On Sept. 20, Riviera Beach City Manager Jonathan Evans was fired by a 3-2 vote of the city council.
Councilman Terence Davis made the motion:
“At this point, I’m prepared to make a motion to relinquish and fire the city manager, at this time, immediately, for cause for misfeasance and that’s my motion at this time,” Davis said on Sept. 20.
Davis never disclosed what those reasons were, saying the city attorney advised him not to give the reasons.
City attorney Andrew DeGraddenreidt was present during the Sept. 20 council meeting but in a memo obtained exclusively by WPTV, he seemed to have forgotten what Davis said.
He sent the memo to the HR director, and the interim city manager a day after Evans was fired.
“My review of the action taken by the city council upon last evening indicated that the manager was terminated “without cause,” DeGraffenreidt wrote.
According to Evans’s contract, if he was fired “for cause” he would only get a payout of his sick and vacation time, which would be just over $14,000.
But if he was fired “without cause”, he would also get a severance pay for 20 work weeks, totaling around $83,000.
City officials emailed back and forth what to pay Evans, since Davis said multiple times he wanted him to be fired “for cause” and councilwoman Lynne Hubbard second the motion.
DeGraffenreidt was trying to convince city officials it was “without cause”.
City officials responded with a transcript of the Sept. 20 council meeting, in which Davis clarified his motion several times. He said multiple times that he wanted to fire the city manager “for cause” and for “misfeasance”.
On Oct. 11, Human Resources Director Bruce Davis advised staff to “please prepare (…) to pay Mr. Evans his final paycheck based on the “Termination Without Cause” provision(s) in his employment agreement today if possible.“
That brings us back to Sept. 20 and the suspicion that those three city council members never had a reason to fire Evans to begin with.
Starting Monday night, those three city council members might be paying the price, as people are gathering at Jay Ministry to get a petition underway to recall all three of them.