Palmer City Council terminates city clerk, effective immediately

What you need to know: 

• The Palmer City Council voted last week to terminate its contract with City Clerk Shelly Acteson, just hours after she submitted a letter of resignation.
• Council members said they ended the contract because Acteson delayed processing some of their requests and because of a discrepancy in the special recall election ballot data between the preliminary Election Day count and a final tally by the city’s canvass board. Acteson said such differences between unofficial and final results are common.
• The city will pay Acteson about $15,000 in severance, plus accrued leave. The process to hire a new clerk will be discussed at an upcoming council meeting.

PALMER – The Palmer City Council voted last week to terminate its contract with City Clerk Shelly Acteson just hours after she submitted a letter announcing her resignation.

The resignation and termination followed months of increasing tension between Acteson and some council members who complained that she stalled processing their requests. Council members said they were also concerned about a discrepancy in ballot data following the city’s May 20 special recall election for Mayor Steve Carrington.

Acteson resigned Friday afternoon, providing the two months' notice required by her contract with the city.

Rather than accept her resignation, the council voted 4-0 during a special meeting Friday evening to terminate her contract. Carrington and Council members Jim Cooper and Ken Erbey were not present and did not vote. Acteson also did not attend the meeting.

Council member John Alcantra on Friday also requested that the city manager prepare a plan for an audit of the special election because of ballot tallies that changed between election night and the final canvass board review. He said he does not question the results but is concerned about the count.

Carrington defeated the recall in a vote of 222 to 176.

Preliminary results published around 9 p.m. on election night showed that 389 ballots were issued during the election. That document did not include information or results from the city’s canvass board and did not include a tally of questioned ballots, officials said.

Updated results published May 23, after the canvass board’s count, included all ballots and showed 407 ballots were issued and 398 were tallied, a difference of nine ballots, according to city documents.

Data provided by the clerk before the council’s certification vote at last week’s regular meeting showed that the nine-ballot difference occurred because four absentee ballots were issued but not returned, and five submitted ballots were deemed uncountable by the canvass board.

Acteson said total ballot tallies regularly change between unofficial Election Day counts and canvass board results.

She said she resigned because she feared retaliation from the council.

“Fear of reprisal and fear of retaliation for following the code, the charter and Alaska Statutes in relation to recall petitions — that isn’t how anyone should feel who works for an elected body,” she said in an interview Monday.

Acteson will be paid about $15,000 in severance by the city, plus a payout of accrued leave, according to her contract.

Friday’s special meeting was called following a regular meeting earlier in the week that included about an hour-long discussion regarding the roles of the clerk, city attorney and city manager.

A similar agenda item focused solely on the clerk was originally requested for that meeting by council members Victoria Hudson and Alcantra, but was expanded to include the other staff positions at the request of Carrington and Cooper.

Hudson said she voted for termination on Friday because Acteson indicated during a May meeting that she was not listening to a council member’s question about the process for setting meeting agendas and because Acteson delayed processing legislation that Hudson requested for the agenda in October.

Alcantra said he voted for termination because he believed Acteson was a “lackluster employee” and because he was concerned about the election count.

Carrington said he was surprised to learn about the termination vote.

“That the council members would terminate the city clerk right after a special election and then tag on at the end, ‘We want to do an investigation’ – it astounds me,” he said. “If there’s a problem, you should investigate it, and then, if there are things found, that’s when you would take action.”

Acteson was hired as city clerk in late 2021, according to city records. She replaced former city clerk Norma Alley, who resigned due to a family move. Acteson had previously served as Palmer’s deputy clerk from 2008 to 2012, according to her resume submitted to the city. She took the clerk job after leaving an administrative assistant position with the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, the resume shows.

Hudson said the council will consider a hiring process for a new clerk during its June 10 meeting. A date has not been set for when the city manager will present a plan for the election audit, Alcantra said.

-- Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com