Three councilmen explain no vote on Buss severance

And then there were three – Councilmen Joseph Estes, Kelly Haddad and Will Dunn.

It was Estes, Haddad and Dunn who cast the no votes at a special City Council meeting over a severance and release agreement with former Assistant City Manager Rick Buss.

By a 4-3 vote Thursday evening, Buss was awarded a package that, including benefits, amounts to around $80,000. Buss will receive salary and benefits from Aug. 10 to Feb. 10, 2008. Mayor Kelly Anderson, Vice Mayor Brent Murphree, Councilmen Edward Farrell and Steve Baker Thursday voted in favor of the package.

Buss, who is under investigation over allegations of misconduct and was placed on administrative leave late last week, agreed he would not sue the city.

Following Thursday’s meeting, Estes said the severance package was “not an appropriate measure at this time with all that is going on. I am comfortable with my decision,” Estes said.

“I can’t agree in good conscience to this while an investigation is ongoing,” Haddad added. “I think it’s ridiculous we just offered a man a severance package when he’s still under investigation.”

“Councilman Haddad really summed up my thoughts in that we have an investigation going and this is just premature,” Dunn remarked. “With all of that said, there is a lot of smoke. That concerns the hell out of me.”

There was some question following Thursday’s meeting as to whether or not with Buss resigning, the investigation of alleged misconduct would be dropped.

Dunn said as far as he’s aware, the investigation is not dropped. The reason for that is because it also involves Information Technologies and Telecommunications Manager Richard Terrell. City of Maricopa Public Affairs Manager Jennifer Grentz confirmed Friday that the investigation was still ongoing.

Asked if he was surprised on how his fellow councilmen voted, Dunn said he didn’t know coming into the meeting how it would go.

“I knew there were strong feelings both ways,” Dunn said. “The advantage or maybe disadvantage I had was I was out of town for 10 days. So much of the stuff that has transpired, and I don’t know how much more can transpire in 10 days, was when I was gone.”

Dunn said he had been playing catch-up with Interim City Manager Roger Kolman and City Attorney Denis Fitzgibbons since returning to town.

In a follow-up conversation with inmaricopa.com on Friday, Dunn said typically when a council vote is tight, he’ll get in there and box with his fellow councilmen, but this situation didn’t allow for that.

“I had discussed with Denis what we can and cannot talk about,” Dunn said. “Employee matters are confidential. Because it is dealing with employee matters, as my understanding is, those are done in executive session. This stuff we were dealing with, the challenges somebody might have with Rick, would be employee situations that we cannot legally discuss in an open meeting. There wasn’t much we could discuss except for as it was agendized. I didn’t want to get us or the city in trouble by saying something legally I can’t talk about. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to…the lawyer said don’t. I absolutely didn’t want to do an executive session because I wanted this to be as open as we can.”

At the end of the day, Dunn sees the Buss decision as a positive one for Maricopa.

“As much as I think the vote was wrong, still, the benefit will be positive for the city,” Dunn commented. “If this agreement didn’t go through and ended up in court, we’d have $100,000 in legal fees.”

Photo by Dave Thomas