PNJ Headlines: Here’s what’s in the news Wednesday
Milton father on trial for assaulting Lyft driver, Santa Rosa IT employee suspended, and Pensacola asks FDOT to remove BLM mural in Wednesday’s news
- In a wide ranging interview with the News Journal, Tim Kinsella weighs in on Florida DOGE, culture war politics hurting local government and decisions he made as city administrator
- Kinsella said Florida DOGE team was making conclusions “that didn’t reflect the reality” of how state law dictates city spending decisions
- Kinsella defended his decision to ask former PPD Chief Eric Randall leave the city, saying leaving him in would “betray the trust” of PPD officers
- Kinsella said national politics and “political trauma” has infected local politics to the point where most people don’t believe city officials are acting in good faith
A week after Florida DOGE spent two days interviewing Pensacola city officials, outgoing City Administrator Tim Kinsella is leaving the city with pride in the city staff and apprehension that DOGE may make assumptions that “detract” from the city.
“I think that they (DOGE) will make assumptions that we can’t control,” Kinsella said during a wide-ranging interview with the News Journal on Aug. 22. “I think some of the assumptions may be unfortunate, and they may detract from the great work that is being done here. I hope that is not the case.”
Kinsella shocked watchers of city politics when he unexpectedly turned in his notice to resign from the city administrator position earlier this month to take a job with Navy Federal Credit Union. Kinsella’s last official day with the city is Sept. 3.
As city administrator, Kinsella is at the top of the city’s organization chart, reporting only to Mayor D.C. Reeves, and runs the city’s day-to-day operations with all department heads, except for the city clerk and city attorney, reporting to him.
Educating Florida DOGE
The news of Kinsella’s pending departure came as he and city staff were busy preparing for a visit from the Florida Department of Government Efficiency, which is being run out of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office, led by Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia.
Kinsella said the city welcomed DOGE to comb through everything that has ever been written, and every dime the city has spent.
“We as an administration are very proud of our transparency, our fiscal responsibility, and doing the right thing for the people of the city,” Kinsella said. “Everything that is done here is done with the citizen placed first and foremost in our minds, and that is the honest to God’s truth.”
Florida DOGE is in the process of conducting audits of several local governments across Florida, but Kinsella said during the interviews, city staff found themselves educating the DOGE staff members on procurement law.
“We found ourselves educating them a lot on how our processes work, on how state law works, on how state procurement law works,” Kinsella said. “So we have to educate them on how those things work, because there were certain conclusions that they were making that didn’t reflect the reality of how law dictates how we make fiscal choices.”
Florida DOGE sent a formal request to the city ahead of the interviews, asking for information on 62 specific requests, and several of those were about procurement in the city, with a notable question on why the city selected the higher bid on the still-pending Baptist Hospital demolition contract. That project is being backed in large part with state dollars, and the city’s decision to go with the higher bid has been a point of tension with the Escambia County Commission.
Kinsella said whatever comes out of Florida DOGE’s report on Pensacola, he said he knows that the city has been doing the right thing by taxpayers.
“We have a City Council that is very, very fiscally responsible, and the conversations between the city administration and the city council are, by law, very transparent,” Kinsella said. “Every dime that’s spent has to be approved by them. So the idea that the mayor is going off the reservation and spending money on places that he shouldn’t be spending it is really preposterous.”
Kinsella’s departure
Kinsella found himself becoming the city administrator after becoming a Reeves supporter during the campaign in 2022, and Reeves tapped him to lead a volunteer transition team committee to make policy recommendations on what his new administration should do over the next four years.
Kinsella retired to Pensacola after a 33-year Naval career that was capped off with a three-year term as commander of NAS Pensacola during one of the most tumultuous times in the base’s history, which included a terrorist attack, major damage inflicted by Hurricane Sally, and keeping the base going during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kinsella said during his time on the transition team in 2022, he was struck by Reeves as someone who had a vision for the city and is a “serious politician.”
“When I say a serious politician, that’s somebody that puts themselves second, and does everything in their power for the most good for the most people,” Kinsella said. “And he takes on really hard projects and tries to get a solution. Projects that have been ignored for generations because they’re too hard. I don’t think we have enough people that are willing to do hard things.”
When he joined the Reeves administration last year, he said Reeves told him to stay either a year or six years through a second Reeves term if he is reelected.
“Because if I stay for a year, then he’s got time to get somebody else in, but past a year, it makes it really difficult for him then to get another administrator in and get that rapport going.”
