Because City Manager Curt Walton and City Attorney Mac McCarley are directly responsible for bungling a sexual harassment issue between a city staffer and some member of city council, they should foot the bill for any “outside” probe of the matter. First out of their bonus kitties, then out of their own pockets.
Even the Uptown paper can see that Walton and McCarley stepped in it, although the edit board predictably flinches from holding them accountable in any meaningful way. Councilman Warren Turner — whom the UPoR has used three unnamed city staffers to peg as the focus of the mayor’s anti-harassment email — is swearing up and down that no one from the city staff talked to him about the matter.
If so, this would be a grave error in judgment, possibly rising to the level of a firing offense. The first thing one would do after getting the accuser’s side in a sexual harassment allegation, is go to the supposed harasser for their side in private, without prejudice. You certainly do not have the head of the department blast email everyone, warning them not to sexually harass other employees, while ducking a meeting with the supposed problem. Yet that is evidently what the Mac and Curt duo did.
Once again we are back to needing a fuller account of the facts from city staff. Absent that, it certainly appears that top staff moved to quash a sexual harassment complaint against a city council member by dragging the mayor into the matter. The mayor — at last check, a lawyer — should have absolutely known better.
But what any “probe” still has to tell us is what two of the highest paid and most powerful players in city government were thinking when they set the city on this rocky and avoidable road.
