the next attorney assigned the same firm to go about the same work.
And what did our new city manager do amid this? Robin Hayes stuck to a statement about the city’s harassment policy and said nothing about the overreach of elected officials who directed Groot in the first place. You would think concern for her own employees would rise to a more demonstrative level with some criticism of how the mayor and council even now seem unwilling to admit fault.
Why is the city staying with Stenstrom, McIntosh, Colbert & Wigham P.A.? Groot wasn’t actually a member of Colbert’s firm but an associate (“of counsel”). Mount Dora required that candidates for city attorney have board certification in municipal law; lacking that, the firm formed the “of counsel” relationship with Groot to qualify for the bid. What’s the sense in continuing with a firm who erred so badly in getting Groot in the first place, knowing of his previous difficulties relating with his clients? To date, Groot admits no fault and says intead he feels “defamed.” The city won’t have anything more to do with him, but it will be interseting to see if Stentron, McIntosh, Colbert and Wigham P.A. will.
“The City of Mount Dora,” Groot writes in his April 3 memo, “in my view, desired to hire and strong and knowledgeable attorney.” Maybe he would like to say how strongly he was directed to act—and by who. Loose cannons still get their shot from somewhere.
Mount Dora enjoyed 10 years of litigation-free service from Cliff Shepard; inspired by a cry of “Time for a Change” from one of council’s worst-ever eggs, the replacement city attorney got the city in big trouble in just a couple of months. And for the time, the city’s legal representation will not carry the board certification. Why go to all the trouble to keep this relationship intact? According to Girone’s memo, William Colbert “expressed an extremely heartfelt concern and dismay for any action that resulted in the conclusions reached by M. Green in the Investigative Report,” and the firm is being required by council to make a formal apology in writing. But is that really enough? Shouldn’t the apology to city staff and citizens really be coming from those who hired Lonnie Groot in the first place? And wouldn’t that be most clearly expressed by wiping the slate clean by seeking legal representation wholly apart from the firm Lonnie Groot worked for?
Girone and most of the new members of council who came on board in Nov. 2015 swung a wrecking ball through the middle of city hall, and one has to wonder if it was more in the spirit of payback than any sense of real changed mission going forward.
So much energy has been squandered by elected officials dealing with this — first staffing vacancies, then complaints of harassment from unprotected staff — that pressing economic development efforts are wilting on the branch for lack of attention. While we were squabbling over whether to keep city manager Pastue, an ISBA (Interlocal Service Boundary Agreement) went to Eustis leading right up to the proposed Wolf Branch Innovation District. As the city began wondering how much protection is needed from its own city attorney, it took a settlement agreement with Medallion Home that left it scrambling to build a new fire station outside of the development in two years. And because we still don’t have a planning director (Mark Reggentin left last March), the Wekiva Parkway construction is approaching Mount Dora faster than plans to create an Innovation District where it exits into Mount Dora.
So much time and expense has been lost that one wonders just how the city will catch up. And whether we’ve even started dealing with the true source of corrosive relations within city hall.
A number of fellow Mount Dora residents provided thoughtful commentary in the development of this piece. Thanks especially to Jim Murray and Rozann Abato.
Additional links:
- Labor attorney Dorothy Green’s March 22 memo summarizing the investigation.
- Lonnie Groot’s April 3 rebuttal.
- Councilman Cal Rolfson’s March 29 memo with his responses to the investigation.
- “Mount Dora Council discusses workplace harassment findings against its attorney” (April 5, 2017)
— David Cohea, Mount Dora Topics editor (djcohea@gmail.com)
