Thursday night’s Lake Worth Beach city commission meeting turned into a screaming, name-calling, finger-pointing affair between Commissioner Omari Hardy on one side and Mayor Pam Triolo and City Manager Michael Bornstein on the other.

The fiery point of contention – who among city leaders has emergency powers?

After the tension-filled two-hour meeting was adjourned, Hardy and Bornstein became engaged in a heated verbal argument that ended with city staffers escorting Bornstein out of the City Hall conference room.

Hardy accused Bornstein of “turning off people’s lights during a global health pandemic” and said Triolo was complicit because she declined to call an emergency meeting last week to discuss issues related to the coronavirus crisis.

Instead, Hardy said, Triolo gave Bornstein emergency powers to run the city even though Lake Worth Beach has not declared a state of emergency.

“This is a banana republic is what your turning this place into with your so-called leadership,” Hardy yelled at Triolo after she called a recess. “We cut people’s utilities this week and made them pay — with what could have been their last check — to turn their lights off in a global health pandemic. But you don’t care about that! You didn’t want to meet!

“You care more about your relationship with [Bornstein] than you do about the people that are out there working.”

Bornstein acknowledged during the meeting that 50 customers had their power turned off on Tuesday, a day before the city released a statement that shutoffs were being discontinued.

Triolo responded by telling Hardy, “Out of order. You’re done. You’re gone.”

She also appeared to mock Hardy’s announced plans to leave the commission in November to run for a seat in the Florida State House.

City observers say that Hardy and Bornstein have maintained an uneasy relationship for some time. It turned icier last week after Hardy’s written request for an emergency session for Friday, March 13 to discuss the city’s response to the pandemic was rejected by Bornstein, who said he appreciated Hardy’s “youthful exuberance” but advised the 30-year-old commissioner to “calm down.”

Bornstein said he “short-circuited” the proposed gathering after querying the four other members of the commission, who were not interested, he said.

Thursday’s regularly scheduled commission meeting also seemed like it would not take place after it was canceled along with numerous other city events as the result of the crisis.

But the meeting was re-set on Tuesday so that the commission could consider a resolution seeking to “reaffirm” the mayor’s right to grant emergency powers to the city manager, even without a declaring a state of emergency.

In past emergencies — including 9/11 and several hurricanes — Bornstein said he’s taken the lead on day-to-day running of the city without any issues.

Bornstein said the quickly changing nature of the crisis requires that he maintain the flexibility needed to make decisions “without having to stop [and] wait for some decision from the policy board….This is a system that works.”

The meeting got off to a rocky start after Triolo announced commissioners would be limited to five minutes of comment on the proposed resolution.

Hardy countered that placing a time limit on “perhaps the most important meeting this body has ever had” was inappropriate.

That began a running verbal battle between the two, along with Bornstein, that turned nasty, and personal.

A discussion about the language in the city charter ended with Triolo yelling at Hardy: “You — enough.” Triolo also said that Hardy was carrying on a “dog-and-pony show.”

Hardy became upset after Bornstein said utilities weren’t turned off to customers with unpaid accounts in the wake of the crisis, before saying that shutoffs did occur this week before the moratorium. Triolo concurred with Bornstein.

“Like, seriously?” Hardy asked Triolo rhetorically. “Like your letting this guy stand here and lie to the public?”

More than an hour into the meeting, Triolo indicated she was cutting off discussion on the resolution. Hardy responded by saying he wasn’t given his allotted time and asked Triolo if she was “going to keep me from talking right now?”

“You’ve been talking all evening,” Commissioner Scott Maxwell said.

Hardy countered by telling Triolo, while pointing at Bornstein: “You call me disrespectful because I’ve interrupted people. But this gentleman has turned off people’s lights in the middle of a global health pandemic. That’s what that gentleman did. And you think I’m disrespectful.”

Triolo called a recess and walked into an adjoining room, but the shouting match continued.

“I have never seen this,” Vice Mayor Andy Amoroso said after Triolo and Hardy left the room.

The meeting reconvened around 10 minutes later. So did the bickering.

After the resolution passed on a 4-1 vote, Hardy said: “We’ve made a joke of ourselves.”

The session adjourned but not before Hardy and Bornstein got into another heated shouting match. At one point, the two men drew closer to each other before staffers prodded Bornstein to leave the room.

In an email to the Palm Beach Post on Friday, Hardy said he regretted going ′ back and forth with Mayor.”

“But I had just watched our city manager lie and mislead about shutting off families’ utilities, and they didn’t want anyone to say a word about it,” Hardy wrote. “It was too hard to take.”

jmilian@pbpost.com

@caneswatch