Fischesser said he wasn’t quite prepared for the “jumbled mess” of bills, broken equipment and lack of written policies and procedures he found.
Fischesser said he worked to right-size a bloated public works department and encouraged leaders to contract with other municipalities, like Ferguson, to buy items such as gasoline or rock salt to save money and prevent stealing.
He helped devise a plan to deal with COVID-19 and tried to encourage the city to adopt bidding processes and better record-keeping procedures. But most of the time, Fischesser said, he was forced to chase after months-old bills or emergency repairs that popped up like “little fires.”
“I probably spent a third of my time trying to figure out who we owed money to and why,” he said. “It was very frustrating to be there.”
‘Watch the city burn’
Hunt said he, too, was inundated during his roughly 15 months as mayor. He said he worked hard to settle debts, deal with COVID-19, establish new programs and make some “drastic” changes, including firing several employees.
One of those was interim public works director Kevin Gibson, who is white. Gibson sued the city in April and accused Hunt, who is Black, of trying to systematically rid Normandy of white workers. He alleged Hunt made statements like, “We’re going to get rid of all these white (expletive) and it’ll be an all-Black ran (sic) city like it should be.”
