In Reply to R. Woodman
.Don’t attribute malice (as in generally wrongful intent) to what can be explained as incompetence. Could this be our administrative management paradox. Just something to think about.
— R. Woodman
Your statement is very profound and has provoked much thought in myself and others. I think it is not necessarily malice but it may be the egos of the lackeys that have landed in charge and their ego’s protective mechanisms. In this case, it is probably institutionally reinforced and there is most likely such a depth of incompetency that the continuity will continue until the paradigm is changed. Only elected officials who honor their fiduciary trust to their constituency can muster up the courage to take definitive action.Corruption begets corruption and incompetency begets incompetency. They go hand in hand and the self entitled incompetents that have existed within our organization are always ready to suck up to the incoming lackeys and their inevitable incompetency and corruption.
The right kind of incoming management would immediately assess the existing incompetency and not bond with and reinforce it. If anyone has watched the movie “Brubaker” starring Robert Redford that should explain the whole continuing problem in Port Orange and it’s solution. Bad incoming management immediately bonds with incompetents that embrace them with open arms. Good management comes in, establishes honest relationships, and identifies the true value in the organization. Bad incoming management embraces the incompetent suck-ups and makes war with the strong and valuable staff. The incompetents end up doing obeisance to them and reinforcing a new wave of institutional incompetency. . This is how the paradigm of institutional incompetency maintains its continuity.
Where the malice comes in, which you have certainly experienced, is when incompetent individuals who have been granted institutional self entitlement, strike out at individuals like yourself and existing employees that represent the remaining institutional knowledge. Your former colleagues that really care about the city, and have not sold out know that your reports are true. It is only a matter of time until public officials such as Bob Ford and hopefully Don Burnett decipher this and are able to understand and assimilate the truth. They do not have the technical expertise but they certainly have the intelligence to inevitably connect the dots. You have the ability to educate these intelligent public officials in a practical way. Their constituency would certainly benefit if they procured someone like yourself with 41 years of public utilities experience as a part time consultant. If they did that, you would certainly help them to separate the wheat from the chaff in their organization, and identify the value therein. You would have no skin in the game, and with the support of Bob Ford, Don Burnett, and the Stakeholders that currently exist within Public Utilities and other departments millions of dollars of un-harvested revenues for the citizens of Port Orange would finally be realized.
Everyone knows that the current city manager has rejected any and all solutions from technical staff and has shut down the internal ingenuity of the workforce .Many of our technical staff have conversed with him and found that his actual nuts and bolts technical knowledge is destitute. He has nothing more than a 4 year management degree that he procured in middle age, has been fired from his last job, almost voted out of his job before that with scandal and controversy, and left Fort Lauderdale with a trail of lawsuits from employee abuses associated with him. His mantra to our city officials has been” in Destin I had a simple solution for your problems”. After failing time and time again, he says,” This is a very complicated situation”. They also know he has occluded transparency and shut down honest communication with any and all city councilmen that disagree with the mayor or demand transparency from his office. He has introduced spurious interlopers to our city culled from the I.C.M.A. network that have jaded pasts and are creating more problems than the ones that Port Orange has ever experienced before.
We hope that people like Bob Ford and Don Burnett are the ones that may reshape the future of our community and that the Allen Green paradigm will become a thing of the past. We know that Bob Polhman has indicated that he never wanted to select Kisela as the city manager and yet he has openly supported Allen Green. It is abundantly clear that our new city manager answers to Allen Green and not the rest of the city council.
Maybe it is time for a new paradigm.
I am happy to see some focus of attention by the commentator on Allen Green. Is there anyone among us who would say that Green does not have great influence in city governmental affairs and the city of Port Orange? Did you know he was born in Port Orange? Did you know that in regards to problems with the Grand Master Developer of the LaCour Riverwalk Park, he reminded the city council members that he had wanted a silent partner as a master developer in this diabolic CRA adventure? Did you know that Allen Green is very much concerned about the morale of city workers, and treats city tax paying citizens as investors? Did you know that Allen Green volunteered to be the sole negotiator on behalf of the city council with his long time acquaintance, Buddy LaCour? Did you know that Green and Parker decided with LaCour to buy the Lohman funeral home at 3 times the market price going at the time? Did you know that as I understand it, no other member of the CRA knew about this deal, until the CRA and city council were ask to pay LaCour the money he had put out in the Lohman funeral home purchase? Did you know that Green very early in the discussion of the formation of a citizen audit and budget committee asked if his wife could be on that committee? Did you know that although Green did not like the Shelley/Parker deal, he decided not to tell other council members of the pending deal, because he did not want to see a grand exit from city work by city workers? Green told me that. Imagine that! Someone needs to ask Green if in all his city politics years on the city council, if he feels accountable for any of these bad issues in city government which still needs to be fixed.
Do we all notice the attempt by Kisela to shift the emphasis of all these problems onto good city workers, who by all means should not have to endure all these airing of negative issues in e mails, on blogs, in supermarkets. If this is not all very complicated, these negative issues are mostly conjecture, skepticism, suspicions, and the facts do not support them? And I always ask, why then is it that we do not have all the facts? I may accept that I am stupid, but Ted Noftall is not, Mark Schaefer is not, Newton White is not, Scott Stiltner is not, Bob Ford is not, and it may be that Don Burnette is starting to get it.
You mentioned Bob Pohlmann. I spoke with Bob for about 3 hours in my house, and Bob came across to me that he has a lot of confidence in Allen Green, because Green is not from the north, and Green likes baseball. If Bob meant to convey anything else to me, I missed it. Bob asked me if I thought Green was doing anything criminal. I replied no, “Green is not a stupid man”. But I do wonder how you can be an influential politician all these years in Port Orange and yet not be responsible for all the bad things that have been revealed. Kisela has been sucked into the old boy network, and surely a team player. That is too bad, for the tax payers, city workers, and any one on the city council. Unless the city council gets off its comfortable chairs up on the dias, and institute some meaningful changes in city government, they, the city council members are slowly being tarnished by this old boy network, team player attitude. Silent partners indeed!