VSO clashes with commissioners, clerk

The Kimball County Commissioners called an emergency meeting last Thursday after receiving notice of an inflammatory-worded meeting notice put out by the Kimball County Veterans Service Officer Shaun Evertson.

The original notice sent by Evertson called for an “emergency” meeting of the county’s veteran service committee to be held at 2 p.m. on Thursday, July 16. The notice said the meeting was to “discuss and take action regarding the ongoing disruptive and damaging activities of the Kimball County Clerk and the Kimball County Board of Commissioners which are severely impacting the ability of the Veterans Service Committee and Veterans Service Office to execute their statutory mission.” The notice was sent to The Observer, put on the bulletin board outside the VSO office in the courthouse and was also posted at the post office.

The commissioners, along with county attorney David Wilson and county clerk Cathy Sibal, discussed if publication of the notice could be stopped. Wilson said the commissioners could not stop its publication, but the veterans service committee could.

At issue is the hours and pay for Evertson and his administrative position, who are both part-time. The discussion has been ongoing since February. The commissioners allowed Evertson to hire part-time help for his office this spring, which is the first time in at least two decades the office has had additional paid help. Evertson has disputed some of the details surrounding the pay and hours allowed to work since he made the hire in late April.

After a sometimes contentious discussion during the July 7 commissioners meeting, commissioner Larry Engstrom said the sides agreed to move forward to solve the issue at the July 21 commissioners meeting.

“This notice gets published, and that’s not moving forward,” Engstrom said.

“No, it’s not. It’s sabotage. It’s a stab in the back,” Wilson said.

The commissioners invited Bob Abramson, chair of the veterans service committee, to Thursday’s emergency meeting. Abramson said he had heard about the notice from Evertson and asked him to change some of the language, but he did not believe he had seen it.

“I think the board and Cathy are upset about some of the language here,” Wilson said.

“I can see why,” Abramson said.

“It makes it seem like the veterans service committee is making these accusations against the board and the clerk,” Wilson said.

Sibal said Evertson accused her of not properly doing her job.

“I get the emails this morning accusing me of not doing my job, and that I was refusing to do it,” Sibal said. “I acknowledged it. I said I’ll do it. I said I need to ask questions, I need to let the board know. The board of equalization hearings, the tape recorder isn’t available at that time, because we’re here. I tried to visit with Shaun, because that’s how I like to try to work out conflict. (Commissioner) Daria (Anderson-Faden) was present and he would not speak to me about it. How do you resolve conflict if someone takes this attitude?”

Anderson-Faden asked Abramson if the other members of the committee were aware of the notice and the language used. Abramson said he was not sure if they were at that time.

Commissioner Tim Nolting asked if Abramson would stop the publication of the notice. He agreed, and said he understood a different notice would be sent.

“Shaun and I talked about this, and I told him I thought it was inappropriate,” Abramson said. “I don’t remember if he read it to me or gave it to me. But I told him I didn’t like it.”

The agenda was read, and Abramson also agreed to change items listed there.

“There’s no confusion over verbal approval because there’s no such thing as verbal approval by the board of county commissioners,” Nolting said. “A motion must be made a seconded and voted by the entire. There are no verbal agreements. There is not confusion or disruption by the county clerk.”

Wilson said an agenda item that concerned him was “legal recourse.”

“That’s not paving the way for any good working relationship,” Wilson said.

“No it’s not. I agree,” Abramson said.

Abramson said it was still important for the committee to meet and look at the facts and issues.

“I don’t think you’re going to get all of the facts at this meeting,” Wilson said.

After Evertson finished visiting with a client, he entered the meeting.

“Where it says we are hindering the development of, the disruptive and damaging activities of the county clerk, the county board of commissioners, severely impacting the ability of the veterans service committee and the veterans service office, I don’t know what that means,” Engstrom said. “I think that’s a stab in our back, because you just said here (July 7) at our commissioners meeting let’s go forward. There’s some miscommunications, some misunderstandings - that might be. But to say this, is pretty low handed.

“I think you need to tell me why you wrote something like this and published it and have it hanging on the bulletin boards so everybody can read it and down at the post office. If there’s some communications that we have missed, that’s one thing. We can work through that, we can understand that, we can move forward. But to come out and say we’re severely impacting the ability of the veterans service office to do their job is pretty poor.”

“Yup, I agree. It is purely poor to be impacted severely,” Evertson said.

