- April 26, 2024
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Flagler Beach City Commissioners at meeting on Jan. 19 grilled City Manager William Whitson about how he communicates with the commission and chooses tasks to focus on.
Whitson’s wife, Becky, took the podium in defense of her husband at the meeting, saying that the commission was “tormenting” her husband for not knowing their priorities.
“He is responding to being burned because he didn’t know what your priorities were,” Becky Whitson said. “You are killing my husband.”
City Attorney Drew Smith also came to Whitson’s defense several times.
The city settled on a tentative path forward to resolve communication and priority issues that had drawn complaints from commissioners.
Several commissioners said Whitson needs to rely more on his department heads and prioritize which tasks need a lot of his time.
Last fall, Whitson had provided the commissioners with a priority list that they were asked to fill out in order to give him direction.
Three of the five commissioners had filled it out, numbering individual items on a scale based on how important they were to the commissioners, whose responses were then averaged together.
Commissioners Jane Mealy and Eric Cooley had not filled out the list.
Mealy said a lot of things on the list are already planned out, and that anything storm-related should take priority over other items on the list — like Fourth of July fireworks, she said.
Cooley said he shared Mealy’s thoughts, and added that everything on the list was a priority.
“There’s 50 to 60 items on the list,” he said. “What’s important is all 50, 60 of these, and I don’t really like the idea of narrowing that down.”
The list was too itemized, several members of the commission said; many items on the list could be grouped under one umbrella topic.
Cooley said he did not appreciate Becky Whitson’s accusation.
The commission was not just coming after people, but trying to ensure that budgeted priorities are completed, even if some things have to be reprioritized as a result of the storms, he said.
“In my mind, I think this gentleman is smart enough and he’s high paid enough that he can and should be able to do that,” Cooley said.
Ultimately, the board gave Whitson direction to use his staff on individual projects and to use better tools, like a project tracker Mayor Suzie Johnston found, to keep up with the many moving parts of projects more accurately.
In a discussion about how the city communicates with residents, the commission instructed Whitson to improve on and use what the city already has, rather than focus on adding new bells and whistles.
The city’s new app will be launching on Jan. 23 for beta testing, Whitson said, and will be an all-purpose source for residents to find information like city operating hours and meeting times, as well as to access information like project statuses.
The app will also let residents submit complaints and questions and will feature push notifications for important information, Whitson said.
Whitson said city staff members hope to launch the app in full in February, depending on how the beta testing goes.
The commission will use data from the app to determine the next step forward in improving the city’s communication strategy.
Metadata from the app — like how many people even download it, to start — will help give city staff some direction, Commissioner James Sherman said.
“I think we need to exhaust everything that we budgeted for this year,” Sherman said.
The city will also restart the monthly radio interviews it had been holding during the recent hurricanes.
It will start circulating a hardcopy newsletter on a trial basis — with copies available at public places like the library and City Hall — and will create a “City of Flagler Beach” Facebook page instead of just relying on the Flagler Beach Police Department’s Facebook page. The new page feature original staff content and also share posts from the FBPD page.
Whitson said that if the new tactics work, the commission can add more resources for communication efforts in the next budget process.
“If we start with all this now, it gives us months to see what’s going on,” Mealy said.
