Mike is a good guy, but I doubt he will improve the 8 week wait.

The building department needs some transformative leadership.

It was mentioned in the meeting that the finance department will review each new (interim) position and determine an acceptable pay increase.

I suppose it is subjective with Lea as she is not part of the union, but I would suspect Mike is governed by the contract. Working "out of classification" usually has a built-in formula.

If Mike is smart he will stay with the union. He should be able to see what might happen to him with what did happen to Brian. Given a set of rules, following them and trying to take some direction from commissioners who are politicians, this could be a temporary position even if he was promised it full time.

If tonights paper is any indication of what happened, this is a Carter, Carter, Carter move with the other commissioners giving lip service to backing the things he was doing. I would love to hear from the other commissioners why it was they felt this was necessary.

Stepping out of the Union, into and exempt position underneath a bunch of politicians is craziness.
I am sure the other two commissioners have a good explanation for falling inline behind big Al.

Carter said during the meeting that Mike had asked to remain in the Union.

I used to meet Weyerhauser people who left the woods and "moved up" into management. Most of you probably know the outcome. When reorginization times came, as they do often in big corporations, they were axed.

There is an odor to this firing. I wish the other two commissioners would go public with the reasons to reassure us that it was in our best interests. I suspect that mouths are kept closed because they don't want to set off the man they just fired.

I don't know that I agree with the sentiment being expressed here. I am a big fan of open government, but there is a limit to that, in a few rare cases. One of those rare cases is when an employees performances isn't meeting the expectations of the commissioners. All indication is that this is performance related, which is all the information I need, considering the track record of P&B. If this had been about misconduct, I am sure that would have come out, and I would want to know more. I haven't seen or heard anything that would remotely suggest that misconduct was the issue, though.

It is time for Planning and Building to move on and become better servants for the county, and any leadership that is not on board with the changes necessary should probably move on. At the same time, that isn't enough reason to air unnecessary dirty laundry and keep Brian from moving on to a new position somewhere where his skill set is better valued.

None of this would have been an issue except that many of us have held Brian in very high regard and are absolutely shocked and mystified at his firing.

There are numerous reasons why it might be kept quiet and I would normally have assumed it was one of those. The thing is I cannot imagine Brian in any of those situations.

Other than that I would agree with you about the privacy aspect of a firing.

Lee Napier was great to work with on Quinault project in the past, she has great follow through and common sense!