PORT ANGELES — More than 100 e-mails from residents and City Council members offer a revealing look at the issues and turmoil swirling around the resignation of Port Angeles City Manager Mark Madsen.
They depict the emotional, sometimes angry, undercurrent that preceded and followed Madsen’s July 9 letter to Mayor Gary Braun, when he told Braun he was resigning effective Sept. 1.
Madsen, 51, cited the “untenable, hostile work environment” he said was created by “certain individual council members toward each other, him, his City Hall staff and the community,” though at the time he didn’t name the council members.
City Hall e-mails — released to the Peninsula Daily News after it filed a freedom of information request — reveal particular tensions between Madsen and three City Council members — Cherie Kidd, Don Perry and Deputy Mayor Betsy Wharton — and among the City Council members themselves.
Clashes occurred through the year between the “new” and “old” council members and with Madsen — but escalated and reached a high in late June.
Kidd, Perry and Dan Di Guilio had been elected to the council the previous November and took office Jan. 1.
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t want to spend that much time being stressed out and going nowhere,” Wharton wrote in an e-mail after a closed-door executive session in June
Wharton suggested that the council get a facilitator for “teambuilding” and “goal setting.”
And from Madsen in another e-mail:
“All I heard from most of the council was ‘feel good platitudes’ that gloss over the underlying problems.
“NO ONE confronted the fact that the work of staff is being undermined.”
