Cassie Boatwright, Escambia County’s director of facilities management, has announced that she is leaving the Gilley administration. Boatwright was hired in January 2020.
She came under fire when the Pensacola Bay Center went before the Board of County Commissioners for more money.
The board eventually voted to allocate an additional $250,000 of bed tax collections to help ASM Global operate the facility. Still, the commissioners wanted to know why the company hadn’t asked for CARES funds like its Osceola County venue had done.
Bay Center General Manager Cyndee Pennington told them that Boatwright instructed her not to request any CARES funds from the county because all the funds had been allocated. All the funds hadn’t been allocated.
County Administrator Janice Gilley didn’t come to Boatwright’s defense or try to explain why her facilities management director would tell Pennington there weren’t any funds available.
Sources inside the county have shared others are considering jumping ship – at a time when the county can’t even hire people to man the animal shelter.
At the meeting last Thursday, I read a list of about a dozen questions that everybody should be asking about the County’s Public Safety crisis. Janice Gilley’s response was to ignore every question except the one asking why one of her ill-suited division leads still has a job, which she used to orchestrate a diversionary tactic for Doug Underhill while he disinformationed the media on EMS. When her theatrical public confrontation pretending that I was attacking good County staff backfired on her, as many people stayed in the room to hear the exchange, she then took her meltdown out into the parking ramp with Jonathan Owens, screaming and gesticulating wildly.
I don’t know how any County staff are coping with it any more, truly, including those she brought in.
As policy makers, the BOCC should consider enacting a hiring freeze immediately, so that she is not allowed to continue to absorb massive amounts of taxpayer dollars on dealing with the gonzo PR nightmare her bloated, inept, self-interested bureaucracy has occasioned. We don’t need a single more hire at the County from Ms. Gilley’s “selection” process. There’s a big enough mess to clean up without her being allowed to bring in more people apparently hired through the lens of her single most important talent assessment attribute: fealty to her every whim. The County’s function has been crippled terribly as it is. Just stop the bleeding, BOCC. It’s time to admit that this is not working, and it’s not going to get any better.