Sallis says city to change ethics policy on board voting, no comment from Olson

by Jeremy Morrison

According to a planning board member who triggered ethical questions with his participation and vote on a matter his business partner brought before the board on behalf of a client, the city of Pensacola is reversing its policy of allowing such participation. The city itself has remained mum on the issue.

“They’re now deciding they’re changing their policy,” said Scott Sallis on Wednesday.

Sallis is a partner in the Dalrymple Sallis Architecture firm and also serves as the city planning board’s designated architect. During the board’s July meeting, Sallis debated and voted on a request being made by his clients, and presented by partner Dean Dalrymple, to vacate a right of way. Both Sallis and Chairman Paul Ritz maintained at the time that the participation was allowed — and exempted from normal conflict of interest rules — because the member was the board’s designated architect; city staff did not intervene to stop Sallis from voting.

In subsequent interviews both men maintained that they were basing their assertion on previous city legal decisions.

“That’s recollection from eight years ago and the opinion of the attorney at that time,” Ritz reiterated Wednesday.

City staff refused to comment on the matter, but a spokesperson for the Florida Commission on Ethics said a 2004 opinion did clear the way for designated architects on the city’s Architecture Review Board to continue serving, but did not exempt the members from recusing themselves during votes.

On Wednesday, Sallis said he had been invited to city hall earlier in the day to sit in on a conference call with the Ethics Commission and the city attorney. The planning board member described the call as “quite pleasant and informative.”

Sallis said that he was told that the previous legal decision had been made in a “gray area” and that the city was changing its position on allowing a designated board member to vote on matters they are involved in. He said the policy change would be announced at the next planning board meeting.

“They regretted that I’d been in that situation,” Sallis said. “They’ve all acknowledged that I was following their direction.”

The architect has said previously that he was told of the designated architect’s special status (apparently the only such board member on any city board to have such a status) by Planning Administrator Sherry Morris, as well as other planning staff members and previous city attorneys.

“That was their interpretation of the law,” Sallis said.

Jim Messer, who recently ended his three-year tenure as city attorney, has said he is unfamiliar with any exemption for a designated architect on the planning board. He had never been asked to give any interpretation of the ethics law on whether such a board member could vote on his firm’s projects.

While the city has not responded to repeated requests for comment on this matter, Sallis said Wednesday that the inquiries had apparently sent staff searching for answers.

“Your questions put them in great research mode,” Sallis said.

The architect also said that, following the conference call with the Ethics Commission and an explanation of the pertinent laws, the issue seems easy enough to understand.

“It seemed pretty clear to me,” Sallis said. “It says ‘cannot vote.’ I don’t know how they misconstrued that.”

The city of Pensacola has not responded to questions pertaining to this issue and has not corroborated Sallis’s assertions about a policy or any possible change of policy.

However, Pensacola City Councilman Charles Bare did talk about the ethics issue on News Talk 1370 WCOA’s “Pensacola Speaks” on Monday. His statements contradict what Sallis told Inweekly. Bare said that City Administrator Eric Olson told him that city staff never told Sallis that he could vote.

“I sent an email, and I received a response back from Eric Olson actually who’s the administrator who is in charge of planning,” Bare said. “He told me that there were no staff that told those members of the Planning Board that they were exempt in any way from the Florida Ethics laws.”

When I asked the councilman why didn’t city staff speak up during the planning board meeting to stop the ethics violation, he said, “I don’t think that the staff are always experts in the law. What we need is legal representation there. I know in my discussions with the Chief Operations Officer (Tamara Fountain) that she has indicated that Lysia Bowling, our city attorney, may start to attend those meetings.”

Bare also said the city attorney is recommending ethics training for board members.

“I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but that Lysia Bowling, our city attorney is recommending that all the boards get ethics training,” he said. “We’re required to have four hours a year. I think that you’re going to see a push. The reaction to this particular incident is going to be we need to train our board members better in what they’re supposed to do.”

Two weeks ago, when Inweekly first learned of the possible ethics violation during the planning board meeting, we emailed Bowling, provided her with a transcript of the discussion, and asked her to review it and let us know her findings. The city attorney never replied.

Councilman Bare did share the memo from Bowling: BowlingEthics.

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Summary: Planning Board member Scott Sallis violated the ethics law by voting on a project presented by his firm, but says he did it because city staff told him he could do so. The City Administrator Eric Olson tells a councilman that the city staff never told Sallis he could vote. However, we cannot get Olson to tell us why city staff did not stop Sallis from voting.

Sallis says that city staff, after talking with the Florida Ethics Commission, has reversed its policy on him voting and will tell the planning board at its next meeting that members can not vote on their firms’ projects. Olson will neither confirm nor deny this conversation occurred.

City Attorney Lysia Bowling now wants to implement ethics training.

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My observation: The core tenet of Florida ethics law is a board member can not vote on items that benefit himself, his family, his business associates or his clients. An experienced city attorney, city administrator or chief operations officer would have known that and fought to make sure that law was never violated, because such a violation undermines public trust.

Instead we have city staff spending weeks to debate the issue and cover it up.