According to the Panama City News Herald, about a year after he was hired as city manager, Tony O’Rourke was fired Thursday during a Panama City Beach City Council meeting.
The decision came after the council — apart from Councilman Paul Casto who didn’t attend the meeting — unanimously voted in favor of O’Rourke’s termination.
Although a discussion of the former manager’s performance wasn’t originally included in meeting’s agenda, Mayor Mark Sheldon said he believed it was time to clear the air on a handful of “small errors, inconsistencies and embellishments” he’s noticed during O’Rourke’s employment.
“As many people know, I can be impatient,” said Sheldon, who added he has prepared over past months to evaluate O’Rourke in an upcoming annual review. “I’ve recently decided that bogging down a formal evaluation would simply slow down the business of the city, (and) the business of the city is an incredibly important matter to me.”
Included in a list of critiques he presented Thursday, Sheldon recalled a time shortly after he was elected last year when he was asked by officials of local municipalities to convince O’Rourke to begin attending monthly city manager meetings held by the Bay County Chamber of Commerce.
“Astonished that (the) city was not (already) present, nor represented,” he went to O’Rourke, who allegedly said he could not attend the meetings because of a “scheduling conflict.”
Sheldon said he then went back to the chamber and “begged them” to reschedule the meetings to a date more convenient for O’Rourke, which officials “reluctantly” agreed to do. Since then, the former manager had only attended one meeting in person and another over the phone, he added.
“Other meetings with county officials have (also) gone unattended, (and) staff or I have stood in his place,” Sheldon said. “Building relationships with other municipalities is very important for Panama City Beach, (and) this is just another example that Mr. O’Rourke doesn’t care to be a part of the team of Bay County.”
Sheldon also looked back to last Memorial Day, when he apparently asked O’Rourke to seek mutual aid from the Bay County Sheriff’s Office to help control the inevitable influx of tourists. Sheldon said that the former manager “assured” him it “would be done.”
The following week, after witnessing crowds overrun local law enforcement during the holiday weekend, he asked O”Rourke about the mutual aid. Sheldon said he was told a request was made, but the sheriff’s office didn’t have the available resources.
“I then spoke to the sheriff, (and) he denied receiving that request,” he said. “That lack of action put our citizens, our visitors and our city’s reputation at risk.”
Sheldon said that the final straw for him was an incident that he said “promoted employee theft.”
He said that after receiving a complaint from a resident, a city employee admitted to being paid to perform private work with city equipment while on duty. Sheldon said he was told by O’Rourke that the employee would be fired, but he later learned that the former manager had instead spoken with the chairman of the civil service board, who did not support the termination.
“I was shocked that Mr. O’Rourke would even discuss the potential appeal with a member of the civil service board because it would have tainted the entire appeals process,” he said. “I have since learned that this conversation didn’t happen the way the city manager reported it to me. It was just fabricated by Mr. O’Rourke to justify his decision and sadly condone theft.
“After this event, I told Mr. O’Rourke personally that I had lost all faith in his ability to manager Panama City Beach,” Sheldon said. “I told him that day I did not believe he was the right person to be the city manager.”
While both Councilman Geoff McConnell and Councilman Phil Chester agreed that they also have doubted O’Rourke’s abilities to run the Beach, Councilman Michael Jarman had a different perspective.
That said, Jarman noted that he was concerned after hearing the other councilmen’s complaints. As someone who said he views O’Rourke as a friend, Jarman said it was a difficult decision for him, but that he wouldn’t stand for anything that threatened the effectiveness of the local government.
“The travesty is that what may have been able to be remedied, can no longer, from what I’m hearing, be remedied,” he said.
In closing, O’Rourke kept his comments short and simply hinted that this would not be the last his termination was discussed. His contract with the city stated that he could be terminated by the council at any time, with or without reason. He was paid a salary of about $170,000 a year.
“Despite the pretext, I’m clearly being terminated because of my whistle blower complaint I lodged with the city council just yesterday as related to suspected acts of gross mismanagement, waste of public funds and neglected duty,” O’Rourke said. “I look forward to sharing these disclosures and these facts in the near future.”
