Most qualified candidate passed over for City Attorney  

 
By Dorothy Inman-Johnson
Special to the Outlook

I realize the Tallahassee Democrat Newspaper’s editorial board has declared its preference that the City of Tallahassee complete a second national search, with a $30,000 head hunter, to find qualified candidates for the newly vacant city attorney position. But did they bother to even look at the exceptional qualifications and credentials of Cassandra Jackson, the interim City Attorney, who was among the nine candidates in the first national search?

 
I served on the search committee and reviewed all nine of the applications received for the job; and Attorney Jackson’s experience and qualifications are head and shoulders above the others. She has been a member of the Florida Bar for 30 years and has twenty years of legal experience working in local government. She was assistant city attorney in St. Petersburg and Lakeland, assistant county attorney in Leon County, and general counsel for the Florida Department of Management Services before her 15 years as assistant and deputy city attorney in Tallahassee. She is among only 7 to 10 percent of municipal attorneys who qualified for the Florida Bar local government certification. She’s licensed to represent the City in Florida and the 11th Federal Circuit in Atlanta, Georgia; and has an impressive record of work for the City in arbitration, employment law, land use, code enforcement, public records, ethics, and contract law. And if that’s not enough, she was highly recommended by both former Tallahassee City Attorneys Lew Shelley and Jim English for the position. She has proven her qualifications and earned the position the old-fashioned way, through good hard work.

 
While sitting in last week’s city commission meeting and watching Jackson being passed over with the weak excuse from Ziffer, Miller, and Maddox that they did not get enough applicants was a disservice to this excellently qualified unblemished worker, who just happens to be a Black female. It especially made my blood boil when the mayor noted there were no more than two to three total applicants when several other current appointed officials were approved by this same city commission. The national search for which Attorney Jackson easily was the top candidate attracted 3 to 4 times as many applicants. Obviously, that was not a problem for them in the past.

 
The other excuse for passing over the best qualified candidate was the fact that the City of Tallahassee is being investigated by the FBI and should not hire from inside the government. There are city commissioners under investigation, not Cassandra Jackson. So why penalize her for behavior by Commissioners?  And worst of all, after Maddox, Miller, and Ziffer refused to appoint her to the city attorney position, they added insult to injury by voting to lower the qualifications for the position so the head hunter could find more candidates; proving qualifications had nothing to do with their actions. Obviously, these three commissioners have a preferred candidate for the job other than Jackson, and had to lower the qualifications to fit their choice.

 
Though they bristle at any mention that their actions might be racially motivated, if it waddle like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. When Commissioner Nancy Miller was asked why she was refusing to support Jackson, she stated, “She’s too nice and I’m not sure she’s tough enough for the job”. The fact that both former city attorneys, her former bosses who are very familiar with her legal skills, are references and very supportive of her appointment refutes Miller’s wild assumption. If Jackson was not a highly capable legal representative on the wide range of municipal legal issues on which she has represented the City in negotiations and court over her 15 years of service to the City, certainly these former City Attorneys would not have risked their reputations by supporting her. And this situation is proof discrimination in the work place is alive and well on the Tallahassee city commission.

 
As children, my Mom used to remind us that as Black people we are expected to be more qualified for the job than others just to be considered. Cassandra Jackson proves the point that even in 2018 my mother’s words still may be true. And as I watched the deliberations at last week’s city commission meeting, with three of the Commissioners refusing to consider her for the City Attorney position, I felt I was living through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s again when any excuse was good enough to refuse to hire qualified Black applicants.

 
I guess Washington isn’t the only place where the clock is being turned back on hard won achievements over the past decades.

 
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