ACCOUNTABILITY
In the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke,” The Captain, a prison warden played by actor Strother Martin, delivers an iconic line: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
- Communication remains a problem for Escambia County Administrator Wes Moreno and his team. It’s also expensive for taxpayers.
Background: For years, the Escambia County Commission has debated what to do with the aging Pensacola Bay Center. The current board, Mayor D.C. Reeves and the Pensacola City Council reached a general consensus in April.
Commission Chair Ashlee Hofberger summed it up in four points:
- Proceed with Bay Center renovations
- Build an adjacent flex/event center designed for weekday conventions and weekend sports
- Continue negotiating a public-private partnership for a second ice sheet
- Task the city with addressing parking and transportation—potentially through a parking garage at the long-vacant Tech Park and federal transportation grants
Mayor Reeves offered to work with Moreno and City Manager David Stafford to draft the “guardrails” that emerged from that discussion and bring them back to both bodies for confirmation before moving to formal procurement.
Month Pass: Moreno didn’t bring anything for three months. When the commissioners at Committee of the Whole on Aug. 6, the published agenda listed an update of the Bay Center but did not attach an interlocal agreement with the “guardrails” the mayor described.
I found the agreement attached to the Pensacola City Council’s meeting scheduled for Aug. 13. Read Interlocal Agreement between City and County – Future of Pensacola Bay Center.
The lack of communication from Moreno left several commissioners feeling blindsided.
“This interlocal agreement is going to need some attention. The proposed draft being agreed to being approved by county legal—I mean, that’s one thing. That’s not the board. And I don’t know if my colleagues approved that. I certainly didn’t give a stamp of approval to that.”
— Commissioner Steven Barry
He wasn’t alone. Commissioner Mike Kohler said he was “caught off guard on that, too,” adding that the draft had already circulated on social media in a way that framed it as “‘city’s going to decide and we’re going to pay'”—a narrative he said doesn’t help the project.
When Commissioner Lumon May pressed him on the agreement, Moreno downplayed the situation, telling the board: “There’s a draft of a local agreement. It’s not been executed. We’ve drafted it collaboratively with the city, and we’ve got some red lines going back and forth, but it’s not been executed.”
What The Records Tell Us: Public records obtained from the City of Pensacola show that the “red lines going back and forth” ended in mid-June—seven weeks before the Committee of the Whole meeting.
On June 17, City Administrator David Stafford sent the final draft of the Interlocal Agreement, which he called a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), to Mayor Reeves, City Attorney Adam Cobb and other senior city leaders. He wrote:
“Per Wes Moreno, BCC will discuss Bay Center at its August 6 Committee of the Whole. The intent would be to present potentially two draft RFPs for discussion, one for management of the Bay Center, the second for a CEI Project Administrator. As a reminder, county attorney has agreed to our final edits to the MOU (attached), and I believe we intend to bring it to City Council on July 16.”
The agreement attached to that email is identical to what landed on the Pensacola City Council’s Aug. 13 agenda. Read Bay Center June IA.
The county administrator had seven weeks to walk the Interlocal Agreement past the commissioners individually and bring any changes back to the city. Instead, on Aug. 6, Moreno wanted his board and the public to believe it was still a work in progress—while the City of Pensacola clearly believed it had a final draft ready for votes by both the council and the commission.
Moreno dropped the ball. Escambia County taxpayers are still waiting for work to begin on the Bay Center, while costs climb with each delay.
This “failure to communicate” is expensive, and it could have been avoided.
