Bill Bell is no longer Montrose's city manager, after fifteen years in the position. He wasn't fired, and he didn't exactly resign. On Tuesday night, Sept. 1, Bell asked the city council into executive session and they came back out with a written proposal to end his employment by mutual agreement, effective immediately. Council voted five to nothing to accept. Deputy City Manager Ann Morgenthaler is now interim city manager.
"We have reconvened now in open session coming out of an executive session where Mr. Bell presented us with a proposal to separate his employment with the City of Montrose on an amicable basis," said Mayor Badagliacco as council returned to public session.
The city calls it a mutual separation, and the distinction mattered enough Tuesday night that City Attorney Chris Dowsey stopped Councilor J. David Reed in the middle of explaining it. "Just for the record, it's not a resignation," Dowsey said. "It's a mutual separation." Reed asked what he had said. "You said resignation multiple times," the attorney told him.
That isn't a quibble between the two. A resignation is an employee's decision, a firing is the council's, and a mutual separation is a negotiated exit with terms — terms that are in a written agreement that wasn't on Tuesday's agenda and isn't public yet. Council says it goes into the packet in two weeks for ratification and becomes public record then.
The departure follows a summer of friction. The Montrose Daily Press reports that after a meeting in July, Mayor Michael J. Badagliacco wrote to Bell to tell him that the elected officials, the council as a whole, are his superiors (not the other way around) and that he hoped Bell would keep that in mind, because such behavior would not be tolerated. In August, a Montrose Mirror columnist accused the city of compromising April's municipal election, and on Aug. 26 the mayor called a special meeting to consider investigating it. He opened by moving to put Bell out of the room. Bell pushed back: "Don't interrupt me, please, and we can disagree, you always disagree with me, but you're incorrect."
Eight days before Bell made his proposal, the mayor told KVNF that removing him wasn't under consideration. "I've heard people say, 'well, are you going to fire Bill Bell?'" Badagliacco said on Aug. 24. "That's not on the table. Why would we do that? It would just cause chaos."
And council didn't fire him. Bell went to them, and the vote to accept was unanimous, including the two councilors who spent August defending city staff. No one on the council has said the election dispute and Bell's departure are connected, and no document KVNF has seen says so either.
Bell is not giving interviews. Contacted after Tuesday's meeting, he told the Daily Press his only comment would be the city's written statement. In it, he thanks council for entertaining what he calls his request for an amicable and mutual separation, and says he believes it is in the best interests of the City of Montrose, as an organization and as a community, at the current time. He writes about fifteen years of projects and partnerships, and calls Montrose a wonderful place.
Morgenthaler steps up automatically as acting city manager under her own contract, which takes effect the moment the city manager is absent. Council separately voted to appoint her interim city manager effective immediately, subject to negotiating her salary and benefits, and that appointment comes back for ratification at the council meeting in two weeks. Bell's separation agreement, including any severance terms, goes before council the same night.