Palm Bay is holding a “Corruption Workshop” tonight at 6:00 PM in the Council chambers. According to a notice sent out by the City, the workshop will feature agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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We had discussed two agenda items for the December 3, 2020 Palm Bay City Council meeting. The first was the proposal for making December 24th an official paid holiday for City employees and the second was to address the pay of police and communications workers within the City.
We’ll address the pay for police first.
Chief Moya made an impassioned plea for increasing the pay of police. He threw up lots of charts and data.
What became clear was that Moya was looking for more pay and that the people Palm Bay was hiring were not looking into total compensation. This became a critical point as during discussion, Council Bailey noted that when pension benefits are added in, Palm Bay has the most compensation for its workers in the county – by a good amount. Moya agreed but said the pension came from the City budget and not the Police Department budget and Moya was only bringing up the numbers for the Police Department budget. We wondered why until we realized that Moya was hiding data that hurt his cause.
Moya said that “millennials” weren’t looking at long term total, overall compensation, but only pay.
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Just yesterday, we wrote about Deputy Mayor Kenny Johnson’s proposal to give City employees December 24th off at a cost of $99,925 to the taxpayers who are struggling financially due to the pandemic and economic fallout from that.
We will keep saying how tone deaf and insulting to the citizens of Palm Bay this proposal is. We note in another post today that the nearly $100K could be transferred to the police department to get vehicles they say they need.
Yet something else caught our eye as we were looking at the post.
There is a cover memo to the agenda item for the day off proposal. It is written by Acting City Manager Suzanne Sherman thru Human Resources Director Charleena Cox.
We missed the connection, but at the bottom there is this:
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The other day we talked about how the City of Palm Bay was proposing an illegal bonus for police officers. That proposition will be voted upon by the City Council tonight at a regular meeting.
One of our ninjas brought the idea of a police raise to our attention. While we focused on the legality of the proposition, they focused on the numbers and the claims being made by the Police Department itself to justify the raise.
The data for their analysis are from the information and presentation being made by the Police Department which is found in the agenda packet and we are displaying below.
Here is the raw data in a spreadsheet form.
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As we said yesterday, we normally wait for the day of a meeting to bring forth issues in a particular City or County, yet here we are again.
On Thursday, December 3, 2020, the City Council for the City of Palm Bay will meet at 7:00 PM for a regular meeting. This will be one of the first meetings since three new members of the Council – Randy Foster, Donny Felix and Rob Medina – were sworn in after the election.
The agenda for the meeting can be found here.
New Business item number 1 is described as:
Consideration of adopting Christmas Eve (December 24) as an official holiday observed by the City of Palm Bay. (Deputy Mayor Johnson)
There are very few people or groups that you will meet that are more Christmas oriented than we are. We love this time of year.
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We normally wait for the day of a meeting to bring forth issues in a particular City or County, but this issue is special.
On Thursday, December 3, 2020, the City Council for the City of Palm Bay will meet at 7:00 PM for a regular meeting. This will be one of the first meetings since three new members of the Council – Randy Foster, Donny Felix and Rob Medina – were sworn in after the election.
The agenda for the meeting can be found here.
Item 4 of “new business” – the last item on the agenda is:
4. Consideration of a pay adjustment for sworn and communications center personnel within the Police Department ($478,350).
Law enforcement have released the video of the interview between then City Councilman Tres Holton and investigators from the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement concerning a recording made by Holton’s mother of a signature gatherer for a petition to change the language of the City Charter on special assessments back to what it was prior to 2016.
We covered the recording, Holton’s mother’s action and Holton’s misrepresentations here and here.
If you want to listen to the recording to refresh your memory, you can download it here or listen below.
The interview starts out with Holton trying to explain that he is the victim of remarks made by people against him and his family by supporters of political opponent Thomas Gaume.
Gaume was one of the leaders of the petition drive to have the Charter wording changed back to pre-2016 verbiage. In the interview, Holton believes the petition is an attempt to derail his election as he won a “straw poll” vote.
It is true that Holton won a straw poll at a BREC meeting. The problem is that the petition drive started months before that poll was taken. Furthermore, the value of the poll was exhibited when in the 2018 primary, Holton came in last behind Gaume and eventual winning candidate Kenny Johnson. The people in Palm Bay did not care what BREC thought, but did care about the corruption in City Hall in which Holton was chest deep.
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The Florida Today newspaper ran an article on the ethical issues within the City of Palm Bay and more specifically, how different candidates that are running for election would address the City’s corruption and lack of ethics.
Some of the answers surprised us and we thought we’d go over them.
MAYORAL CANDIDATES:
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