A Common Trend Emerges
I hope everyone had a great weekend.
This cold was something else. I was in Denver on Saturday and it was in the mid 50s. Very little snow, even at higher elevations. I flew back late Saturday night to low 30s, where it had been snowing earlier in the day.
Something doesn't seem right with that picture.
Moving on.
Today, we are going to talk about Crystal River and the City Manager. Last week, the city council had a workshop to figure out how to do the City Manager's evaluation process.
If you recall, back in October , the city council almost fired the City Manager Audra Curts. Going into that meeting, it appeared that she would be gone. Mayor Joe Meek had told me via email (and also the Chronicle) that he did not have confidence in her moving forward and the city needed a change. Then council member Cindi Frink has stated similar in her review. Council member Chris Ensing had a similar view as well.
During the meeting, Ensing changed his mind, which caused Meek to also change his mind, giving Curts 6 months probation period to make things better.
A few days later, Frink would resign... and Mindi Hastings voted in during the December meeting to replace her. Now, with the new council, they wanted to create a clear process for these evaluations and make them more objective rather than subjective as they were. Great idea.
The idea was to create a process that had ways to measure how well the city manager was doing and discussed regularly at future meetings for the public to see.
But this workshop did not go without drama. During the meeting, Ensing brought up text messages between myself and Curts and stated that he had no confidence in her as city manager as a result of the texts. He felt that if it was his employee, he would fire her for those messages as they were "wrong, wrong, wrong".
Ensing mentioned a records request as to how he got to see my texts with Curts. He did his own records request in on 12/23/25 to help him understand what is going on and had received the messages a result of that request. There was also a separate anonymous request for those messages done on 12/11/25.
Everyone knows there is a lot of behind the scenes stuff happening with conversations and all that. Ensing bringing this up does not help them create guidelines for an employee evaluation for one of their two employees. It just adds to the drama and is exactly what those working behind the scenes want to happen.
Another observation... There appears to be some major staff issues. Not sure exactly why that is, but when employees have issues with their boss and a new boss comes in... and those same employees have an issue again... maybe the problem is not with the boss... or perhaps the city just picks bad bosses. As you will see in a minute, the council has a pretty shockingly bad track record of picking city managers.
That is not to say that mistakes have not been made by the current city manager. If asked, I am sure she will agree she could have done things better or differently. Hindsight is always 20/20.
As mentioned above, for some reason, there has been a lot of turnover with city managers in Crystal River. Here is a list of former city managers. I may have missed a couple as some records are hard to find. This does not include interims.
1969-1982: John Morrison
1982-1985: Wallace Payne
1985-1987: John Kelly
1988-1990: Gil Hess
1990-1993: Merv Waldrop
1993-1994: Terry Leary
1994-1995: Roger Krieger
1996-1998: Roger Baltz
1998-1999: Russ Kreager
1999-2001: David Sallee
2001-2002: Phil Lilly
2003-2005: Susan Boyer
2006-2014: Andy Houston
2015-2019: Dave Burnell
2019-2023: Ken Frink
2023-2024: Doug Baber
2024-Current: Audra Curts
The ones in bold were involved in a bit of turmoil. All but Baber were fired. Baber resigned due to drama and staff complaints about him.
Contrast that with Inverness.
1981-? : Richard Gilbert
1986-1994: Bruce Banning
1995-2020: Frank DiGiovanni
2020-Current: Eric Williams
I am not sure if anyone followed Gilbert before Banning took the job, but as you can see... a huge difference in the number of city managers and none of them were forced out by council that I can tell. Whatever Inverness is doing, Crystal River should copy. They do it right.
From everything that I can find on the Crystal River city managers, a common trend occurs. The city council, for whatever reason, keeps getting in the way. There has been a TON of drama over the years and that is why you see so many city managers. We are seeing this repeat AGAIN.
It is time for the city council to get out of the way. Set up a process that creates goals to achieve, then get out of the way. Let the city managers do what they need to do to reach those goals. Have regular updates to those goals and once accomplished, set new ones.
That provides measurable success. If the goals are continuously not met, then you know you have a problem with the city manager. If the goals are met, then you have a successful one. Stop meddling and stop with the behind the scenes shenanigans. Those things will continue to let the drama fester and not move the city forward.