Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Bullying scandal rocks city leadership
DELRAY BEACH — Delray Beach Mayor Shelly Petrolia hoped George Gretsas would be the city manager to finally stick.
Since 2013, eight city managers have come and gone — a handful under the cloud of divisive allegations, pricey severance packages and lawsuits.
But the city has now cast its spotlight of drama onto Gretsas, who took the reins of the city in January and already faces being fired. By May, he was accused of bullying a female employee and later attempting to fire her in retaliation. Gretsas contested all the claims. In June, the city voted to fire him.
But his contract said an investigation needs to be conducted, with formal charges drawn up. When those charges were finally released this past week, it shocked some when they excluded the allegations that landed him in the hot seat in the first place. Now, the whole debacle is on a collision course for Oct.
23, when all parties will hash things out at a public hearing that likely will be contentious — to say the least.
In the meantime, the residents of Delray Beach will have their day-to-day affairs run by yet another interim city manager who never applied for the job, their fourth in seven years.
“As a city we are paying for all of this,” Commissioner Ryan Boylston said. “I don’t think we are anywhere close to seeing the end of how much this is going to hurt.”
Alleged bullying and retaliation
Gretsas, a former city manager of Fort Lauderdale and Homestead, arrived in Delray with a reputation for shaking things up in previous cities and drawing the ire of longtime city employees in the process.
Delray didn’t have Gretsas as the first pick for city manager. But after its preferred candidate dropped out in the contract negotiation stage, Gretsas got the position.
Early on his tenure, Gretsas, 52, said he became aware that some Delray residents were complaining about brown water. An investigation determined that some water distribution systems might be compromised and not cleaning water effectively.
At a May 14 meeting to discuss these ongoing issues, Assistant City Manager Suzanne Fisher claims Gretsas yelled at her and made her feel he might “become physically violent,” according to a complaint.
She also said Gretsas made harsh comments to female employees during his time with the city. On May 15, Fisher went on medical leave due to emotional distress from the incident, according to her complaint.
Gretsas admits he was “heated” in demanding answers during the meeting, but denied targeting women during his time with Delray. Rather, he said, he quickly became the enemies of a handful of “malcontents” who he pushed for answers and solutions.
After Fisher took her leave, she approached Mayor Petrolia about Gretsas and later, City Attorney Lynn Gelin, who recommended on June 2 that she draft a formal complaint.
On June 5, Gretsas sent notice to Fisher that he intended to fire her after he said he uncovered evidence she had pulled strings to get her boyfriend a job he was not qualified for at a city-owned golf course. He also said he had evidence suggesting she had a history of making false claims of bullying against colleagues. The notice was interpreted as retaliation against Fisher by many city leaders.
On June 10, Fisher filed her complaint against Gretsas.
An investigation by an outside law firm was conducted into Gretsas.
Twenty-five witnesses were interviewed and a June 24 vote was scheduled to terminate Gretsas based on the allegations of bullying and the report.
But the law firm’s report, which was intended for the city commissioners, wasn’t released in time for the vote. The vote on June 24 was split 3-2 with Commissioners Boylston and Adam Frankel voting no.
“Mr. Gretsas didn’t see a report, his attorney didn’t see a report, I didn’t see a report,” said Frankel, explaining his decision.
On July 2, the report concluded Gretsas’ behavior toward five women violated the city bullying policy. It also concluded his actions against Fisher were
“motivated by retaliatory animus” after he learned of her plans to file a complaint against him.
Under normal circumstances, the 3-2 vote in June would have been enough to remove Gretsas. A 2014 voter-approved change in the city charter waived the requirement for a super-majority of votes to remove a city manager. The change was pushed for after the contentious resignation of former city manager Louie Chapman Jr. that year.
But unlike the split vote in 2019 that terminated yet another city manager, Mark Lauzier, within 72 hours, Gretsas’ contract spelled out a longer process. The next step: 60 days to conduct further investigation and draft formal charges.
New charges
City Internal Auditor Julia Davidyan was appointed to conduct the new investigation and said she began on July 7 by listening to audio recordings of interviews from the previous investigation. Slowly, she said, the interviews led her like bread crumbs to other potential infractions.
Among other things, they included the claim that Gretsas had purposely installed a “private” internet network upon arriving in January outside of the city firewall. That he used and communicated with staff on a project management software without giving appropriate access to the Information and Technology Department, possibly obscuring public records. And that he hired employees he’d previously worked with, paying them more than he should have and not following the proper procedure.
City Attorney Gelin drafted formal charges for a number of policy infractions and presented them at the Aug. 24 special commission meeting to vote on. The charges accused Gretsas of “willful and deliberate conduct in disregarding the policies of the City,” and hiring “cronies” to assist him. The allegations of bullying and retaliation were noticeably missing.
Commissioner Frankel said the new charges seemed “minor” during the meeting and was joined by Commissioner Boylston in expressing concern. However, Commissioner Juli Casale said she thought the new charges were more severe. “They effect both our city policies and state policies,” she said. “Whereas, I think if you look at bullying it is very subjective.”
In the end, the commission voted unanimously to continue with the new charges. In October, after both sides say their piece, they will vote yet again — this time deciding whether they want to fire Gretsas, once and for all.
Gretsas told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that the “private network” he allegedly installed was a router from Comcast so that he could have reliable internet and the project management software was only used to make the city run more efficiently.
He denied making purchasing and personnel decisions in a vacuum but added that the city charter and the city’s emergency orders gave him the right to circumvent normal procedures.
“There is no consistency in their arguments, there is no merit to what they are saying,” he said.
He said the new charges for policy infractions are just a distraction from the dysfunction he was exposing around the state of the drinking water, which he called fragile and blamed the mayor for overlooking. “They’ve got a crisis in their local government and it’s gotta be fixed, and it’s gotta be fixed fast.”
On Thursday, the Sun Sentinel’s news partner, WPEC-CBS12, reported that two yards of sediment had been taken out of a drinking water storage tank in the city in April and raised questions about how often they are cleaned.
Mayor Petrolia acknowledged the water issue is ongoing and being addressed, but said she was not aware until Gretsas brought it up earlier this year. She insisted if anyone was to blame, it was Gretsas.
“We’re policymakers,” she told the Sun Sentinel. “We don’t get involved in the operations of the city unless the city manager involves us.”
What happens next?
Thanks to Gretsas’ contract, the city will air out all of these allegations before the public in October.
In the meantime, Gretsas is amassing hundreds pages of documents and communication he believes will vindicate him. He said he is happy to continue to his job should he be allowed to. But more important is preserving his reputation. “They are smearing me,” he said.
He said he would have no hard feelings if the city were to fire him without cause and pay him his five-month severance package, but he believes that would be a tough sell politically, given past settlements with previous city managers.
Already the turmoil has been costly for the city.
Gretsas has been suspended with full pay since June 24 and will continue to be paid until the October hearing.
Fisher has been paid since May 15 and will continue to be paid until she resigns on Sept. 7, where she will receive even more benefits in exchange for agreeing not to sue the city.
Not to mention, this week many city commission members sat through depositions for an ongoing lawsuit by the former city manager Lauzier — the man Gretsas was hired to replace — who filed a whistleblower complaint in 2019.
Should the city be once again on the hunt for another city manager, that also will likely be a costly affair for taxpayers.
According to numerous city commission members, the recruitment for the city manager position has been extremely difficult in recent years. After the termination of Lauzier in 2019, Commissioner Boylston said some recruitment firms even denied taking on the job of searching for candidates.
“It’s going to be difficult,” he said, imagining yet another search. “You’re not going to be running Delray during good times, you’re going to be running Delray during very, very difficult times.”