VERO BEACH —The Ohio man tapped for the top attorney spot for the City of Vero Beach lost his chance for the job Thursday when a majority of the city council voted to stop the contract negotiations for the $120,000-a-year position.
Instead of going with Daniel “K.C.” Collette, a long-time attorney who also has a rap sheet for two prostitution charges in the early and mid-1990s when he was a public employee in Palm Beach County, the City Council voted 3 to 2 to give the job Interim City Attorney Wayne Coment.
Mayor Pilar Turner and Tracy Carroll did not vote to give Coment the job. Carroll was one of two council members who also didn’t support a motion by Turner to stop negotiations with Collette after his arrests became widely known to the public in the days after he was picked for the job.
Councilman Craig Fletcher also sided with Carroll in supporting Collette.
“I still think Mr. Collette is the best person for the job,” Fletcher said.
Coment has been at the helm of the legal department since taking over the spot on an acting level for the past year when he replaced retiring City Attorney Charlie Vitunac.
Still, council members decided they wanted to do a national search and pay and a Vero Beach company $5,000 to help lead that search.
After more than 50 resumes were sent to the city for the top attorney job, the list was narrowed to four: Collette, Coment, Fred van Vonno, and Jim Wilson, a Vero native who is currently the city attorney for West Melbourne.
David Johnson, the head of HR Dynamics, told the council he probably should have looked deeper into Collette’s background.
Before the March 6 vote that effectively put a contract on the table for Collette if he passed the criminal background and credit check, many members of the city council were already under the impression that Collette had been thoroughly vetted.
Johnson said Thursday that he may have misspoken at the meeting and said that no criminal check had been done on Collette prior to the vote.
“I must have misspoken,” Johnson said.
