Monroe County Mayor Heather Carruthers startled many listeners during a May 6 radio interview when she said County Administrator Roman Gastesi had offered to resign in light of the contentious and costly $1.5 million that county workers accrued under a special pay policy that takes effect during a state of emergency.
Carruthers admitted the county had made a mistake by not changing that policy immediately after Hurricane Irma in 2017, when similar accruals caused the same uproar.
“We’re human; we make mistakes. But the county administrator is ultimately responsible, and he has offered to resign over this,” Carruthers said. “But I don’t think that’s the best thing for the county. He has been fiduciarily responsible in the past, and I’m confident he will continue to be … but he’s got to fix this. And if he doesn’t, then we’ll have a different discussion.”
Carruthers went on to say the county would fix its mistake not by raising taxes, but by cutting budgets.
Monroe County Commissioners Michelle Coldiron and David Rice have both voiced their support for Gastesi. Coldiron said she first learned of the news while listening to Carruthers on the radio. Coldiron and Rice said they spoke to Gastesi privately later in the day.
“He reiterated that if the county commissioners wanted him to resign, or felt that he should, he would,” Coldiron said. “I don’t feel it’s necessary.”
Coldiron said it was Gastesi’s “relentless” work and connections with the governor and state Department of Transportation that enabled Monroe County to put up checkpoints to safeguard Keys residents from the virus.
“And that was his main priority, or one of them. The largest outbreak of COVID-19 was 18 miles from our border and he protected Monroe County,” she said. “Could (the emergency pay policy) have been communicated better? Yes. Did we stop it as soon as we could? Yes.”
Rice said he weighed the pros and cons of accepting Gastesi’s resignation carefully.
“In the end, I decided that he has my vote of confidence,” Rice said, adding that six people are culpable for the $1.5 million in special pay for some 400 workers during the coronavirus response at the local level. “Any one of us commissioners or Gastesi could have modified the pay structure. We knew we had to do it after the hurricane. Honestly, it just slipped off the plate. It’s one of those mistakes that I regret, but I do not see that this is an offense that rises to the level that we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
He touted Gastesi’s ability to get state funding as well as his budgeting skills.
“We need Roman at this time particularly,” Rice said. “We have one of the toughest jobs coming up and that is figuring out how we are going to run next year’s budget. He was very good at figuring out how to absorb an unexpected loss like we had in the recession of 2007-2009.”
Coldiron said the county is under the impression that FEMA and the state will reimburse the Keys for all but $191,000 of the $1.5 million.
Commissioner Sylvia Murphy says she absolutely supports Gastesi, as he knows “how to run a county.”
“He knows politics and he knows how to get things that we want or need done,” she said. “And more importantly, if you will notice over the last 12 years, he has put people in positions in this county who know their stuff. I will use Lisa Tennyson (legislative affairs and grants acquisition director) as an example. I will use Tina Boan (senior director of budget and finance) as an example. Roman has put a lot of people in place.”
Neither Carruthers nor Gastesi responded to phone calls from the Keys Weekly for comment at presstime. County Commissioner Craig Cates declined to comment. For more on this story, see page 12.
— Weekly staff report
