“It’s very obvious to everybody in this room that you guys are not on the same page. I don’t know how this city will ever move forward if we don’t have a group of people who are willing to come together for the betterment of the town.”
Resident and Ludlow Board of Education Member Melanie Hazelwood said this during Thursday’s city council meeting, during which a former council member was arrested.
During the meeting, Ludlow residents bore witness to the fractured dynamic, focused on whether or not the city should settle potential lawsuits with City Administrator Scott Smith.
Occurring on Thursday, only a day after Mayor Chris Wright resigned, the meeting was at times characterized by mutual recrimination, disorder and even included the arrest of a former Council Member, Lori Davenport, following an expletive-laden outburst at the dais.
How did we get here?
Much of the conflict stems from the fact that Smith had previously served as the city’s police chief and the city administrator at the same time.
Public employees pay into a public pension system, which pays out benefits upon retirement. Police officers and firefighters, due to the risks involved in their jobs, get extra benefits called hazard pay, which was the crux of the potential suit.
Administrative workers, like city admins, do not get hazard pay. The settlement aimed to avoid a lawsuit from Smith. City Attorney Patrick Grote said the city had been returned about $42,000 from the pensions authority that Smith had been overpaid for his non-hazardous duties as the city administrator.
The problem was, Grote said, there were numerous city workers and officials who could testify that Smith had been led to believe that his benefit payout would not have been affected by his dual roles; essentially, he had been told by people in positions of power that he could keep the money.
Some council members were skeptical this could be proven, but Grote thought it would be easier to pay Smith the money back than risk tying up the city in litigation, which would likely incur more expense.
“Kentucky Public Pension Authority has indicated that they are going to split hazard pay for Mr. Smith directly down the middle from the time that he served as both city administrator and police chief,” Grote said. “As the city attorney, I do not believe that that is litigation we can win.”
Smith was first hired as the chief of police in 2015 and assumed the role of city administrator in 2019. Mayors and other elected officials usually do not serve in their roles full-time, so even under Ludlow’s strong mayoral form of government, the council may appoint a full-time city administrator to manage the affairs of the city on a day-to-day basis.
Although executive power, including the power to hire and fire city workers, still rests with the office of the mayor, the administrator is there to pick up the administrative slack in the absence of a full time executive. Many cities in Northern Kentucky hire city administrators, even if they aren’t required to.
Scott took on the role after the preceding administrator, Elishia Chamberlain, was terminated. There was tension around Chamberlain’s dismissal. As reported by The Cincinnati Enquirer before LINK nky was launched, former Mayor Josh Boone fired both Chamberlain and former City Attorney Fred Johnson shortly after taking office.
The city was in the midst of a nearly $200,000 budget shortfall at the time, and conflicts between Chamberlain, other city staff and elected officials seem to have been brewing for a long while.
Smith, who has a master’s degree in public administration, took on the role while also serving as the police chief. He received payment for his administrative duties, although the exact amount is unclear.
Meeting minutes from previous meetings indicate that Wright (while still in office) viewed the doubling up of duties as a cost-saving measure, as Smith was not receiving a full-time salary for his admin duties.
Smith’s position has been a source of conflict among the council members. Davenport – who lost a bid for re-election in November before being arrested this week – took issue with Smith’s occupancy of two appointed positions at the same time, and she filed a complaint with the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, which opened an investigation into the matter.
This prompted Smith to resign from the additional administrative duties in early March 2024. Smith’s quick return to police work exclusively ended the investigation before the AG could make a determination one way or another: an opinion from the AG’s office dated March 13 of last year said that Smith’s resignation made the office’s inquiry “moot.”
After that, the city began seeking out another city admin. Smith retired as the police chief last September, and the city had even identified someone else, Brian Hallahan, to take on the city administrator role. More conflicts between the council members later, and Smith was hired on as a full time city manager at the end of last year.
Davenport and Council Member Abigail Miller did not attend the meeting where the rest of the council voted to affirm Smith’s appointment. The only council member who voted against Smith’s appointment was David Ziegler.
At the time, Ziegler even went so far as to accuse city staffers of trying to influence Wright’s decision because they knew and liked Smith, having worked with him for nearly a decade, and not because of his specific qualifications for the job.
Smith later leveled a harassment complaint against Miller for licking his hand. At a public hearing in April of this year, Ziegler cast the only vote not to remove Miller from the council; a city legislator can only be removed from office through a unanimous vote from the rest of the council members.
Comments at the meeting suggest the city could have risked another lawsuit that would have escalated the harassment claims, as well, if the city hadn’t settled.
Documents attesting to the claw-back by the pensions authority were not immediately available at the meeting, but pensions authority documents obtained by LINK nky suggest that Smith had been overpaid and that the pensions authority had returned money to the city.
The documents LINK nky received, however, were incomplete, and the pensions authority, when contacted, declined to confirm or deny their authenticity.
The meeting
The newly executive-less city council had to appoint a council member to serve as chair for the meeting. They voted Council Member Sarah Thompson to serve in this role, but in practice, managing the meeting largely fell to Grote.
The meeting itself was preceded by conflicts in the Ludlow community groups on social media.
Prior to the meeting, Davenport posted what appears to be correspondence between the AG’s office, as well as what appears to be a memo from the Kentucky Public Pensions Authority dated April 14.
