Coastal Mississippi hires consultant to smooth over ‘hurt feelings’ on the board
The board members of Coastal Mississippi went into executive session Tuesday to discuss the performance of the CEO and staff, then spent the public portion of the meeting questioning their own practices.
The makeup, performance and communication of the board’s committees was the main issue discussed.
The board voted to spend up to $5,000 to pay a consultant to speak with each commissioner, identify the problems and help the members get over “hurt feelings,” as board president Brooke Shoultz put it.
Also, Shoultz told the Sun Herald before the meeting, board members are not always getting the information they need from the tourism agency’s CEO, Milton Segarra.
As vice chairman of the finance commitee, Shoultz said, she asked Segarra for staff salaries during budget preparation last summer.
Although public salaries are public record, Shoultz said that Segarra did not give her the information. Instead, she said, he eventually provided a salary breakdown by department and number of employees in each department. In February, she said, he finally gave the executive committee the salaries.
She said the commission’s board unanimously passed a motion recently that requires Segarra to give any commissioner requested information within 24 hours, or 72 hours if the staff must retrieve the information from an outside source.
Segarra has served as CEO since January 2018 and oversaw the adoption of Coastal Mississippi as the brand for tourism in the three Coast counties.
He also is one of the highest-paid public officials in the state, public records show.
Segarra’s current base salary is $225,000 with generous benefits, a company car, an expense account and bonus pay based on performance. His contract calls for a raise each year, to $243,360 by October 2023.
Commissioner Bill Holmes brought up Segarra’s contract at Tuesday’s meeting and said Nikki Moon, who was chairman of the governance committee, introduced it 10 months early.
“I didn’t want to vote against his contract,” Holmes said. The contract was “20-odd pages,” Holmes said, and never came to the full board for review before the vote.
Commissioner Kim Fritz said outside the meeting that Segarra’s contract was drawn up by the executive committee and Moon would not let the board members have a copy. She told them to come by the office one hour before the meeting to see the contract, Fritz said, but the board had no opportunity to compare it to the previous contract before the vote.
Fritz, Holmes and Mary Cracchiolo Spain, who recently resigned from the board while serving as president, voted against the contract, which was approved in March 2020.
Hugh Keating, the board’s attorney, blamed some of the issues on 2020, an “unbelievably strange and difficult year.”
He said, “Just remember what this commission is going through and the entire nation has been through this past year,” he said. “This commission has been working as hard as any people I’ve ever seen. With a staff that was reduced. With money coming in from the Cares Act,” he said. The board got other grants and had to spend $3.4 million by the end of the year.
That money was more than half the regular annual budget of $7 million.
“It’s not like it was intentional,” Keating said of the conflicts. “It was something that happened because things are moving so fast.”
This story was originally published June 1, 2021 at 5:36 PM.
