The city of Rehoboth Beach took a small moment during its board of commissioners meeting on Friday to introduce someone who needed no introduction.
Taylour Tedder, the incoming city manager, was already famous, after all.
Since early April, he’d been the subject of a raging controversy in Delaware’s most popular beach town — the subject of scathing local editorials, near-microscopic analysis of the terms of his contract, and withering jeremiads at city commissioner meetings, all before he’d even started his job.
Rehoboth resident Derek Thomas called his hire “appalling,” in a letter to the editors of the Cape Gazette. Fellow resident James Johnson, at a commissioners’ meeting, opted for “tone deaf.”
“What were you thinking!!” read an all-caps cardboard protest sign at a packed April commissioners’ meeting. “Crazy.”
The rebuke likely wasn’t personal: Relatively few of Rehoboth Beach’s 1,100 or so year-round residents had met Tedder, who told Delaware Online/The News Journal on Friday that residents he’d met so far had been “very nice.”
The public controversy also had relatively little to do with Tedder’s record as the former city manager of Boulder City, a Nevada tourist town outside Las Vegas that’s best known for its proximity to Hoover Dam.
At issue, instead, was the size of Tedder’s paycheck.
As of his first day of work on May 15, Tedder has become the highest-paid Delaware municipal or county employee among salaries Delaware Online/The News Journal has tracked.
Among state employees, it’s arguable that only the president of Delaware Tech Community College brings in more than Tedder’s total compensation.