RIVIERA BEACH, Fla. — A special meeting in Riviera Beach took place Friday to discuss staffing and newly appointed positions just days after Tuesday's election.
The meeting was called for two purposes: Getting access to documents for a proper interim performance review and employment contract of City Manager Jonathan Evans and City Attorney Dawn Wynn. The other was discussion and reconsideration of chair person and pro-tem for the City Council and the Community Redevelopment Agency.
Tradrick McCoy said there are concerns about Evans.
"I am losing confidence in his ability to manage so many different departments and oversee so many different things," McCoy said.
He also stated he couldn't find a record of annual evaluations by city council members for Evans through the clerk's office or human resources.
"HR is in possession of my employment evaluation, as when the information was requested," Evans said. "They didn't have possession of it at that particular moment, but they've always had and maintained possessions of my employment evaluations."
The last-minute meeting also drew a lot of pushback from residents who sat in the meeting for hours.
"We are going to be watching and there was a council that fired him once before, and we got rid of those people, and we can do it again. And that's a promise," Singer Island resident Jamie Dickson said.
McCoy said there were violations of the Sunshine Law when it came to solicitations for employee group insurance plans.
"Mr. McCoy, you are always saying how you get information at the last minute, that you don't have time to look at it, and it's just kind of disingenuous of you to call a meeting for this and give us two hours notice to be able to go through hundreds of pages of documents and to be able to intelligently make a decision about it," Councilwoman Shirley Lanier said.
Lanier said it's not in the best interest of the city for her to comment on such short notice.
Chair pro-tem KaShamba Miller-Anderson agreed and added that some links to documents were broken and she couldn't access the information.
"I understand your concerns in not having the information and unreadiness and I would certainly encourage that, and I will own that. However, I don't accept the fact that you would call it disingenuous. Disingenuous represents deceit or something like that," McCoy said. "I was outraged, No. 1, to even see that this happened because no one seemed to even give me the ... didn't even warrant a response. I've been literally asking about this issue for a month, and it wasn't until a proposer actually filed a bid protest that we found ourselves in this situation."
Meanwhile, a second emergency meeting was called by Councilman Doug Lawson to "reconsider" or vote to remove newly appointed chairperson Dr. Glen Spiritis as the city chairman and Miller-Anderson as CRA pro-tem.
"While he's a well-accomplished previous city manager and has been involved in New York politics for over 30 years, I wanted to offer the grace required to familiarize yourself with the responsibility of being a council member in Riviera Beach," Lawson said.
Lawson said Spiritis doesn't have enough experience, and he felt the vote to appoint him was rushed.
The move also got pushback from residents who said he was voted in, and that it isn't fair for City Council to change their minds after the fact.
Some residents also speculated that race is the issue as Spiritus is the only white person on the city council.
"I don't quite understand that when we brought Spiritis in and we all voted responsibly, how can you say that he's not capable to run the job," resident Derrick Burns said. "We just need to do things according to how the books say it needs to be done."
None of the discussions were voted on Friday as planned and pushed to the next city council meeting.
Evans was fired in September 2017 but rehired with new commission members in May 2019.