The Pensacola Humane Society shut down in January after the staff walked out. The PHS Society has since filed a lawsuit against six former employees over a public letter alleging financial mismanagement in the nonprofit. On Dec. 12, several board members met with the staff and volunteers to try and claim the situation. Here is the opening segment of a chaotic two-hour meeting.
Board member Hank Gonzalez opens with: “We’re here to listen and have open, constructive dialogue. We’re here because of this document that went out. And, if this document was intended to get the board’s attention, you’ve got our attention.”
He later says, “We as a board recognize that we’ve had some challenges. We feel like we’ve addressed the challenges as they’ve come up as we’ve been made aware of those. We will acknowledge that we made an executive director hire the last time that was not a good choice, and that was the board’s decision. Sometimes you make good choices, sometimes, you make bad choices. That was not our best choice”
Gonzalez continues, “We feel like the executive director before that, Jennifer Bitner, was a good choice. We saw skillsets in Jennifer; we thought we saw skillsets in Jan, and those didn’t pan out, and Jan’s no longer here. In the interim, we decided we’d do a search for a new executive director immediately, and we told Manda (Moore-Joseph) that she was going to be part of that search. She would be one of the nominees for that job. This document, frankly, took us all by surprise.”
More to come.