“I don’t understand it. I really don’t,” Engstrom said. “I don’t know what we did here that’s causing you to say that, because your office is still open, you’re still working your hours, you’ve got an assistant over there for 20 hours a week. We have her report here, and you’ve got 26 people in a month. I don’t know what we’re doing that would cause you to write something like that.”

“You don’t,” Evertson asked.

“No,” Engstrom answered.

Evertson spoke about the process since February, and then asked if Thursday’s discussion was valid since at the July 7 meeting it was said nothing was valid unless voted on. He said everything else is open to interpretation.

“That’s pretty severely impacting right there,” Evertson said.

“Not so. Not so. This board cannot act on discussion, comments. It takes action by having a motion made and seconded,” Nolting said.

“So you’re trying to have it both ways,” Evertson interrupts.

“No sir,” Nolting said.

“Yeah, you are,” Evertson responded.

After asking Evertson to quit interrupting him, Nolting said, “Nothing that you have written on this agenda is true. It’s inflammatory, it’s slander. The clerk’s office and the county board of commissioners is doing nothing to impede your ability to do the job that needs to be done as a veterans service officer, and to say so in public, publish it in a newspaper, post it on public bulletin boards, is not only slanderous, it’s inflammatory. We don’t need to spend time on this type of stuff.”

“I would agree with you on that,” Evertson said.

“Decisions of the county commissioners are made by motion and by vote,” Nolting said. “What might be discussed and how that discussion might be interpreted is irrelevant in comparison to what is actually acted upon.”

Evertson went back to discussing the Feb. 3 meeting and then said as he was ready to hire someone in April, he was told he could not do so by deputy county clerk Josi Morgan.

Nolting said the board approved part-time help of 20 hours a week at a wage of $8.85 per hour. He said if Evertson wanted something different, then he needed to put it in his budget proposal for the new fiscal year.

Evertson once again discussed the details of the hiring, such as the length of the probationary period (which was to July 1), changing the salary at the beginning of the fiscal year and taking away money from his salary to put into the budget for his assistant. He said he came into the July 7 meeting to hear, “I don’t remember any of that.”

Engstrom said he agreed with most of what Evertson said about the details of the hiring, but not allowing the person to work 29 hours.

Nolting said if there was an oversight, it was in not fully explaining the budget process.

“We just don’t make things happen on July 1. We can’t,” Nolting said.

Evertson said that is why he started the process in February, to have that person in and trained.

Anderson-Faden asked how many hours Evertson was authorized to work prior to hiring an assistant. Engstrom said he was allowed to work 12 hours per week.

As for the reason the notice was worded the way it was, Evertson said he had to give a reason to fulfill state law.

“I wasn’t doing it to slam you. But by state law, I have to put up the reason for the emergency meeting. I have to put up the agenda. I have to make the agenda available…That’s been revised,” Evertson said. “The committee feels like - and it’s not just me, I’ve polled the committee - the committee feels like we’re in a place where we have no way to plan, we have no idea what’s going on. We think we’re going in one direction, and then all of the sudden we’re not going there. The confusion of why this got into we don’t remember it that way and that’s why I want to, and the committee is interested in listening to those discussions because it’s possible I got too much radiation or something and my memory is faulty. So we want to find out, to know, what those conversations were like. And if those conversations are like, shut up Evertson, it’s going to be 20 hours and that’s it, then I’ll come back in here and I’ll humbly beg your pardon and I will say I was wrong. But that’s not the way I recall it.

“The difficulty we’re facing, and I’m quite sure you guys don’t really get this, that it’s part time. We’re not in there all the time. We’re not in there to have extra hours to figure out all this stuff. We have to plan and use our time appropriately. We actually have more veterans stuff to do than the amount of hours that are available to us, so we have to prioritize. We’re struggling with that, and when we run into, for lack of a better word, bureaucratic hurdles, it’s frustrating. So my points are valid. That’s where we were left (July 7). What’s going on? What are we trying to do? How can we have any sense of planning if all off our discussions are invalid because they haven’t become actions. That’s the impression that I got leaving here (July 7), that any discussion that’s held in here that doesn’t become an action is moot. It doesn’t really matter.”

Sibal pulled the minutes from the Feb. 5 meeting and read them. At that meeting, the commissioners authorized Evertson to seek a part-time administrative assistant that would work 20 to 29 hours per week.

Evertson again discussed the April 21 meeting and said board attorney Audrey Elliott’s notes from the Feb. 3 meeting showed that he was allowed to make the hire, but said the commissioners did not recall that. He also discussed what he termed discussion without formal direction did not mean anything.

