Fla. Official Defends
Firing Manager
By AP from the
NYTimes on the Web, March 25, 2007
LARGO, Fla. -- One of the five
commissioners who voted to fire a city manager who is seeking a sex-change
operation said his management style, not lifestyle, led to the dismissal.
Commissioner Gay Gentry said City Manager Steve Stanton was a ''hard-nosed,
my-way-or-the-highway'' boss who expected more understanding of his personal
situation than he showed to some of his roughly 1,200 employees in 14 years as
the city's top official.
''Suddenly the rules were changing and he was asking to be dealt with in a
different way than he was dealing with people,'' Gentry said.
Commissioners voted 5-2 early Saturday to fire Stanton from his $140,000-a-year
job in the city of 76,000 west of Tampa. Stanton was forced last month to
reveal he was a transsexual and planned to live as a woman and eventually pursue
a sex-change operation.
Stanton defended the employment decisions he made, including firing a public
works employee who stayed home with his elderly mother when a hurricane was
approaching.
''Every one of those employment decisions were correct and proper,'' Stanton
said.
Stanton and his attorney said the commissions' two votes to fire him in the last
month are discriminatory, but have not said if he will sue. His employment
contract says he can be fired without cause at any time.
Stanton, 48, said he plans to concentrate on the transition from life as a man
to life as a woman and will begin the process of legally changing his name to
Susan. He said the cause of transsexual rights was advanced by the
attention surrounding his fight to keep his job.
''This is not about Steve keeping his job exclusively. It was about
supplying information and education about something that people just don't
understand,'' Stanton said.
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