Letter from Moss to Mayor and City Council


On Thursday, June 7, 2007, City Manager Jerry Moss forwarded a copy of a confidential letter authored by him to Henderson Mayor Clem Seifert and the Henderson City Council.

The letter is dated June 1, 2007.

Although the letter is marked confidential, a copy was obtained by The Daily Dispatch which subsequently printed excerpts from the correspondence in its June 7, 2007 edition.

The letter is presented in its entirety below. Below the letter is a link so that readers may view the letter in its original format:

Mayor Donald C. Seifert, Jr.
Members of the Henderson City Council
Henderson, NC 27536

Mayor and Council Members:

For over thirty-seven (37) years, I have been both an employee and an observer of the current Council and past Councils. During those times, I have observed Mayor’s and Council people during their good times and bad times, political ups and downs and the best behavior and some of the worst behavior.

While the current Council has some significant problems to overcome, we probably have the best Council ever as far as their concern for their fellow man, both rich and poor, black, white and brown and all others in between. However, I believe we have lost sight of whom we really serve and why we serve. We argue over joint programs and other matters that have a significant impact on the overall population and after 5-4 votes or 4-3 votes, some of you go home happy and some of you go home unhappy with the outcome. The loser in these disagreements are the very people we serve because all political disagreements/decisions affect our citizens in some way.

Most of you believe you are right in the decisions you make and your decisions are right for some people but are they right for the majority of the citizens. I would like to think a compromise position seems to serve the citizens better and they understand compromise because they have to compromise every day in their personal lives. They compromise with their spouse about money matters, raising children, schools, whether to purchase a new home or car and many other things daily and, in most cases, they continue on with their lives. I believe our failure to compromise on decisions made at the Council level affect all our citizens in their daily lives.

With that being said, I will tell you that if you removed outside forces from your political decisions, we would all be the better for it and I believe we would immediately have a City Council that would get along with each other better. Each of you know who these outside forces are so I don’t have to tell you. Many times we have allowed outside political forces to literally run our city to the point that prior management and current management feels like they (The outside forces) were managing you the City Manager and Staff. We have let a few politically connected people help us make decisions you were elected to make. Clear evidence of that was at the last City Council Meeting when nine (9) people influenced a few of you to vote to put back joint programs without regard for how we were going to fund those programs without a significant tax increase. Not one person asked what the impact of putting those programs back in the budget would have on the entire budget.

It is past time to take our city back from the hands of a few people who believe they know better how to manage our city than you do. These people run private businesses that are very successful but private businesses are not managed and cannot be managed like the business of city and county governments. For example, if we want to build a new building which is being built with state or federal money involved in it, we have to comply with a whole different set of rules and regulations than does a private business. So I don’t believe they (outside forces) know best how to manage a city or county government.
The Management, Staff and each of you know best how to make this government successful so lets make a concerted effort to work together for the good of all the citizens of Henderson and, if it is necessary to involve outside people in telling us how to do things better, then lets involve people that have expertise in managing a successful local government.

Please accept this letter for what it is……the City Manager’s sincere plea for a government run by the Manager, Mayor and City Council without any outside influence from people that have a political agenda for everything they want to see the city do. From my personal observation, we have allowed them to do more harm to our internal and external relationships with our County Commissioners, State and Federal Government leaders and I hope we can begin improving that by working closer with them and each other.

I know that each of you have a love for this city as I do……its my home, its where I was born, chose to stay here and raise a family and I am proud of my service to the city and I am proud of this city. Yes, we have our problems but working together, there is nothing we cannot overcome. You should be proud of your service to the city because most of you take the time every day to perform some service to our citizens as you were elected to do. I just think we could accomplish a lot more for our citizens by working together and removing the outside political influences we have that, in my opinion, are more of a detriment to us than a help to us. Think about it for a moment, those outside influences have kept something stirred up between our Council members for quite some time now and, for the good of our city, its time for it to stop.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If I have made some of you angry with me for the things I have said, I will apologize in advance. For the good of all of us I believe this had to be said I am very willing to talk about this in more detail with each of you if you desire.

Sincerely,

CITY OF HENDERSON

Jerry L. Moss
City Manager

Link to Moss’ original letter