Doug Paris has a knack for putting people in no-win situations.
That’s where Salisbury City Council finds itself now. The council took action to end Paris’ contract as city manager — a mutual agreement, both sides insist — but is muzzled by the contract’s restrictive terms and personnel law.
Considering Paris’ penchant for revenge, the fear that he would sue over something council members say may be real. But so is the public’s disgust over Paris’ $209,000 severance package and the ongoing mystery surrounding his and his protegé Elaney Hasselmann’s exit.
I’m not making excuses for City Council. Mistakes were made. Paris’ endorsement by outgoing City Manager David Treme fooled council members into overlooking his inexperience. Sometimes you see what you want to see.
But it wasn’t long before people’s eyes were opened to Paris’ lack of maturity for such a powerful job.
It started with Paris’ public clash with the county over merging 911 operations and got worse.
He had an easy foil — Commission Chairman Jim Sides, who had a rocky history with the city. It was easy for Paris to drum up opposition to a chairman who openly declared distrust of Salisbury officials. But Paris made negotiations more contentious than they needed to be.
The downtown central office saga might not have taken such a bitter turn in 2013 if Paris hadn’t tried to move heaven and contaminated earth to site the office on a city lot on South Main Street.
We’ve all wondered what prompted council member Brian Miller to call for the closed session that ended with Paris’ exit last month.
I don’t know. But behind-the-scenes communications between the Post and Paris showed he had little interest in answering to City Council. He was on his own mission.

In late January, reporter Emily Ford called Paris for information about parking in the South Main area. Mayor Paul Woodson had said future phases could include a one-story parking deck and possible condominiums behind Integro’s new headquarters at 301 S. Main St.
Paris told Ford not to include the mayor’s comment in her story because it was incorrect. She said she’d quote Paris to that effect, but the mayor said what he said; the city manager could not take back the mayor’s words. Paris threatened to go “full bore” if Ford used Woodson’s mention of a parking deck.
Full bore? What was that?
The back-and-forth with Ford led to this line in the story, quoting Paris:
“No deck,” he said in an email. “Put that in your story.”
She did. But that was not enough. After the article quoting both Woodson and Paris appeared in the paper, the city manager demanded the Post print a correction, still insisting the mayor was wrong. We refused.
Paris had a staff member try to place an ad in the paper headlined, “CORRECTION,” and saying we erred in reporting the possibility of a parking deck. When the Post would not publish the ad, City Hall called to cancel the city’s newspaper subscription and its advertising contract for Fibrant, public notices, events, etc.
So that’s what “full bore” meant — retaliation.
I called Woodson to tell him what the city manager was up to. He sounded surprised and did not say much.
That afternoon, when the Post asked Hasselmann, the city’s public information director, to confirm the cancellations via email, she said the matters were to be discussed by the mayor and our publisher, Greg Anderson. The cancellation was canceled.

But another situation was worsening. For several months, Paris and Hasselmann had been shutting down media access to city employees. With increasing frequency, city employees told Ford and other reporters that employees were not allowed to answer questions. Virtually all queries about city operations had to go through Hasselmann, who was to get the information needed and relay it. Ford had requested a meeting with Paris to talk about access in December. He declined.
After a few frustrating months, Ford asked in early March to talk with the mayor and mayor pro tem about the problem. Woodson and Maggie Blackwell immediately agreed and met at the Post with Ford, News Editor Scott Jenkins and me — not once but twice, the second time with Paris present, too.
I can understand how a meeting with Paris could last five hours. We spent about an hour explaining why it didn’t make sense for Hasselmann to screen everything.
Paris, who says he runs the city as he would a business, compared the situation to a Wall Street Journal reporter wanting access to people at Bank of America. We were incredulous. This is Salisbury, we said. City government is a public entity answerable to the people.
We weren’t the only ones talking to a brick wall. Woodson and Blackwell made no headway with their city manager in that meeting, either. Ever calm, Paris owned up to nothing, offered no compromises and obviously was not about to defer to anyone.
So it was not a complete surprise when the council and Paris parted three months later. Tension was clearly building. But what was the final straw? The public has a right to know.
Elizabeth Cook is editor of the Salisbury Post.