“In my opinion, what’s happened since (the July 7 meeting), is you’ve taken a personal attack on me, my office and on the commissioners,” Sibal said. “It’s clearly stated here that it was discussed from 20 to 29. Then the action was taken in April to go to 20 hours. I assume you were present at that meeting. I was not here. I assume you were there when the board took the action. You could have easily spoke up and said, ‘Wait a minute. I want 29 and nothing more or less.’ That didn’t happen. The action taken in April was on 20 hours a week at the hourly rate set. Period.

“Then we proceed through the end of the budget year, which the last meeting there was June 16, I believe. We give you the operating statements. If there’s an error, come back to us. Talk to us. So that’s what I remember. Obviously when we say we don’t remember 29 hours, a lot’s happened since then. It’s set in stone here.”

Evertson said the issue Sibal brought up was two things - the “vicious personal attack” and that of the meeting notice. Evertson said Sibal simply did not like the words he used.

“No, because it’s an attack on the performance of my duties,” Sibal said.

“If you step back and look at it, I just explained this, my perspective on this, and I used regular words, right? I felt like, and I still feel like to some extent, that we’re blocked from being able to go forward,” Evertson said. “There’s this great unknown. How do I know what you guys are thinking? How can I sit down and come up with a plan, come up with a budget? How can I do that with that uncertainty?”

Evertson said many things in the meetings were based on informal discussions.

“(July 7), the rug got pulled out from under that. So I was completely without any confidence that I had any idea what was going on,” Evertson said. “So that is a serious impediment to me in being able to do the job. I don’t why I would describe it as something else.”

Evertson said the veterans service committee did not know the ground rules on how to proceed, and he wrote the public notice, which, he said, he had since revised.

“So now we’re at a point here where you believe that you need to dictate the language to the committee of what they can meet about or what they can put in their public notice,” Evertson said. “If you want to do that, in my opinion, you need to tell the committee that and the committee can direct me to do so.”

“With all that, I still don’t see where there’s any justification for putting the negative, derogatory comments directed to the commissioners and the clerk in your notice,” Wilson said. “You can tell what the purpose of a meeting is without making an attack on individuals, and that was an attack. I know what the legal requirements are, and that certainly isn’t required to be in there about disruptive and damaging activities. If you’re concerned about their activities, then have a meeting about their activities. You personally chose to put in there an attack on the commissioners and the clerk.”

“I did,” Evertson said.

“Yeah, you did,” Wilson replied. “And I think this board needs to take action about that, because that’s highly uncalled for and unprofessional.”

“And you presented it as the committee. You’re not the committee,” Nolting said. “You put your opinion in a public notice that was supposed to go…and followed that right through in your agenda. Uncooperative. Inability of the clerk.”

“And those are the bullets that are going to have to be discussed at the committee meeting,” Evertson said. “There’s nothing I can do to change how you perceive that. I won’t deny that I was quite frustrated when I wrote that, and those are the real challenges that I saw at the time. I see those challenges slightly different at this particular moment, because we’re moving forward with a little bit of a discussion here.”

Evertson said he did change the language on Abramson’s recommendation, but did not tell him how he was going to change it. Engstrom said it was still derogatory toward the commissioners and the clerk.

Evertson said if additional changes were needed, the commissioners could tell Abramson and Abramson could tell him.

“However, I do want to get back to the reality of where we ended up (July 7) and the frustrating process that this has been,” Evertson said. He said he did not understand what was happening and why roadblocks were put up.

Engstrom said about the frustration Evertson felt at the July 7 meeting, that the commissioners could not increase the assistant’s pay or allow her to work additional hours until the budget process was complete. He added a pay increase could be retroactive to July 1 if the commissioners agreed to that request.

Evertson said he wrote a letter about the salary and hour changes, but it did not get on the agenda for one reason or another multiple times.

“It was on (the July 7) agenda,” Sibal said.

Evertson said the change needed to be made now in order to reduce his pay and free up funds from being spent.

“That letter was to presented long before (the July 7) meeting, and I believe that’s what the deputy clerk was trying to say, he was supposed to bring that in, at I believe, another meeting, so that you knew,” Sibal said.

Evertson said he presented the letter both electronically and with a hard copy for both June meetings.

Sibal and Evertson discussed the letter, budget timelines and an operating statement for the office, but seemed to be talking about different things.

“Between you and us, we just don’t have a meeting of minds,” Engstrom said. “I think you perceive something, and it should be done, and we’re looking at, we’ve got the information, but we can’t proceed until we get through our budget. I think that’s the biggest hangup we’ve got.”

