Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward as seen during an interview last fall, during a far less turbulent time for his administration. Michael Spooneybarger/Studer Community Institute.

It is fair to say the seventh floor of Pensacola City Hall has seen better days.

And in an interview Aug. 14, Mayor Ashton Hayward III acknowledged that there had been missteps in communication from his office.

“Definitely. I think it’s very fair to say and I think that there’s things that could’ve and possibly should’ve been done better,” Hayward said.

Among things that might be on such a list:

— The dissolution of a $20 million plan by Quint and Rishy Studer to lease three parcels on the Community Maritime Park site. The plans would have included a campus for the University of West Florida Center for Entrepreneurship, a conference center, a daycare center and a sports museum. Read here how the leases were consumed by mistrust and miscommunication.

— The revelation that former city staffer Derek Cosson had returned to City Hall as a contract employee, doing much the same work he did as a full-time employee until he came under fire one too many times for his conduct.

— The dismissal of LuTimothy May in organizational restructuring.

— The creation of a Transparent Pensacola tab on the city’s website that seemed hastily arranged at best.

— The resignation of the city’s chief operating officer, Tamara Fountain, amid questioning of her academic and professional qualifications.

— The criticism of City Administrator Eric Olson for contacting the supervisor of neighborhood association president Melanie Nichols regarding her use of her military-hosted work email address to contact city officials in the course of her citizen advocacy.

“I think relationships are very important,” Hayward said. “All of my successes in life at 46 years old have been because of the relationships that I’ve built. I could always do better in any relationship. And I think coming out of here, maybe, it’s important for me to be in more meetings when the stakes are high.”

We sat down with Hayward and Olson for more than an hour on Aug. 14 to discuss the recent issues that have dominated the local headlines of late.

Q: I think there is a sense in a circle of the community that it’s about campaigning and it’s not about governing. Those are different skills. And there are different messages involved in those.

Hayward: Listen, I’m going to always campaign for Pensacola. So whoever reads this: I’m always going to campaign for Pensacola. And anyone that’s close to me is going to campaign because they are supporters of Ashton Hayward and the City of Pensacola.

Now, after close to five years being here (as mayor), I think you’re going to see me take a more proactive role in me governing making more statements of “this is what we need to do, this is how we’re going to go forward.” I’m not saying they’re always going to be perfect. But I think the public wants to see me do that, for sure.

Maybe I wasn’t thinking that I had people supposedly doing certain things. I think it’s important for me to be more vocal on issues that are paramount to the success of Pensacola’s creation of opportunities within our area.

Q: What recent thing you wish you might have taken a larger role in?

A: I thought I was taking a big role in (the Maritime Park leases), and I think things could have been done differently from my position and my staff’s position. And maybe I should have just walked it through — the mayor walked it through — instead of other people being involved.

Q: And the transparency website?

A: I think things could have been definitely differently in the way that that was managed and handled. That could have been done differently. (But) let’s face it. We were the third-most transparent city in Florida.

Q: You mean the First Amendment Foundation’s scorecard on municipal government. Linked here.

Barbara Peterson of the First Amendment Foundation at a public records seminar in Pensacola in August 2013. Photo credit: Joe Vinson.

A: Yes, and (foundation president) Barbara Peterson. I brought Barbara in here for training (in 2013).

Q: Might you bring her back again?

A: Sure. Barbara’s great, and I think you can learn from everybody and I think that’s very important to do that.

On staffing in the Mayor's office

Q: Are you going to fill the COO job?

Hayward: Obviously Tamara’s departure was unexpected. There will be some interim changes. We haven’t decided what those will be yet. We will be doing a search for additional staff. I strongly feel we need someone to help Eric with the day-to-day operations.

When it comes to evaluating the job description, I have Eric looking at the job description to re-evaluate if we want to add or delete parts of the job description.

Q: Will Derek Cosson continue as a contract employee with the city?

Hayward: I’ve tasked Eric to look at all of our contract employees and that obviously includes Derek. Click here for a list of full-time city employees who work on contract.

For a list of the people who were paid as vendors by the city for the fiscal year 2014-2015 — including Cosson — click here.

Q: Whose decision was it to bring Derek back as a contract employee?

Hayward: Tamara.

I need a communications person. Looking at that is very important. I’m looking at that like a complete shop like we used to have at city hall — press releases, writing speeches, putting my  message out. We’re going to need to fill that interim and permanently. And there are good teams in Pensacola who I think can help with that.

On public records, their importance, process and procedure

The City of Pensacola's online public records request screen.

Public records requests are an important part of any government. The City of Pensacola’s “Sunshine Center” serves as an online clearinghouse for those requests. But at some point actual city employees do have to become involved. That costs time, and money, and the process almost is never as fast as the person requesting the records would like.

Q: And you have had a lots of questions about public records.

A: The city’s been shut down for the last couple weeks for public records, which we want anybody to have whatever they want. Come get it. I think that’s important.

Q: The public records request process can be cumbersome.

Olson: If you show us a specific problem, show us and we’ll fix it. That’s what we’re here to do. We have a new public records coordinator, and he may be responding differently, but absolutely if you have some suggestions and they can be done given what we have to use.

