City Commissioner Jeremy Matlow blasted some of the city’s top executives Wednesday for texting one another with “ridiculing” comments about members of the public and local media during a recent Blueprint meeting.
He described a snarky play-by-play conversation among city leaders, including City Manager Reese Goad, that happened while public business was being conducted.
“I’m so disappointed at what takes place with city management during our meetings,” Matlow said. “Management has to be held to a higher standard.”
At the end of Wednesday’s City Commission meeting, Matlow attempted to present a slideshow displaying the text messages that he obtained from a public records request. When that didn’t happen, he proceeded to hold up print outs of the slides while he read them aloud.
His presentation fell flat with some of his colleagues, namely City Commissioner Dianne Williams-Cox, who questioned the tenor of his own social media posts and comments he has made about his colleagues.
The latest controversy to derail city business underscored the deep dysfunction at City Hall, where two city commissioners, Matlow and Jack Porter, who make up the voting minority, frequently clash with the majority, Mayor John Dailey and City Commissioners Curtis Richardson and Williams-Cox.
Goad, who does not have the support of Matlow or Porter, has been able to keep his job by maintaining support from the majority.
The city staff’s text messages mocked the way Stanley Sims, a resident who regularly speaks at public meetings and has a history of clashing with city officials, pronounced the word “distilleries” during a Sept. 21 Blueprint Board of Directors meeting.
The board, made up of all 12 city and county commissioners, approved a $1.8 million appropriation for SoMo Walls and Distillery Company, a project going up on South Monroe Street by developer and Grow Tallahassee political committee chairman Bugra Demirel.
Top city staffers texted back and forth on their city-issued cell phones, getting laughs and likes from one another in a group chat, according to Matlow’s records. Participating in the conversation were Assistant City Managers Cynthia Barber, Abena Ojetayo, Christian Doolin and Wayne Tedder, among others.
“Too many dam stirrries!!” Ojetayo wrote.
“Stealries,” Barber said.
Doolin posted in the group chat a meme from “The Simpsons” TV show that showed a photo of cartoon character Ralph Wiggum with the caption, “Me fail English? That’s unpossible.”
The teasing about Sims, who also worked on Matlow’s re-election campaign last year, began to subside after Goad chimed in himself, writing, “I love it” before they directed their attention to a TV reporter calling her a “mathematician” after she reported that she had broken down the math on a city item.
Goad, who offered no explanation from the dais, declined to speak with a reporter about the messages or their appropriateness after the meeting.
Sims told commissioners that he was “standing up here in a hostile environment.”
“I’m being trolled Mr. Mayor by your executive team,” he said. “They troll me during this meeting because I have had strokes and I have a health impediment”
The tension was palpable at City Hall as Matlow went through the texts.
Mayor John Dailey and Goad put their heads together and began whispering to one another.
After Matlow made a motion to direct the city manager “to treat all members of the public with respect and dignity,” Dailey quickly signaled that such a motion would get unanimous support. He recalculated after Williams-Cox disagreed and announced she would recuse herself from the vote and walk out of city chambers. She stood up to leave but sat down again after City Attorney Cassandra Jackson cautioned that there was no legal basis for a recusal.
“There’s no voting conflict,” Jackson said. “I don’t know of a basis that you could recuse yourself on this motion.”
Williams-Cox countered Matlow’s remarks by bringing up his own posts on social media in which he frequently criticizes city management, Dailey and other political opponents. She also referenced insult-laden texts by one of his close political allies referencing her and others that happened during another Blueprint meeting and surfaced last year.
“As my colleague, I would have expected that you would have defended me, but you did not,” Williams-Cox said. “We cannot sit here and point fingers at what others are doing when we’re not doing the best that we can do.”
Last year, the Tallahassee Democrat published texts between the Blueprint Board of Directors and others during their vote on controversial funding for Doak Campbell Stadium. Max Herrle, a political consultant and Matlow ally, called County Commissioner Nick Maddox a “dumb little bastard,” and former County Commissioner Kristin Dozier called Dailey “Foghorn Leghorn.”
Williams-Cox, who called Matlow’s motion “childish,” abstained from the vote, prompting Dailey and Commissioner Richardson to follow suit.
Under Florida law, local commissioners are required to vote on items before them at meetings unless they have a conflict of interest, involving a special gain or loss for themselves, their employers and certain others, or a perception of a conflict. In cases where they have a voting conflict, commissioners must publicly declare the nature of their conflict before the vote, abstain from voting and document it on a state form within 15 days.
“I do have a conflict,” Williams-Cox said. “My integrity. My reputation. I don’t want to be lumped in with this child’s play.”
Elena Barrera can be reached at ebarrera@tallahassee.com. Follow her on Twitter @elenabarreraaa.
