November 8, 2016
The Honorable Addison City Council,
I appreciate the city council’s offer to allow me to address some of the subjects that the Mayor continues to bring up in his newsletter and his other venues. I have been retired for over two and a half years and he continues to feel a need to question my actions over my 32 year career for his own political reasons. I am tired of it to be honest with you.
After reading last week’s Mayor’s Newsletter and other commentaries it is obvious that the mayor isn’t interested in the truth. He just wants to create an adversarial atmosphere where he can continue his political grandstanding and try to cause me and others harm. For this reason I have decided to not participate in that arena in person. I ask that you read this response into the record at the City Council meeting and include it in the City Manager’s weekly newsletter.
I am very proud of the almost 32 years I served the Town of Addison. I have great respect for the Council Manager form of government and believe it is the best form for a community when it is allowed to operate as designed.
We built a great city and an incredible municipal organization. Five other Mayors and countless City Council members selflessly served Addison over three decades to make it what it is today. We won awards annually for financial reporting. Our Annual Budgets and Comprehensive Financial Reports were the envy of most communities. We had clean audits from professional accounting firms. Our long time Finance Director Randy Moravec had a degree in Finance , a Master’s in Public Administration, and a PHD in Urban Studies. Eric Cannon replaced him in the later years and he had a degree in Accounting and Finance and he was a CPA. They are two respected and highly competent professionals.
A couple of weeks before I retired the Mayor proposed that we find someone to do a transitional audit for the Town. We just had our annual audit completed in October. None of us had any idea what a transitional audit was supposed to be. The Mayor proposed that the audit cover the period of October through the end of February when I was leaving, so to give Lea Dunn the new City Manager a clean slate. Lea Dunn had been with the town for 17 years as the Deputy City Manager so it wasn’t like she was walking in the door from somewhere else. Lea was not the Mayor’s choice for City Manager. He found Larry Kanter and they started an almost two year process of trying to discredit me, Lea and the organization in general and spent over $100,000. Mr. Kanter was always careful to say that he was not conducting a forensic audit, and his criticisms were mostly directed through his opinion of accounting practices and processes. By Mr. Kanter’s own admission the process was very political, and frankly his findings were just his opinion and he has no significant municipal experience.
Not once during this two year period did the Mayor and Council ask for my input or opinion of the Kanter report and public access was actively blocked to Lea Dunn’s response to the report claiming it was privileged information. Lea’s response and the comments of other senior staff members were critical of the report and the Mayor did not want that out in the public.
The Mayor was hoping to find information that would void Lea’s severance agreement so when they forced her out they would not have to pay her $200,000 in severance. That didn’t happen, so they had to pay her as well as pay an interim replacement and headhunting firm to find her replacement. All of this was a total waste of our tax dollars and we lost an excellent employee. He was also trying to discredit me, because I often disagreed with him and he was always concerned that I would run for Council. I have never had any interest in running for public office and I still do not.
This is the first mayor that has criticized fellow council members in public that disagree with him. He has a death grip on the cities email list, because he has to control the message or his house of cards will fall. He has divided the community, which I didn’t even think was possible, but it happened. His lack of care for the employees of the town caused the Police and Fire Associations to get involved in the last election for the first time in the history of the town. Lots of people have left the towns employment and others are looking.
I have provided an explanation of the safe deposit box situation and the Midway Road accusations for your benefit. Under the city manager form of government the process for obtaining information from former employees is to have the city manager’s office contact them and then they present that information to the city council. That doesn’t happen here because of the Mayor’s involvement in the process. Our city functions best when the professional management team is permitted to do their job and is not distracted by a mayor with his own political agenda. Addison voters recently made it clear that they do not appreciate the mayor’s political stunts that serve only to undermine confidence in the community.
Donna and I are living in the same house on Bobbin Lane that we have lived in for 30 years. We aren’t going anywhere and we are here almost every day, so if anyone wants to know something about us or what I have done in the past just come on by. I will be happy to visit with individual council members or individual members of the public and tell you everything I know. It saddens me to see the community divided. That is the legacy of this mayor.
I have always wanted nothing but the best for Addison, so hopefully this schism can soon be repaired and we can get back to common decency in how people are treated in the town.
Thank you,
Ron Whitehead
3919 Bobbin Lane, Addison
972-490-8449