LINK nky made its own records request to the pensions authority to ascertain the document’s authenticity. The pension board sent us the same document Davenport posted, which you can read here.
The memo details a complaint sent by Ziegler to the pension authority, alleging that Smith had pushed for a pre-arranged deal with the city to get hired on as the new city administrator last year. A pension authority investigator performed interviews with the mayor, Smith and council members, conversations that at times included information about what went on in closed session. Although the authority did not think the matter warranted additional investigation, it did corroborate some of the points of contention that had come up in the past.
Key takeaways include the following:
- All of the interviews conducted “confirmed that Mayor Wright decided to repost the Ludlow City Administrator position to give Scott Smith the opportunity to apply for the position.” Due to the timing of his retirement as police chief, Smith couldn’t legally submit a resume until Oct. 1, 2024.
- Smith corresponded regularly with the pension board to avoid running afoul of employment laws and pension regulations.
- Eleven candidates applied for the position of city administrator, and multiple interviews were carried out.
- The mayor made an initial offer to Hallahan for the position, but later rescinded it to offer the job to Smith.
- A letter signed by 32 “city employees requesting that Mr. Smith be afforded the opportunity to apply for the Ludlow city administrator position” was sent to the mayor on July 10, 2024, giving credence to Wright’s previous statements that at least a portion of the city staff members wanted Smith to return.
- “No evidence was obtained during the investigation to suggest that Mr. Smith had conversations with anyone with hiring authority, such as the mayor or council members, prior to his retirement about the city administrator position, other than requesting the opportunity to apply for it.”
- Wright and Smith did not exchange emails between Aug. 8, 2024, and Nov. 18, 2024, the Monday after the council confirmed Smith’s appointment.
- Smith was paid for his duties as a part-time city administrator “for approximately six years, in addition to his Ludlow Chief of Police salary, which was not reported to the [pensions authority] for retirement purposes.”
While several residents at the meeting were critical of Smith, chatter, commentary and applause from the crowd throughout the meeting indicated mixed opinions about the whole situation. Attendees frequently called out questions to the council members.
Davenport took to the lectern early in the meeting. Tensions boiled over quickly.
Davenport described it as “unethical and immoral” for Smith to occupy the two positions.
“And now he wants to cry because, you know, the pensions,” Davenport mocked. “It’s bull****.”
Council Member Julie Navarre began to speak, but Davenport interrupted.
“Shut up, Julie,” Davenport said.
Thompson asked Davenport to sit down.
“I’ll do what I want, Sarah,” Davenport said. “I pay your bills, b****.”
Davenport returned to her seat, then another attendee stood up, inquiring about the land parcel the city had purchased earlier this year. Thompson replied that that was the subject of the caucus meeting scheduled to occur after the special meeting.
Davenport spoke up again.
“Miss Davenport!” Grote responded. “This is your second warning; I will not issue you another one.”
“I don’t care if you kick me out!” Davenport said. “This is a bull**** meeting!”
A handful of attendees clapped.
At this point, Davenport got up to leave. Police arrested her outside of the council chambers. She was charged with obstructing governmental operations.
The meeting continued without her.
Residents came up to discuss their points of view on the settlement. Many residents didn’t have comments so much as questions about the situation.
Smith did not attend Thursday’s meeting and declined to comment on the potential litigation. However, he did discuss the broader dynamic on the council, describing his critics, both current and former members of the council, as “bullies.”
“It’s kind of sad to be honest,” Smith said, adding that they were “willing to waste employee time and money” for their personal gripes with him.
Smith pointed to Davenport specifically, accusing her of flooding the city with records requests and then putting out incomplete information in an effort to mislead the public.
Back at the meeting, Ziegler made the same accusation of bullying about Smith.
“We need somebody that knows how to work with people, not somebody that chases people off,” Ziegler said. “That’s what he [Smith] does. If he doesn’t get along with you, he bullies, he intimidates and he retaliates. There are actually people that won’t come forward about him because he is scary.”
Toward the end of the meeting, after the council had actually cast a vote on the settlement, Thompson responded to a resident’s comment about her responses to Davenport on social media. Thompson described the situation as one in which misinformation had deliberately been sown to amplify the rancor on the council.
“I love this town, and I’m tired of seeing it be maligned in a way that people are somehow doing something nefarious or behind the scenes, and that’s not the case…,” Thompson said. “I want people to have trust in their public officials and not have this back and forth of misinformation happening. We have that happening as a nation, on a national level. We don’t need it at a city level. We need to trust our public officials and what they say to us to be factual and truthful, not gossip.”
This statement elicited applause from much of the crowd.
In the end, the council voted to settle with Smith. Council Members Stephen Chapman, Paula Graszus, Navarre and Thompson voted in favor of settling. Ziegler and Miller voted against.
The council will take up the issue of whom to appoint to the office of mayor at their meeting on Sept. 11.
Council members can nominate any Ludlow resident who’s lived in the city for a year and who’s at least 21 years old to be mayor. The council will then vote on the nominations. Council members can nominate themselves, but they cannot vote for (or against) themselves if nominated.
Whoever the council votes in will serve out the remainder of the mayoral term, which ends on the last day of 2026.