Addressing Concerns

Based on comments put on our blog over the past few days addressing our posts “Who’s Running Polk City”, our intent and reasoning behind these posts need to be clarified further.  From a business personnel perspective, any individual being considered for any position should be subject to a screening process that not only scrutinizes their qualifications, educational background prior to employment, but also integrity and ethics.  The findings we posted about both, City Clerk, Patricia Jackson, and the Mayor, Joe LaCascia were things we felt were very relevant.

 

The City Clerk, who has years of experience in both City Clerk and City Manager capacity in Eagle Lake and Mulberry, would be an obvious source of information to answer day-to-day questions our city officials might have.  Will she be considered to fill the City Manager position once Ms. Block steps down as Interim City Manager?  There may be a lot of things that Patricia Jackson did correctly to maintain her position over the years in Mulberry as City Clerk and then City Manager.  But the articles we cited in the previous post quote areas of concern in Patricia Jackson’s employment reviews done by her supervisors.  She may be a great City Clerk, but not necessarily qualified to be a City Manager.  The articles in the Ledger and News Chief regarding her performance as City Manager in Eagle Lake and Mulberry back this up.  To review these articles again, please read “Who’s Running Polk City” and the links are available there. 

In regards to our post on the Mayor’s background, the same logic and reasoning applies.  We obviously were not able to obtain detailed information on his employment history since he was not a public official, but the discovery of this lawsuit, whether found guilty or not guilty, we thought needed clarification.  Even if the plaintiff in this lawsuit had a grudge as his main motivation, for him to publicly and officially make such serious charges, he must have thought he had facts to support them.  For this man to go through the trouble of filing this lawsuit, he obviously had the perception that Mr. LaCascia was involved deeply enough in these questionable practices to be named specifically.  Whether or not he was actually guilty was left for the courts to decide.  We are simply bringing to light that this was out there and we are giving the Mayor an opportunity to clarify this to the public.  We are not making accusations, just bringing this to light, and it should have been questioned in a background check.

 We welcome any clarification that will shed more light on the information we have found on both City Clerk Jackson and Mayor LaCascia.  We are not accusing them of any wrongdoing in their current capacities with Polk City.  Considering Polk City’s past history, we are simply asking questions to prevent any future embarrassment.