Council Votes 7-4 to Enter into a Separation Agreement With City Administrator: Here’s Why

Seven members of City Council, including four new members who were swept into office in November 2018, voted to part ways with City Administrator Howard Lazarus.

The reasons Lazarus lost his job were numerous, though perhaps not obvious to those who spoke at Council, and posted to social media that the decision was purely a “political one.”

In actuality, it was a decision related to the management and governance of the city. The City Administrator’s dismissal was the result of significant problems and issues related to several city departments, including solid waste, the AAPD, and the city’s HR Department, which is still without a director months after the former head was forced to resign.

1. In 2018, voters changed the composition of City Council and multiple incumbents lost their seats to political newcomers. Lazarus had been hired in 2016 by members of a majority on Council who was voted out of office.
2. As a result of his 2019 evaluation, Lazarus was not given a raise, but rather a lump sum amount, with four Council members voting against giving the Administrator any additional compensation.
3. Lazarus’s 2020 employee evaluation included very low scores in a number of critical management areas and sharp criticisms of his job performance.
4. Lazarus has difficult professional relationships with several of the women on City Council, a problem that was also noted by the Austin Chronicle in a 2018 article about Lazarus’s public interview during his efforts to land a job in that city. Lazarus in his public town hall meeting “made comments that could be interpreted as sexist: He said raising his [daughters] had helped him learn ‘how to negotiate with irrational people,’ and that encouraging the careers of ‘strong, independent women’ inevitably means engaging with ‘strong, independent women.'”
5. The City’s recycling program remained a multi-million dollar mess Lazarus never cleaned up. In his three years as Administrator, Lazarus never replaced Tom McMurtrie, Ann Arbor’s former Recycling and Solid Waste Coordinator. Lazarus oversaw a recycling program that trucked the city’s recyclables to the Rumpke facility in Cincinnati, a distance of 240 miles. This resulted in unusually high collection fees paid to Recycle Ann Arbor and wasted money paid to Recycle Ann Arbor to pick up and haul the city’s recycling that was, in reality, to be landfilled.
6. Ann Arbor’s roads further deteriorated during Lazarus’s tenure. In May of 2018, it was reported that “Information provided by the city shows the percentage of local neighborhood streets rated 1 to 3 on the PASER scale (failing or poor condition) rose from 30 percent to 43 percent from 2014 to 2017, while the percentage rated 4 to 6 (fair or good) dropped from 31 percent to 28 percent, and the percentage rated 7 to 10 (good to excellent) dropped from 39 percent to 29 percent.”
7. His dismissal was also related to Lazarus’s privately-recruited, handpicked group of citizen “executive advisors.” These included people who had been removed from boards and commissions by the current Council majority. Sally Hart Peterson, a former Council member and mayoral candidate whom the voters had twice refused to return to office, advised Lazarus on economic development in private meetings to which the public was not invited or even aware. Lazarus gave Sally Hart Peterson a city email address, despite her not being elected, appointed or hired as a city staff member. Appointed members of city boards and commissions are not given city email addresses. Peterson and her husband were at the Feb. 18th Council meeting. Tim Peterson expressed dismay at Lazarus’s dismissal and pledged his “time and money” to change the composition of Council.
8. In September of 2019, the City’s HR director, Robyn Wilkerson, was forced to resign. A subsequent outside investigation concluded that Wilkerson, one of the highest-paid city employees, had created a hostile environment within her department and elsewhere for a decade, including the entire time Lazarus supervised her. “How could they not know she fostered a hostile environment?” states the investigation report by Sheldon Stark, an attorney hired to conduct an independent investigation. In 2017, Taylor told the media, “I’m delighted with his [Lazarus’s] work.” That same year, public records show, the city’s HR Director was allegedly texting a colleague with repeated complaints about Lazarus’s managerial ineptitude.
9. In October of 2019, a month after the Wilkerson debacle, a job application that Lazarus had submitted to the city of Gainesville, Florida became public. In his application, Lazarus wrote that, “The new members [of Council] seek to chart new directions, often leading to conflict and terse public deliberations.” Lazarus also wrote. “The new majority also has expressed a different definition of the role of the city administrator. The current climate has placed me in a difficult and vulnerable position.” Council member Ali Ramlawi (D-Ward 5) was quoted in the media as saying, “He [Lazarus] needs to respect the elections and the officials who’ve been elected to form policy, and if he’s stuck in yesteryear’s policy and he can’t switch gears, then maybe we do need a new administrator.”
10. In April of 2019, the Ann Arbor Independent submitted a FOIA asking for the “two most recent complaints by city staff filed with HR, including but not limited to sexual harassment, intimidation, and any kind of assault (which would include physical and sexual assault).” The FOIA request was responded to with the following explanation: “There is no policy in the City that requires complaints be in writing, so a search for the two most recent written complaints could stretch back a long time.” The City Administrator was responsible for the use of this policy by the HR Department.
11. In 2019, newly-elected Council members asked the City Administrator for access to a dedicated space in which to meet citizens. The Administrator refused them regular access to any of the conference rooms in the five-story, 103,000 square foot city hall building. Council members were even denied access to their own Council Work Room.
12. In February 2020, the City Administrator put the AAPD Chief of Police Michael Cox on paid administrative leave without providing Council with any advanced notice or reason why. When asked repeatedly by Council members to explain, Lazarus refused to provide any evidence or explanation for his actions.

The Council members and Lazarus agreed to mutual “non-disparagement” and at the end of February it’s likely the city’s CFO, Tom Crawford, will step into the role as Crawford has done before. It’s likely the Assistant City Administrator position created by Lazarus will be eliminated.

During the discussion of the resolution to dismiss Lazarus, brought by Council member Jane Lumm (I-Ward 2) and Council member Jack Eaton (D-Ward 4), all of the Council members “took the high road,” as Lumm said, and thanked Lazarus for his work and wished him well.

Before the resolution was brought to Council, the Council’s Administration Committee met and discussed the removal of the City Administrator—a meeting at which Lazarus and City Attorney Stephen Postema were both present. Members of the Administration Committee include Chris Taylor (D), Anne Bannister (D-Ward 1) Julie Grand (D-Ward 3), Kathy Griswold (D-Ward 2), Jane Lumm (I-Ward 2), and Jack Eaton (D-Ward 4). The outcome of that meeting was a resolution to dismiss Lazarus. The Administrator was aware that at the next Council meeting a resolution to fire him would appear on the agenda. He chose to be dismissed in public.

Lazarus signed his termination agreement at the end of the Feb. 18th Council meeting. He will receive severance pay equal to one year’s salary — $223,600 and pay for unused leave time, which could be another $50,000.

One Council member who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, “We’ll recoup the money we paid him and more in the next budget cycle.”