The Walton County Commission has whittled its list of county administrator candidates from 48 to seven.
It wasn’t accomplished without controversy.
New County Commissioner Bill Chapman provided his list of favored candidates before a scheduled meeting was held to do so.
That didn’t sit well with fellow Commissioner Cindy Meadows, who has questioned the county’s protocol for casting absentee votes.
Meadows was further put off when she attended the called meeting Dec. 18 that Chapman missed.
At the meeting she and each of the other three commissioners were to turn in a list of county administrator candidates they deemed worthy of interviewing.
As the meeting began, newly hired Human Resource Manager Nan MacGinnis told commissioners they were obligated to include Gerry Demers, the interim county administrator, on their lists.
Demers had a “military preference,” Meadows said.
“It’s just your typical politics. It’s not what people want to see,” Meadows said. “This whole thing reeks, in my opinion.”
Meadows said she wasn’t offended that Demers, as a former Army captain and qualified military retiree, is given a preference. What bothered her, she said, was that notice of his qualification wasn’t provided until the last minute.
“Was Commissioner Chapman (who had already turned in his list) advised of that or not?” she said. “It all should have been made clear.”
Chapman, who was out of town when the meeting was held, said he spent two weeks going through the 48 candidates and selected seven he wanted to interview without being made aware of Demers’ status under Florida’s Veteran’s Preference Law. He said he had selected Demers as a finalist without being informed.
In the end, the list of finalists includes three local men and four men from outside the county.
Along with Demers, county residents Larry Jones and Cory Godwin are finalists.
Jones spent 12 years on the County Commission, but dogged by controversy and two ethics complaints, he chose not to run again in 2012.
He has been cleared of all alleged ethics violations.
For his last three years as a commissioner, Jones worked as a governmental liaison for Waste Management, which provides trash pickup for the county.
He was terminated from his position there last April. In his county administrator resume he cited “ethics complaint” as the reason he was fired.
Godwin has served as Walton County’s chief deputy tax collector County since Jan. 4, 2005.
From 1988 until he joined Tax Collector Rhonda Skipper’s staff, Godwin worked in corrections. He was the assistant warden at Walton Correctional Institution when he left for the tax collector’s office.
The other finalists are:
- George “Parrish” Barwick, county coordinator for Jefferson County in Florida. He has held the post since last July.
- Lyndon Bonner, city manager for North Miami Beach from 2011 until his contract expired last September.
- Ted Lakey, county administrator for Jackson County since 2003.
- Robert Halfhill, public works director for Charlotte County, where he has worked since 2009.
Meadows, who was re-elected to the County Commission in November after a four-year absence, said she always had been told that the commission does not allow absentee votes.
She said she wants to know how Chapman turning in his list of finalists for county administrator early doesn’t count as an absentee vote.
“I just want to know what the law is on it,” she said.
Walton County spokesman Louis Svehla said the procedure for selecting finalists for the county administrator position was established prior to the Dec. 18 meeting. No vote was taken, he said.
“Each commissioner was to select seven candidates they wished to interview,” he said in an email.
“The Clerk of Court was to count the number of times a candidate was requested to be interviewed, and the seven candidates requested the most times would be interviewed,” Svehla said.
Interviews are scheduled for the week of Jan 14. Commissioners are expected to vote on a new county administrator Jan. 22.
Meadows said she had heard no talk of the Veterans Preference Law before the Dec. 18 meeting.
MacGinnis notified commissioners at the meeting that Demers must be placed on the list alongside candidates selected on qualifications alone, she said.
“It was not done very well. There was nothing in our packets to that effect,” Meadows said. “There was nothing. It was ‘here it is, put him down.’ ”
County Commissioner Sara Comander said she was aware of the Veterans Preference Law, but had forgotten about its application in county hiring until MacGinnis mentioned it.
Paperwork from the meeting indicates she crossed out a candidate’s name to add Demers to her list.
Svehla said he does not believe adding Demers to the list of finalists affected the selection procedure.
“Ms. MacGinnis reminded the board of the Veterans Preference Law prior to their submission of candidates … and that since Mr. Demers was the only eligible candidate that met that qualification, that he should be interviewed,” he said in the email.
“I cannot speak to whether the board or its individual members were self-aware or reminded or made aware of the Veterans Preference Law at a prior time,” Svehla said.
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Tom McLaughlin at 850-315-4435 or tmclaughlin@nwfdailynews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomMnwfdn.