My name is Carolina Graver, and I am currently serving on the Palmer City Council. I was appointed to a council seat in January 2022, and ran for a three-year term that same fall.

Until now, I have purposefully refrained from making a statement on the current mayoral recall election in Palmer. I am exhausted from this situation, and would absolutely love to get back to business here in the city.

Unfortunately, several articles and releases – most significantly, the information included on the recall ballot on May 20th (found here) – have been published recently and they leave out a lot of relevant information. Notably, they include my name, so I feel obligated to clarify and flesh out some of what has been stated.

I am stating this in my own personal capacity. I am not telling you how to vote. However, I do believe that if you are voting in this election, you should be properly informed. There are many partial truths being shared. Information stated on the ballot by Mayor Steve Carrington is unprofessional and incomplete, at the very least, and it harms the character of several reputable Palmer citizens.

I believe the council made a very bad decision in hiring Stephen Jellie to serve as city manager, last fall. Most of you are aware of the details. If not, I suggest you watch the footage of the council meetings held this past October and November – found here – or peruse the minutes on the city website, here. To put it lightly, Jellie wreaked havoc on the unity and peace of Palmer, and I regret deeply that we hired him.

The biggest issues I want to address from the ballot statement (though there are many) are detailed below.

First, the ballot statement by Mayor Carrington states that our city attorney “trigger[ed] an emotionally charged meeting” by reading a statement of her legal concerns for the city on October 8. That is a false statement, as there is bodycam footage of the mayor and the previous manager, Stephen Jellie, discussing how to deal with the “unruly crowd” that they anticipated later that evening (found here). The number of citizens/staff that came to testify (who had arrived before the attorney’s statement) was already inordinately larger than the six or seven who normally attend.

It is the city attorney’s duty, as cited in PMC 2.14.020 to “Advise the city manager and the city clerk concerning legal problems affecting the city,” and also in the Code of Ethics and Conduct for Elected Officials, which states, “When deemed warranted, the Mayor or majority of Council may call for an investigation into alleged ethical violations. Also, should the… City Attorney believe an investigation is warranted, they shall confer with the Mayor or Council.” She was doing her job.

Second, Mayor Carrington’s ballot statement reads, “Council member Carolina, with support from council member Tudor, called for Mr. Jellie’s termination.”

I will push past the disrespect of being mentioned, twice, by my first name only, on this document. In reality, I had become very concerned after hearing desperate appeals (not an exaggeration) from our staff for the prior few weeks.

Directly from my notes, this is what I stated during the meeting: “I and Deputy Mayor Tudor have prepared a resolution for termination of the city manager’s contract based on convenience to the city of Palmer, as laid out in the City Manager’s Contract, Section 3, A. This will be turned into the City Clerk to be put on the next possible agenda … We believe this gives us time to properly evaluate this issue while being prepared to make whatever decision we deem necessary … We make no excuses for and do not support unethical and borderline illegal leadership.”

In other words, the decision to fire this employee or to review his contract was not without reason. We brought forward the resolution for termination because the agenda process requires any item to be submitted weeks beforehand, and we wanted to have that option available for the city if we needed it.

A good leader should be able to take ownership of their mistakes, apologize and learn from them.

Third, on calling the special Oct. 9 meeting with Councilwoman Hudson’s support, this is what I stated regarding our reasoning behind having that meeting: “I would like to ask for Council support to instruct the City Manager, who works directly for us, to make no decisions relating to staff, equipment, or budget whatsoever while the Council has time to evaluate the comments brought forward during this meeting as well as those previously brought to our attention, to protect our staff during a time of deliberation and investigation until this matter is brought before us again. This is to protect the safety of our residents for essential services being met and to mitigate potential significant liability for the city in terms of lawsuits, financial costs, and our reputation.”

Fourth, Mayor Carrington’s ballot statement reads, “Mr. Jellie informed me the city had retained an outside attorney … I contacted the outside attorney to draft a termination agreement following the terms of Mr. Jellie’s contract.”

Jellie had seen – and been involved in the process, even choosing the outside attorney – of putting together the overlay that gave him severance. He and the mayor were both familiar with it during Oct. 9 meeting, while the city attorney and the rest of the council were unaware of its existence and the unauthorized involvement of an outside attorney until then and had little opportunity to do anything but scan over this multiple-page legal document. Some of the council members and I had to fight to even have our attorney in the room for this session. She was also not given a seat behind the dais and (I found out after) told to sit in the back where we could barely hear her with no microphone.

Fifth, Mayor Carrington’s ballot statement reads, “The $75,000 severance was the exact amount included in his contract approved unanimously by the council the previous summer.”

That severance pay, however, was only given because the overlay agreement necessitated that the correct term was “resignation” in order to qualify for it, as cited in the manager’s contract. In other words, had we “terminated for convenience,” as Deputy Mayor Tudor and I had prepared for, the city would not have paid over $75K in severance fees, as it would not have applied in that case. Again, the mayor was fully aware of this.

Additionally, the overlay agreement included an immunity clause, which would keep either party from suing based on defamatory statements, etc. With sole knowledge of this between them, Mayor Carrington allowed Mr. Jellie a statement before executive session (in a meeting with no council comments afterward) to speak uninhibited about the City’s financial and legal situations, and to propose an arguably inaccurate narrative that included confidential legal information, knowing that the overlay agreement would most likely be signed directly afterward, leaving no room for retaliation by the city.

Finally, Mayor Carrington’s ballot statement ends with the bolded sentence: “Every council member voted to use this agreement.”

The council had an extremely limited window of time in which to look over this legal document, after being put through various personal attacks (both verbally abusive outbursts and sexually abusive gestures from the former manager) with no support from the senior members of the council. Our attorney was silenced, degraded, and in lieu of her advice, the more experienced members took legal advice from the very person whose contract we should have been evaluating. We were rushed to come out of session and vote. So yes, it was a unanimous vote. But it was a vote on an unauthorized document made without transparency, proper legal review, and under significant duress. It is a vote that I regret every day.

Based on my own experience with former manager Jellie, the testimony of other trustworthy individuals who have worked for our city for decades, and what we experienced in executive session, I was aware that manipulation, threats, abuse, and other malicious behaviors were taking place that we had the duty to put an immediate stop too.

Our Oct. 9 executive session was so bad that a male council member said something to the effect that if the individual in question had spoken that way to any of his female relatives, he would have been “kicked into next week.” Because of the abuse that occurred, I filed a police report. I wasn’t the only one to do so. The case number is PA24003372 if you would like to look it up and/or read the transcript of what happened. Additionally, an article by Must Read Alaska shares a fellow councilwoman’s point of view.

Since all this unfolded, a few of the council members (myself included) have apologized for the harm our decision caused the city. My greatest concern is that Mayor Carrington has yet to even acknowledge or express regret for hiring Mr. Jellie or for what his actions caused. He has instead placed guilt in every other area. From my conversations with him, he does not believe that the previous manager displayed questionable behavior and did not see a legitimate reason for firing him.

Despite my and others’ various attempts to encourage him to do so, he has not taken any responsibility for his actions and that is a cause of great concern and frustration for me. A good leader should be able to take ownership of their mistakes, apologize and learn from them. It is for this and the above reasons that I will be voting in favor of recalling Mayor Carrington. It gives me no pleasure to write that, as Steve and his wife Sherry have been good friends of mine, and I have heretofore held nothing against him.

In closing, I encourage you to look into the links I have shared. Do your own research – call up council members, the mayor, and city staff. Hear all sides of the story and make an informed decision. All council contacts may be found here. The website in favor of the recall is here, and the website against the recall is here.

Thank you for your time.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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