Pensacola City Administrator Kerrith Fiddler announced that he was stepping down, effective July 5, during the Pensacola City Council agenda conference on Monday.
He said, “For family reasons, I’ve decided to resign as city administrator.”
On “Real News with Rick Outzen this morning, Mayor D.C. Reeves said he was appreciative and grateful to have Fiddler onboard when he took office. He said, “It was a steady hand for us as we built our administration over this last year and a half. We wish him the best, and family comes first. We wish him the best of luck in the future.”
The mayor said he would be doing a national search for Fiddler’s replacement.
“We’ve got a lot of initiatives going right now,” he said. “We’re going to need someone to come in and be able to take the baton and continue to push these things forward. So certainly, we’d want someone with experience in doing that in some fashion, whether it be a city, a county, military.”
The opening gives him a chance to find someone that fits his needs.
“Look, it starts with me. I mean, in other words, what are my strengths and what are my weaknesses? What do I know? If I’m an old journalist and I know the marketing side well and all that, then you look for the yin and yang where someone might have a more experienced background in something else that I may not have. I think you have to be self-aware and have to be coachable, even from the mayor position, to say, ‘Who is my best compliment? He or she? What are those skills that I would like to see in that position?’”
Mayor Reeves added, “The other big thing that we’ve really established is the priority on employee engagement. Someone cannot be in this position if they don’t prioritize or have experience in building a good workplace because we’ve made a lot of headway there. We’re really proud of that – whether it’s leadership training, aspiring leader training now with Pensacola State, just all of the accountability measures that we have in place, the salary study, we’ve done a lot of work on building up this workforce and employee engagement with all 850, and we can’t see that go away.”