PORT RICHEY - City Council member Pat Guttman arrived at Tuesday night's meeting armed with a litany of complaints about City Manager Vince Lupo. Would this be the first sign of his ouster, some audience members wondered.
But Guttman barely got a word out, and the sparks never came.
Lupo had prepared, too. He brought along an evaluation form for the council to fill out. The discussion faded as the papers were distributed, sparing Lupo a public critique of his performance - for now, anyway.
The three-page checklist, based on those used by other municipalities, covers various benchmarks, including policy execution, fiscal management and citizen relations.
"I'm sure that some of my concerns aren't on here," Guttman said.
Lupo said she could attach additional pages to the evaluation.
To remove Lupo would take four votes of the five-member council.
In an interview after the meeting, Guttman criticized Lupo as being unaccountable and faulted his budget proposal as full of waste. She said the rest of her concerns would come out.
"I'll have my say," she said.
Since he became the city's top employee in 1996, Lupo has been evaluated twice, most recently in 2001. "As a matter of course, we ought to do it every year," Mayor Eloise Taylor said.
She also called for an evaluation of City Attorney Paul Marino.
Marino, who did not attend the meeting, has been under fire recently for various actions, including an ordinance that allowed a gambling boat company to run bingo games (the rules were later revoked) and for reporting to the building department a possible code violation at the home of City Council member Bill Bennett.
Also Tuesday evening, the council received a new budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. The spending plan would hold the property tax rate at 5.82 mills and provide a 5 percent raise for city employees.
But the $3.1-million general fund budget relies on, among other things, higher building permit fees and controversial cuts to the Police Department, including elimination of dispatch services.
The council did not take action on the budget proposal and will soon receive another variation of the budget.
Lupo was criticized for focusing only on cuts to the Police Department.
"This whole City Hall needs to be looked at, and to do a budget based on reducing only the Police Department is not fair, nor is it right because there are, in my opinion, other departments that certainly could be downsized," council member Phyllis Grae said.
