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If a person has a contract to perform a job and they are released early from the contract for anything other than just cause, that person will likely receive the rest of the money due as per the contract. This is what commonly happens to professional and college coaches.
However, if the person resigns instead of being fired or is terminated with proper cause, they usually don’t collect one cent. Unless, of course, you work in Cherokee County government.
Getting rid of people in the wrong way has become somewhat of a county tradition. Commissioners fired a county manager 15 years ago, then immediately lost a lawsuit totaling about $250,000. They fired a heath director a few years later and ended up losing another six figures. Other employees who were forced out also received payouts due to commissioners not following proper protocols, which can be blamed on bad advice given by a former county attorney.
The county was also forced to make payouts when employees in the Emergency Management and inspection offices were accused of sexual harassment in the 2000s. A former Department of Social Services director was only forced to pay back $1,000 of $186,000 that she was convicted of embezzling. Then there’s the tens of millions of dollars the county has lost due to multiple DSS lawsuits and the SWAT shooting settlement. But let’s get back to the most recent incident of taxpayer money being spent like drunken sailors suffering from dyslexia.
Commission Chair Alan Bryant said Darryl Brown, the board’s attorney since 2018, asked to be fired at the March 9 meeting, saying he felt like he completed his obligations and duties were done. Bryant said Brown, who wrote his own contract and was the only lawyer the county even had look at it, advised him that it would be in the county’s best interest to fire him. Of course he did.
That statement might need to be run by the N.C. Bar Association, because it was definitely not in the county’s best interest – not by a long shot. Brown received a staggering $151,615 payout and another 10 months of health insurance.
That’s because in the signed 2023 contract, the board agreed that if Brown “is terminated at any time while the attorney is ready, willing and able to continue to perform the duties of county attorney then, in that event, the county agrees to pay unto the attorney in a lump sum to be paid within 30 days of termination, an amount of 12 times the gross salary of the last full calendar month of employment.” He was able, if not willing.
What isn’t said is whether if Brown resigned on his own he would have received anything other than a pat on the back and acclaims of “good luck.” In the interim, the county has also been forced to pay $32,000 for legal services from the law firm Teague Campbell Dennis & Gorham LLP in Asheville.
The question I have heard asked most by readers in the last week is, did the commissioners not know what was in the contact before they voted? If that’s the case, they would be guilty of nonfeasance at best. However, if they knew what was in the contract and approved the payoff anyway, that could be considered malfeasance, misfeasance or maybe both.
The folks I’ve talked with seemed to think it’s the latter. After all, the county has a long history of taking care of Good Ol’ Boys. For example, two DSS directors asked commissioners to fire the attorney before Brown, but they stubbornly kept him anyway because they liked him – and local residents are stuck paying an eight-figure price for it, to the tune of 8 mills in extra property taxes every year, $200 or more per household.
After Commissioners Cal Stiles and Dan Eichenbaum lost re-election bids in the March 3 primary, both resigned from the board of commissioners at the March 9 meeting. I don’t have any problem with them wanting to turn over their seats early to the people who defeated them since that was the will of the voters.
However, their final action on the board was to fire Brown. That ill-considered decision is now a permanent part of their legacy – and one that won’t be remembered fondly in the years to come.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. Call him at 828-837-5122 or email dbrown@cherokeescout.com.