2013-0917 Special City Commission Meeting - 1st Budget Hrg

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Summary Minutes:Special City Commission Meeting September 17,2013 Sunny Isles Beach,Florida First Budget Hearing Mayor Edelcup said all we want to make sure is whatever we finally do meets the Ethics requirements and so he will leave it with the City Manager and City Attorney to work out the specifics. Either way when you reach your conclusion, she will be hired as either a Consultant or as an employee depending upon how everything plays itself out. Commissioner Scholl said he doesn't even know why the Commission is getting involved in this because the bottom line is we agree that this is what we wanted,whatever this mechanism is, to potentially get grants for us in the future, etc. He doesn't agree with what the City Attorney just said because he read Joe Centorino's letter and he just doesn't agree with the City Attorney's interpretation. We have money appropriated in the budget and it is up to the City Manager to prosecute the mechanism of how that is going to come about. Mayor Edelcup said the money is being provided for and the City Manager makes the decision. We don't normally make the decisions as to whether or not people are hired as employees or contracted since that is something that the City Manager usually handles. Vice Mayor Aelion said with that being said,cities have a City Attorney for a purpose and this is to guide the City in its legal affairs, and if a City Attorney has an opinion about a certain issue, not only do they have to be heard, they have to be weighed and weighed seriously. Mayor Edelcup said there is a difference of opinion here. Each one of us has read all the opinions that have been sent to us, and we do not all necessarily agree with our City Attorney's decision. Based on that he is asking the City Manager and the City Attorney,who should be the people that are working this out and not the Commission,to make sure however this person is hired conforms to any ethics requirements that are there, and that they both be satisfied in the end that we are doing the right thing and report back to the Commission. But he thinks the Commission should not be stepping into this segment of how people are hired within the City's organization. Commissioner Levin said she thinks there are special circumstances here, she did not ask for the item to be removed from the budget,she asked that it be reclassified. She would like to see either a complete job description or a Scope of Services to justify the amount of money that will ultimately be paid, and Vice Mayor Aelion agreed. City Attorney Ottinot clarified for the record that his opinion is basically consistent with the Ethics Commission, and Mayor Edelcup disagreed. City Attorney Ottinot said when he received the letter from the State Commission and the County, he called Mr. Centorino and Ms. Frigo and asked them to explain paragraph 3 in the opinion a person can be hired as an employee if he or she basically terminates an employment, and in the bottom paragraph they indicated that person cannot be representing a developer outside the community if he or she believes the developer has an item before the City. I called him and asked him to clarify that because there is clearly a conflict here. The City Manager came to him yesterday with an issue of a part-time employee who has been asked by a developer to work outside the City. The City Manager asked him to call the employee and both of us agreed that the employee had a choice to either become a Consultant and work with anyone he wants to or a City employee and he decided to stay with the City and not to have that conflict. And so we had a similar issue yesterday and the City Manager did not disagree with that. Mayor Edelcup said he has read the opinions and he does not get the same interpretation after reading Joe Centorino's memo that the City Attorney interprets it to be. We are talking about 6