Council effort to fire Milton City Clerk Dawn Molinero fails by a narrow margin

The stark division within Milton city government was once again on full display Monday night at yet another meeting specifically called to weigh the fate of a city staffer.

This time it was City Clerk Dawn Molinero who stood accused of transgressions against the good of the city. And, as City Attorney Alex Andrade had done a week prior, Molinero survived a call for her termination. A vote to fire her ended in a four to four tie and Mayor Heather Lindsay cast the deciding vote in favor of retaining her staunch political ally.

City Manager Randy Jorgenson had orchestrated Monday's meeting. He told the mayor and three surprised council members that "five members of the council had indicated" they wanted to hold a conversation about Molinero's behavior during an ultimately thwarted search for a new city manager.

Council members Michael Cusack, Marilynn Farrow and Gavin Hawthorne, along with Lindsay, were never contacted as the meeting was being set up.

"I can count to five," Jorgenson said in explaining why he hadn't reached out to all members once he'd obtained the needed majority to set up the special called meeting. "When I got to five I stopped calling."

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Four of the five members from whom Jorgenson had obtained agreement to call Monday's meeting ultimately sided with his argument that Molinero had helped create a hostile work environment within the city via "elaborate expressions of corruption and collusion" and voted in favor of firing her.

Members Jeff Snow, who made the motion for termination, Casey Powell, who seconded it, Roxanne Meiss and Matt Jarrett voted in favor of termination. Jason Vance was the only one among the five contacted ahead of the meeting to vote with Cusack, Hawthorne and Farrow in favor of retaining Molinero.

Relations among council members and the mayor, always strained, have been shredded since Scott Collins, the leading candidate to replace a retiring Jorgenson as city manager, turned down an offer for the job early last month. He cited "a coordinated undercurrent effort to make either this contract negotiation or my initial contract term unsuccessful."

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Jorgenson told the council Monday that staff morale has also hit the floor, and he laid much of the blame for that on Molinero.

"I've worked for five years to put together a good team, and I think I have," he said. "Now, the tension is palpable. I can't leave here without this mess being alleviated."

In the days after Collins made the decision to withdraw his candidacy, Molinero was inundated with requests for public records as media, council members and the public sought to piece together a story of what events had transpired to kill what appeared to have been a good match between the city and Collins. At the request of one reporter she agreed to put together a timeline of events as she saw them.

The timeline, while seemingly chronologically accurate, also plainly painted the mayor and city clerk as good guys and others, including Snow, Meiss, Economic Development Director Ed Spears, Andrade and Jorgenson as conspirators in a plot to disrupt the hiring process.

"It was clear to me this candidate had been threatened, insulted and/or treated unprofessionally," she wrote in her July 16 timeline entry. "At that moment I knew we had a corrupt few who were interfering in the contract negotiation process."

Molinero did not hesitate to name in her timeline those she thought involved in the unseemly behavior.

"Calling the city corrupt, you can't just say that," Jorgenson told the council Monday. "I haven't seen any evidence of that."

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Jorgenson also accused Molinero of removing the computer from his office and the office of another employee and of notifying city staff in his absence that she was in charge of day to day operations, "which is not true."

There were also insinuations that Sunshine Laws may have been violated as the Collins debacle unfolded, with some media members receiving records others did not or delays occurring in the distribution of some requested documents.

"Intentional non-compliance is a serious issue," Andrade responded when the mayor objected to allegations of Sunshine Law violations.

Lindsay had called a July 25 special meeting to discuss communications between Andrade and Collins. She said she had done that after being told the city attorney's methods of interviewing the job candidate had gone a long way toward convincing Collins to reject the Milton job offer.

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She didn't hide her anger Monday that the council had called a meeting without notifying her. She wanted to know if any council grievances were being directed at her.

"Did you think about letting me know or letting the city clerk know you were going to act," she asked Jorgenson at the meeting's outset.

She accused Jorgenson of targeting Molinero after the clerk withdrew a letter of support for Spears, the economic director, as a city manager candidate.

"I think it's extremely unfair for you to attack Dawn," she said. "The public and the council need to know the truth, Mr. Jorgenson. You were deeply involved" in the effort to submarine Collins' city manager candidacy. "I will make that known."

Lindsay said she disagreed that the Monday meeting had been properly called and asked that she be provided two transcripts of the meeting that she would consider sharing with the First Judicial Circuit's State Attorney's Office and the Florida Attorney General's Office.

Before the special meeting was conducted it was announced that Molinero had obtained legal counsel.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Milton Florida council effort to fire city clerk thwarted