RFP Staff
♦ Over the past several days the Rowan Free Press was contacted by media seeking information about Salisbury city council’s cover-up of Doug Paris’s “mutual termination” and “Golden Parachute”, the Public Information Officer’s sudden “resignation”, and Moody’s downgrading of Salisbury’s bond rating due to Fibrant’s debt and risk. It came as no surprise that a highly regarded news journal out of Raleigh encountered resistance to their probing into Fibrant’s challenges. Resistance showed up in the form of unreturned phone calls. It certainly is the Rowan Free Press’s experience to get foot dragging on Freedom of Information Act submissions or have FOIA requests go unanswered. This morning we’re going to submit these Freedom of Information Act inquiries:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2E5Ew6OLdEldzVrRnRVRnBQdWc/edit?usp=sharing
Limits exist as to what can be hidden by a “mutual termination” contract. If a contract potentially hides governmental wrongdoing, that wrongdoing can be exposed by well targeted “Freedom of Information Act” documentation. Failure to respond to such document requests amps up public suspicion and builds the ground floor for a court case. It is illegal to duck FOIAs.
Many in Salisbury are waking up to city council’s cover-up with its “mutual termination” agreement and its unsavory giveaway of a full salary “Golden Parachute” to someone who allegedly resigned. City Council appears to have publically bungled here as they did when they failed over a year ago to question Mr. Paris’s “wrongful terminations” of a number of long time city employees. At the very least city council needs to do an internal review of those cases and publically come out with their findings. Among those with questionable terminations was the city’s former Public Information Officer Karen Wilkerson, the person Ms. Hasselmann replaced. Conjecture about Karen Wilkerson’s untimely termination is growing in the light of the drama swirling around city hall.
With the Supreme Courts recent rulings on whistleblower protections for government employees we have do doubt the skeletons in City Hall’s deep closet with be trotted out. It is best for city council to be forthcoming. In the end it will all come out either under the medias massed searchlights or in court. The “mutual termination” and “Golden Parachute” commands attention that won’t go away.
The recent approved city budget with its extremely high tax increases, the water and sewer hikes, and solid waste fees is a loud reminder of Fibrant’s failure and the former city manager’s strange departure.
City hall needs to begin an immediate new era of honesty and transparency. Each city councilman needs to know what is actually occurring in city departments without deferring to a city manager or reading a script.
Citizens and fellow employees are loudly questioning why Ms. Hasselmann advanced so rapidly through the promotion ladder and received sizable leaps in pay. And many other questions require answers from city hall.