Hayward: I welcome any objective input that says, “Hey, that’s something you may want to look at.” I want to be the best. I want to know what we need to do to make it easier. Eric is a great process guy, and that’s something we talk about — what can we do, and if it’s wrong let’s fix it.

Olson: And to make a broader point, we often take requests that come in for information and put them in to the public records system because it’s easier for us to find the information that way. So you have some people who call and ask you to do something because they don’t want to use the public records system, and you say, “If you put it into the public records system, it’s easier for us to do that.” We know nothing is as easy as it looks. But are we always working on it. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to change how we did public records.

Hayward: There’s two sides there. I think we’ve gone above and beyond to make it easy as possible for citizens. Maybe there are some things that we need to tweak, but you get in the queue and there’s no special treatment. It is what it is. But I welcome citizens coming down here and saying “Maybe we can do it this way and we can explain it to you.” I don’t think there’s anyone at City Hall that wouldn’t want to do that.

Olson: I meet every day at 4:45 p.m. with the public records coordinator and go over, what’s out there, are we missing something, have you called on this one. We actively manage it. I personally actively manage it. And Max (Branham, public records coordinator) is great. He’s got a law degree. He’s very good. We are public servants and we provide services to the public in as equitable fashion in the best possible way. So we’re always customer service, customer service, customer service.

On the other side, we are a government agency. So Max is trying to find that fine balance between responsive. But we do have to do due diligence and make sure we’re not releasing stuff that’s not supposed to be released.

On moving forward

Q: So recent headlines have not been flattering to the seventh floor. You are the strong mayor under the city charter. That’s your chair. What do you need to do to address that perception?

Pensacola City Hall.

A: I remember someone saying to me being the mayor will be easy. Managing people will be challenging. And we have great people who work for the city. Fabulous employees. But bringing the strong mayor form of government, if you’re in D.C. or Tallahasse, you would be bringing in a chief of staff. You would be bringing in this and that. (Pensacola) just voted for a strong-mayor form of government. So now you want to tell me how I’m going to appoint, who I’m going to bring in who is going to do that?

It’s interesting. Because in the old form of government, you had a city manager and you had three assistant city managers. We ran (our campaign) on efficient effective government. We cut, and we had a chief of staff — a COO — but we do need people up here to help the city administrator in those day-to-day activities and spread those responsibilities out.

The perception of the things that have happened, obviously I’m not happy with it. It’s disappointing. But the bucks stops with me. There’s things I should have done differently. I’ve got to move forward and learn from this. Focus on these things that are big picture things for the community. Eric and I were talking ... we have a budget. We need to spread that equitably among all of our citizens, and someone needs to manage that day to day. And the mayor needs to look at things that are causes in the community that he can be a support player, or a drive those things with private citizens and government.

If there’s issues with employees, then you’ve got to do what you do and move on. It’s not been fun. It hasn’t been easy the last three weeks. I’m disappointed, too. Finding the right team is challenging. I think we’ve learned from this in a major way. I strongly feel we need two — looking at the old model of assistant city administrators — to split up the responsibilities.

We need someone who is a liaison with me and city council. I have to be out being the mayor doing those things that you do.

I need someone in my office working in council and talking about things that will be on the agenda. I think that’s an important job. You’ve got to have someone who is talking to them and keeping them in the loop. It’s important going forward. Council and the mayor have been doing well lately. We’ve been getting along. You’re never going to always agree. It’s not always easy. But they’ve got opinions and ideas and visions, too, and at the end of the day we all have to come to the common good for the citizens.

Q: Will there be any more “Mornings with the Mayor” meetings?

A:  I don’t know if the forum was always the best format. My lines of communication maybe should be better. I’m a pretty approachable person, so I don’t buy all this that “the mayor’s not approachable.” I’m happy to walk down Palafox. But if that’s the perception, I apologize 100 percent. But I think most people that know me as their mayor and know me as Ashton Hayward know I talk to everybody.

A Mornings with the Mayor media roundtable from November 2013. Photo credit: Shannon Nickinson

I want to on the record to defend (electronic and social media-based communication). Social media is evolving. I’m going to have social media and that’s the way of the world today. The ones that don’t like it, a lot of people do like it. And when I did become mayor I wanted to ramp up the office of the mayor, but most importantly the City of Pensacola and get our town out there and let people know what we are and who’s leading the charge.

If people don’t like that I didn’t hire (some) person, so be it. I’m going to hire who I want to hire. I think I can do those things. I’m not going to stop doing that. I think communicating with the media one-on-one, face-to-face is important, and the funny thing is, I like all of the media. I enjoy talking to them.

It’s not that I don’t want to talk to the media. I’m proud of what we’ve done. Would I like some do-overs? Sure. I would have liked do-overs before I was the mayor. But I have to move forward for the betterment of the community, and I have to build on the success that we’ve had.

It is challenging getting the right team. And we’ve made mistakes. And I take full responsibility for those. But I’m going to move forward.  

Someone said to me, “People are always on government’s rear end, what part do you not get?” And they were dead right. People are trying to get the best government they can get, and I want to leave my legacy that we did better things in local government than what was there.

I want to get a good team in place. I want to be able to respond to citizens.