CALDWELL, Idaho —
This story originally appeared in the Idaho Press.
At Canyon County’s monthly community input meeting Monday morning, questions continued to crop up about the process through which eight of Canyon County’s nine elected officials wrote a letter asking Commissioner Leslie Van Beek to resign in January.
Not much additional information has been released through public records requests since members of the public gathered at March’s community input meeting to ask questions about Van Beek’s alleged wrongdoings. At that meeting, Canyon County Clerk Chris Yamamoto and others suggested that once information about the alleged wrongdoings is released, the county will more openly be able to discuss the allegations in the letter.
At Monday’s community input meeting, questions from a handful of community members included how the letter was drafted, why the letter was not on official county letterhead, and whether Van Beek was aware the officials would be drafting a letter.
Van Beek said she was not invited to the meeting in which the letter was drafted.
The letter, signed by the other eight county officials, called for Van Beek’s resignation, alleging she had acted in a manner “unbecoming of an elected official” without going into more detail. Van Beek wrote her own letter in response and mailed them both to media outlets, as previously reported.
When a community member asked if the letter was unauthorized because it was not written on county letterhead, Commissioner Keri Smith replied that “it was authorized,” and that it did not matter whether the letter was written on county letterhead or not.
“I’m saying that eight elected officials signed that letter,” Smith said.
When asked if those elected officials met together to write the letter, Smith said that they met in executive session and that though Van Beek was invited to that meeting, she was not present.
But Van Beek said she had not received an invitation to that meeting.
“I do not remember receiving any invitation to executive session to discuss those items,” Van Beek said. “I was presented with that letter during an Idaho Association of Counties conference and told that if I did not cooperate with the terms of resignation, that it’d go public,” she said.
Later that evening, she said she received an email from Brian Holmes of KTVB asking whether she had any comment on the letter.
“I’m not even sure if the mob realizes that someone in there is a mole and leaked that to the press,” Van Beek said, appearing to refer collectively to the letter’s authors.
At that point, Van Beek decided to write her own response, she said. Van Beek mailed the letter asking for her resignation and her own letter to the Idaho Press and other news outlets in early February.
Van Beek said she thinks there may be an email thread between the eight elected officials that excludes her.
That could be true because “you have to be present to be privy to the information that’s provided in executive session,” Smith said.
One topic brought up by several community members was the possibility of providing mid-year raises for county employees and the evaluation process to do so. Van Beek referenced “almost 30% increases to some of the attorneys” since October, calling it “unsustainable,” and unfair to taxpayers. She said there are other factors beyond pay that encourage employees to stay.
“Canyon County has some issues that need to be resolved,” Van Beek said. “And I will say too, I am not for disclosing things … I’ll just say, I am done with being blamed for the lawsuits that are pending. I did not have responsibility for that.”
She said information about that is available, but it’s protected under attorney-client privilege.
“But that is a whip I’ve been beaten with and I don’t own that,” she said. “So I am for good government, I am for financial and fiscal responsibility and government. It is for a lot of those reasons that I am being … that I’m under the gun.”
Van Beek, Smith, and unnamed county employees are referenced in a notice of a tort claim filed by the county’s former human resources director, Sue Baumgart, against the county for allegedly having violated Baumgart’s “resignation, severance, and release agreement.” The notice of the claim, which seeks $1 million in damages, alleges that employees and officials at the county broke the agreement by posting Baumgart’s job early, “saying she was terminated/fired, and saying denigrating things.”
This story originally appeared in the Idaho Press. Read more at IdahoPress.com
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