Palmer City Council, mayor to undergo training amid ongoing disputes

What you need to know:

• Palmer City Council members, the mayor and the city manager will attend a training session on meeting rules and procedures in an effort to address ongoing disputes within the council.
• The session will cover state open meeting laws, parliamentary procedures and related rules in city charter and code facilitated by the city attorney and city clerk.
• Council member Josh Tudor requested the training following months of controversy over council processes, including a recent decision by Mayor Steve Carrington to rule an emergency council meeting requested by Council member Victoria Hudson as "invalid."

PALMER – Palmer City Council members, the mayor and the city manager will be offered a training session on meeting rules and procedures after months of disputes that have become a regular feature of council meetings.

The session, which was requested by Council member Josh Tudor during a meeting Tuesday, will include instruction on the state's open meeting rules, parliamentary procedure used during council meetings, and sections of the city's charter and code related to meetings and conduct of city officials, he said.

The city attorney and city clerk will provide information during the session, he said. An official from the Alaska Municipal League, which assists local governments, will also be invited to participate, he said.

Tudor requested the training with support from Council member Carolina Graver. He said the hours-long meeting could be held on a Saturday.

Disputes over council procedure rules and ethics have been a hallmark of city meetings since former Palmer City Manager Stephen Jellie resigned in early October during a heated closed council session about a week after the city's annual election and the day after Council member Victoria Hudson was sworn in.  

Tudor called for the training after a statement issued earlier this month by Palmer Mayor Steve Carrington that Tudor described as a "dangerous event." 

The statement, posted on the city's website and Facebook page and titled "Ruling Concerning the Invalid Emergency Meeting for February 4, 2025, to Protect the Integrity of the Public Process and Direction of the Entire Council" announced that an emergency meeting requested by Hudson "was invalid and contrary to the already agreed upon schedule."

Hudson requested the emergency meeting so the council could interview candidates for the open city manager position, according to Carrington's announcement. But a special meeting for that purpose had already been discussed and scheduled, he wrote, and an earlier emergency meeting would "undermine" that plan. 

Tudor said allowing the mayor to dictate whether meetings are "invalid" sets a bad precedent not currently permitted under city code.

Emergency meetings can be called by any elected city official as long as a quorum of four members is present, according to Palmer's city code.

"To me, this is dangerous. We cannot have one person, for example, deciding which meetings are valid and which meetings are not," Tudor said Tuesday.

Tudor also said he believes the way the notice was released was politically motivated.

“To me, this did not seem like the right approach,” Tudor said. “It just seemed like it added to political drama, especially because the contents of the letter portrayed a council person in a negative light.”

Tudor said he would like the training to be mandatory.

"What I'm asking for ... all of us do this mandatory training together," he said. "This could be a really good opportunity for us to just work better together as a council so we can better serve the community."

Such a training can only be mandatory if it is included in city code, officials said. A resolution requiring the training has not yet been proposed.

Carrington said Tuesday that his announcement was "probably a little creative," but his intention was to keep the previously established meeting schedules. 

“This was my way of trying to address the difficulty of not having a public discussion after we already had one,” he said.

Separately, Carrington said in his regular mayor’s report that he plans to enforce city code related to public meeting procedures. The report was released prior to Tudor’s request for the rules training. 

“Recent meetings have included a touch of chaos,” he said in the report. “Now seems like a good time to review what our city codes say about how meetings should work.”

The council plans to schedule the rules class after it interviews and hires a new city manager, a process that could stretch into mid-March. Initial interviews with candidates for the position are scheduled for a special meeting Friday.

It will not be the first such training session for elected officials in Palmer. A series of similar sessions were led by former City Attorney Michael Gatti prior to 2021. 

-- Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com

This story was updated Feb. 13 to clarify which statements were made by Council member Tudor, specifics of the mayor's published announcement, that the mandatory nature of the training was Tudor's request, not a council requirement and the council's quorum number.