Kinsella said that, after nearly a year in, the job opportunity that he couldn’t turn down came from Navy Federal.
Culture Wars going local
For the last eleven months, Kinsella has had a front row view of the operations of city government and politics at the local level. He is walking away from the job with the belief that there is a serious problem with a lack of collaboration across the political spectrum and an eagerness to bring “culture war” politics down to the local level.
He said that he believes that will lead to gridlock at the local level, like there is at the national level, where culture war issues dominate.
“All the things that the people care about — homelessness on the streets, affordable housing, job growth, economic growth, no potholes, better storm water — they’re not political issues,” Kinsell said. “They’re just issues that everybody has to deal with every single day, and when you politicize those issues now, nothing gets done.”
Kinsella said when partisan politics is the dominant focus of local government, getting things done will become “infinitely harder.”
“We’ve got to be really careful of that and keep our eye on what’s important,” Kinsella said. “Those citizens pay us to get better storm water, to bring economic development, to have good schools for their kids. And that’s all that we should be focused on. That’s it. They don’t pay us for the politics, they pay us so they have a safe, good place to live for their families.”
Police chief and other controversies
Kinsella’s brief time as a city administrator hasn’t been without controversy. He ran into a wave of backlash from the city’s Black community when he asked Pensacola Police Chief Eric Randall to resign.
Randall’s departure was the latest shakeup of senior city staff. During Kinsella’s time on the seventh floor of City Hall, five senior-level city officials “resigned” from their positions.
“Very, very difficult decisions, but decisions that I didn’t lose a night of sleep over because they were the right decisions for the organization,” Kinsella said. “The mayor needs a team around him that is able to enact his vision. He needs the right people there, and if he doesn’t have the right people, then it ain’t going to happen.”
Kinsella said when he came aboard the city, he picked up in a few weeks what changes needed to be made, but he first tried mentoring and counseling to try to get people where they needed to be before making changes.
Randall’s departure was the most controversial. The PPD chief is the most high-profile position in the city government behind the mayor, and people care about who the chief is, where they may not even know the city has a parks and recreation director.
The controversy wasn’t helped as Kinsella and Reeves thought Randall’s departure could be handled like the departures of other department heads.
“(Randall is) a good human being, and he’s a good police officer, and I wanted, and the mayor wanted him to have the capability to continue his career in whatever capacity that he wanted,” Kinsella said. “He didn’t deserve to leave under a cloud or under a shadow.”
The public demand for answers and public records requests that came pouring in to the city made that impossible.
Kinsella said he felt like he could talk about it now that it’s public, and the reason came down to the fact that he felt Randall had lost the confidence of the police department. Despite six months of effort to regain it, the situation had reached a point where keeping him in the position would’ve been a betrayal of trust between the city and the officers of the PPD.
“There was nothing nefarious about it,” Kinsella said. “There was nothing racial about it. It was a pure leader-follower equation.”
Good faith versus bad faith
Kinsella said he loves being the city administrator, and he hasn’t been this satisfied with a job since he was an aircraft squadron commander aboard an aircraft carrier.
Kinsella said his best days in both jobs have been when he can get people around a table and solve a problem that wouldn’t have been solved unless he brought them all to the table.
“My worst days were always when somebody who we thought was acting in good faith and then didn’t and derailed something that we’d worked really hard on,” Kinsella said.
Kinsella didn’t disclose specifics, but said the biggest shock of city government versus the military is that in the military, it’s a given that everyone you work with is acting in good faith, even if you disagree about the solutions, but that isn’t the case in local politics.
Kinsella said there is the assumption when he meets with a lot of people, including members of the public who have an issue with the city, that the city is coming from a place of bad faith.
“I found that really hard to understand that the person that I invited to my office to sit down and solve a problem believes that I’m sitting here from a place of bad faith, and it takes a lot to get over that,” Kinsella said.
The view that city officials are acting in “bad faith” is another symptom of national politics infecting the local level fueled people’s “political trauma.”
“So anytime you sit down with a government employee or a politician, a member of the public is usually like, ‘They’re (not really) listening to me. They’re going to go do whatever.'” Kinsella said. “I see it all the time, comments like, ‘Mayor Reeves is, if there’s a development or a hotel going up, well, he’s getting money in his pocket from it,’ which is ridiculous.”
Kinsella said his advice to his successor is to meet people where they are and always act in good faith for the benefit of the city residents.
“Always in good faith,” Kinsella said. “It’s the only way forward, in my view, and that goes a long way to establishing the trust that you need to do a job like this.”