Commentary: A Deceit Beyond the Pale

By Mike Phillips

Over the years I’ve lost track of how many city commissions and councils I’ve dealt with. But it’s well into three figures, and I thought I had seen it all.

I’ve seen a lot of mild fibbing, some bald-faced misstating of facts and several boatloads of ham-handed attempts at spin control. But this one is for the books:

A city commissioner, David Sturges, hears a couple of names, in the hall perhaps, and builds those names into a fiction populated by two wise gentlemen with extraordinary credentials who are willing to drop everything and help a citizen search committee. And to help them perform just as well as professionals who have behind them years of matching city managers with cities and who offer one-year warranties on their recommendations.

The gentlemen have decades of service in big Florida cities, he says. He offers them up as a couple of brilliant finds as the commission prepares to bless the committee and put it to work. His eyes are shining with enthusiasm. What a deal, the commissioners collectively think. They add the two gentlemen to the resolution that gives the citizen search committee the green light to proceed.

Not one member – not even Chip Ross, who usually has a generous store of uncomfortable questions – asks a question. It’s as if they are mesmerized by the thought of the two gentlemen. Or just tired after a long session.

But then the next day, there’s a plot twist. One of the gentlemen, Jim Hanson, becomes aware of the resolution when a Fernandina Observer reporter calls him, and he says nobody told him about this. Nobody talked to him and furthermore, he can’t do what the resolution asks him to do. David Sturges’ story about  Hanson was pure fiction.

But Hanson is a retired pro who has been around the city management block many times. He digs in, reviews the commission meeting tape, asks some questions and then lets it be known that though he’s retired, he’s still an advisor for an industry group that doesn’t let its representatives sit on committees. And yes he knows the city’s fire chief, who proposed him as a possible interim city manager when there was a scramble to find one before the planned firing of Dale Martin. Hanson declined. End of conversation with anybody in Fernandina Beach until the reporter called. Maybe somebody heard his name somewhere and used it, Hanson suggests. Good guess.

So a story embarrassing to Sturges runs in the Observer. Then attention turns to the second gentleman, Richard Sala. His resume was grossly exaggerated by Sturges, who said Sala called him and offered to help. He said Sala had years of city management experience at Fort Lauderdale. But it turns out the truth is seven years as assistant city manager and then city manager not in Ft. Lauderdale, but in a suburb called North Lauderdale.

Furthermore, Sala has disappeared from the web after 2012. We know he had moved on to the urban recovery consulting business and done well with a firm named Calvin, Giordano and Associates. But he's not there now, and we can’t find him. He has relatives here, but they are silent. He’s been up and down the coast. One phone number is working but not answered. He is a registered voter in Daytona Beach, but the phone at his address doesn’t work. There’s another number that might be his cell, but repeated attempts can’t get an answer. And just to complicate things, there’s one archive that has him in Pennsylvania.

We’d like to confirm if there was or wasn’t a Sala-Sturges conversation. But given the other flat-out fairy tale about Hanson and given the highly inaccurate resume summary Sturges gave the commission, there’s no good reason to believe the Sala yarn either.

So I have to ask myself: What would I do if I were Sturges’ fellow commissioner? What would I think as the commission sheepishly prepared to redo the citizen committee resolution without any mention of the “two gentlemen”? And what would I personally say to Sturges? I hope I would forgive him. But I also hope I’d urge him to take a hard look at himself. He’s prone to exaggeration, but this incident was well beyond exaggeration. It was deceit. It was beyond the pale. I hope I’d gently suggest that his resignation might be the honorable thing to do.

Those last two things wouldn’t happen, of course. Too much denial involved. But going forward, if I were one of his fellow commissioners, I'd be kicking myself for not asking some probing questions at that meeting. And I would in the future have a hard time believing anything David Sturges says without proof.

Wouldn’t that be sad?