Watch Stan Loveday’s public comments.

On June 4, Key West city commissioners recognized Stan Loveday for five years of dedicated service to the city. Loveday is a dockmaster at the Key West Bight, a former firefighter and EMT and an author. He arrived in Key West in 2017.

On June 25, Loveday ended the 3.5-hour City Commission meeting on the grand jury report with an eloquent plea that concisely and clearly made this point: Failures at the top don’t stay at the top. They ripple down and through the entire city staff and to the residents and visitors to our island, creating an island-wide culture of distrust and leaving front line employees to suffer the consequences.

The grand jury report, he said, told the public what many of us (city staff and the public) have known for a long time and can no longer be ignored.

“We lose good staff,” he said, “not to burnout but to discouragement. … Let me be very clear. Restoring public trust will take more than words. It will take more than some hastily formed committee. It requires consistent, ethical actions; it means listening to employees when they raise the red flag and not just to those with influence. We need to create a culture where people feel safe speaking up.

“City employees should not have to work in the shadow of failed leadership. … Are you listening? Are you paying attention. The clock is ticking. We are running out of time on our city’s favor.”

In just a few seconds longer than his allotted three minutes, Loveday placed the responsibility to clean up corruption and distrust squarely on the current commissioners, while acknowledging that these problems were long in the making and were well-known for years by those who worked for or with the city.

I’m glad I waited long enough to hear him. After hours of often-frustrating discussion and angry, threatening comments, it was both a relief and a reassurance to be reminded that there are solutions, there are staff who care deeply about building a city-wide culture of trust — and that despite the months (and perhaps years) of work needed to do so, together we can build the city government our island deserves.

Loveday was The Citizen newspaper’s Citizen of the Day on Dec. 10, 2022. “Stan Loveday is a dockmaster at the City of Key West Bight Marina. Raised in Michigan, he came to Key West via Tampa, where he retired from the fire department. ‘The afternoon I retired, I threw the lines off my 50-foot Ketch Rig and sailed to Key West in 2017. There is no place like Key West, not a better climate nor better people anywhere else,’ he says.

Learn more about Loveday at the link below.