Category Archives: Environment

NAPLES —
They have a process in place, but one Naples City Council member wants a thorough review of that procedure before another community member is appointed to an advisory board.

“It’s always been sort of an awkward process,” Councilwoman Teresa Heitmann said.

Heitmann earlier this month asked City Council to review the process the city follows to appoint community members to a volunteer advisory board.

The request comes less than a month after some residents and council members said they were unhappy with council’s decision to reappoint two members to the Naples Airport Authority.

But Heitmann said recently her request wasn’t based on the airport board appointments. Instead, she was concerned about the overall board appointment process.

The process involves submitting an application and interviewing with City Council members during a televised workshop. The city’s ordinance requires interviews of all applicants _ both new applicants and incumbents.

Some citizens cried foul when City Council opted against interviewing the two incumbents who were reapplying _ and eventually reappointed _ to the board.

Naples resident Bill May said Naples City Council failed to follow the city ordinance that every person who is going to be appointed or reappointed has to be interviewed.

May said it’s “unbelievable” that the mayor said that he didn’t know about the ordinance last month during the reappointment of John Allen and Cormac Giblin to the Naples Airport Authority.

“The mayor and City Council should have followed the law,” May said.

May said that if the city expects citizens to obey the law, then local government leaders should also have to obey it.

But the same ordinance that requires an interview also allows for council members to waive interviews if it’s “in the best interest of the city to forgo such procedure.”

Interviews with incumbents are often waived, City Manager

Bill Moss said, “since they’ve already been through the process.”

Incumbents also generally are reappointed, Mayor

Bill Barnett said, unless he or she did something “flagrantly horrific.”

Sharon Kenny, who applied for the Naples Airport Authority last month, said she doesn’t agree with the incumbent board members automatically being reappointed, especially on committees without term limits such as the Naples Airport Authority.

Kenny, president of the Aqualane Shores association, said each applicant should be interviewed and the best-qualified person appointed.

Kenny said the current process is awkward, broken and embarrassing.

“This is embarrassing for the council and for the citizens and there is no sense of fairness involved,” Kenny said in an e-mail. “I think the board appointment process needs to be looked at by council and a more fair and equitable system established.”

But Barnett disagrees. He said in all of his time at council there have been no complaints about the process.

“I don’t think the system is broken,” he said. “I don’t see anything wrong with the way we appoint.”

Naples is the only city in Collier and Lee counties that interviews candidates in front of a full board. Neither Marco Island nor Bonita Springs uses interviews as a way to appoint advisory board members.

Marco Island has a more informal process of making appointments to its boards and committees compared to Naples, Marco City Clerk Laura Litzan said.

Because Marco Island is a small community, each council member nominates one person to a vacant board throughout the year, whether it’s a planning board or a committee, and then the nomination is part of the consent agenda and voted on.

Generally, Litzan said volunteers seeking appointments will submit resumes to the board.

“The people who volunteer are very well known to council,” Litzan said.

But if it’s somebody that council doesn’t know, they may call the candidate, she added.

In Bonita Springs, the process is similar, Bonita Springs City Manager Gary Price said.

While not required, Bonita Springs council members tend to nominate board members based on district and council votes on the nominations during regular council meetings.

Like Marco Island, no public interviews are conducted, but council members can call applicants to chat about their individual qualifications before the meeting.

But it’s not just the interview process that has some Naples residents up in arms. Heitmann said she finds the process of nominating _ council members nominate a person, and the nominees are then voted on based on the order in which they were nominated _ frustrating.

Kenny knows how uncomfortable that nomination process could feel. She said she recalled her name being shouted out for a nomination for the airport board, but said the mayor didn’t acknowledge it and accepted a different nomination instead.

Heitmann said she also was concerned with the voting process, saying some council members may feel pressured to vote for someone because everyone else is voting the same way.

Instead, Heitmann said, council should look at another way of voting _ like a ballot _ so it didn’t feel like “you had peer pressure or some other reason to vote for someone.”

Those ballots wouldn’t be secret though, since any decisions like board appointments need to be made according to the Florida Government-in-the-Sunshine law.

Heitmann also called for a moratorium on board appointments until the process is reviewed, but Moss said he didn’t recall there being any support for that request.

Naples City Council is expected to review the board appointment process during its October workshop.

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