The Pensacola City Council voted, 5-0, for the mayor to settle the dispute over the city’s allocation of the Local Option Gas Tax. No presentation was made to the council of what the proposed settlement will be. The only statement from City Administrator Eric Olson was that the city agrees with the percentages proposed by the Board of County Commissioners.
Again the public is left outside the city’s side of the negotiations.
I think the only conclusion to reach is that the Board of County Commissioners must have realized that they were wrong and decided to sue for peace. It would have been better to resolve this issue vice kick the can down the road another ten years for another Commission to deal with. A key issue left unresolved on the city side is if the power to make the appeal is or is not vested in the City Council. State law seems clear in vesting the power to make the appeal in the governing body of a municipality, the Pensacola City Council according to both state law (Municipal Home Rule Powers Act) and the City Charter. Nothing in the City Charter or the city’s Municipal Code expressly or even implicitly delegates this authority to the Mayor or anyone else in the executive branch to include the City Attorney who I heard tell the City Council that she acted along in making the appeal they only found out about after the fact.
We published the BCC proposal, but don’t have City’s response
I think I saw something about the proposal in the PNJ within the past 10 days.