- May 8, 2024
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Bunnell City Commissioner Elbert Tucker has come forward with his reasons for proposing not to renew former Bunnell City Manager Armando Martinez’s contract, saying his failure to institute staff safety training led to increasing insurance rates for the city.
Tucker’s initial motion didn’t gain a majority vote, but Martinez was dismissed later after the commission voted 3-2 not to renew his us contract unless the terms were renegotiated, a condition Martinez rejected.
Tucker had long opposed Martinez’s retention of a $6,000 bonus for the position of director of public safety, a holdover from his former position as the Bunnell Police Chief.
In Bunnell, the job of “director of public safety” had no job description, Tucker wrote in a letter detailing his objections. Martinez was ultimately forced to give up the title — he couldn’t keep it and simultaneously hold the title of city manager — but the commission at the time permitted him to maintain the yearly $6,000.
And for it, Tucker wrote, he did, essentially, nothing.
“There was no such position in Bunnell, and therefore, no job description for the job,” he wrote. “I was curious as to what the functions of a Public Safety Director would be. I found that the Director of Public Safety would be involved in the TRAINING of public employees. I asked the manager if he ever held any training. He said something similar to, if the directors have an idea, they run it by me, and I put in my two cents. That was the extent of the job performance for that $6,000. No training, no sweat. Except there would be a downside to no training.”
The downside, Tucker wrote, was that the city’s insurance company, Preferred Governmental Insurance Trust, raised the city’s rates drastically, starting in 2010, because of frequent and severe claims.
In 2013, he wrote, “the penalty imposed was 158% of the normal premium,” and in 2014, it is 182% of the normal premium.
And, he wrote, “since it appears to the insurance company that over the past several years, it appears very little was being done in the area of public safety, to educate the workforce, because we still have the greater frequency and/or severity problem than is expected by the insurance company, Bunnell has been charged a separate penalty, called a ‘Schedule Adjustment,’ the last four years, totaling $62,907, on top of the but of control, ever-increasing rate.”
If the city had an actual public safety director, Tucker wrote, “and if we had ongoing training, some of the losses may have been curtailed, or prevented.”
Tucker served as a finance officer in the Army and owns Elbert Tucker insurance with his wife, Pam.