Sibal said the motion approved earlier in the year by the commissioners was for the part-time administrative assistant position to be 20 hours per week and it would be reevaluated July 1. In reading the May 5 meeting minutes, Sibal said Evertson’s pay was to remain the same in the fiscal year with a reduction of pay and hours July 1. He presented a letter to that effect, but the commissioners voted May 5 that he was to present a revised letter stating that at a later meeting. That letter was not presented until July 7.

Discussion continued from Sibal, Engstrom and Evertson over rate of pay and how things were paid out from the budget. Almost two hours into the emergency meeting, a temporary solution emerged as Sibal suggested that Evertson simply pay himself less out of the budget line item and work fewer hours. This would allow his administrative assistant to work additional hours. This could be done as long as the budget line item did not change, even if it was dispersed differently.

The need for a veterans service committee meeting was also discussed, and Abramson felt the meeting still needed to be held to discuss any issues before the July 21 commissioners meeting. The veterans service committee will still meet at 2 p.m. Thursday (July 16) in the veterans service office.

Timeline of events

February 3 meeting

According to official minutes from this meeting, which were published in the Feb. 26 issue of The Observer, the commissioners unanimously voted to allow Veterans Service Officer Shaun Evertson to advertise for a part-time administrative assistant. The assistant would be allowed to work 20 to 29 hours per week.

April 21 meeting

In a recording of the April 21 meeting, Evertson said the administrative assistant position would be probationary through the end of the fiscal year. The new fiscal year began July 1. If necessary, Evertson said part of his salary could go to fund the new position. Evertson said he was told the week prior to the meeting that he could not hire someone for the position. Commissioner Larry Engstrom told him the commissioners simply needed additional information before the hire could be made.

Engstrom asked if someone is hired, would funds be available after the new fiscal year began July 1. Evertson said the funds from the training portion of the budget could be used, and if needed, he could restructure his agreement.

The commissioners also discussed a potential agreement with the Scotts Bluff County VSO as another option or if Evertson quit. Evertson said the VSO there would be happy to be the Kimball County VSO, if an administrative assistant was in place here. He said all that would be needed would be to work out an agreement on funding with the Scotts Bluff County commissioners and VSO.

Looking at the part-time administrative assistant position, Evertson said it was probationary with nothing guaranteed. He said the plan would be to go through the first of the fiscal year and see if money could be found to keep it funding. He said the hours would be 20 to 29 per week with no benefits.

Board attorney Audrey Elliott said the county could only reduce Evertson’s pay and hours if he asked for it, and a formal agreement would be necessary. Evertson said the veterans service committee was agreeable to that.

The commissioners unanimously voted to allow Evertson to hire an administrative assistant to work 20 hours per week until July 1 with wages set at $8.85 per hour. They also authorized Evertson to present a letter to the board seeking a reduction in pay and hours.

May 5 meeting

In a recording of the May 5 meeting, Evertson presented a letter to the board seeking a restructuring of his agreement. He said there was no need for adjustment in that fiscal year. In the new fiscal year, Evertson said he would move to an hourly rate and work fewer hours, while the administrative assistant would work additional hours. Evertson said she would work no more than 29 hours and he would work no more than 12 hours. That would cost the county over $20,000 per year. If Evertson worked five hours and the administrative assistant worked 20 hours, that would cost the county more than $12,000, which would be an increase of almost $2,000 in salary.

Evertson’s salary at that time was $453.08 per pay period, which is every two weeks, according to county budget officer Josi Morgan. Evertson asked his hourly rate to be set at $8.65 beginning July 1, and the administrative assistant’s hourly

rate to be raised to $10. Evertson guessed he would work between five and 10 hours per week, while the administrative assistant would work 20 hours per week.

Commissioner Tim Nolting said he understood the proposal that there to be no changes from July 1 until the budget was approved in September, and the office would spend slightly more than in previous budget for first three months based on hourly wages. He said he would be OK with that.

Evertson said if the budget got too high, he could simply reduce the amount of hours he worked. Elliott said the new agreement with Evertson should say he is allowed to work “up to” a certain amount of hours at the new hourly rate of $8.65 starting in July.

The commissioners moved to keep everything the same until July 1, and then have Evertson present a revised letter at the last meeting in June which would present concrete information on a plan to move the VSO position to an hourly rate and with reduced hours.

July 7 meeting

In a recording of the July 7 meeting, Evertson said hours and wages were to change as of July 1. He said he was to be paid $8.65 per hour up to 12 hours per week, and the administrative assistant was to be paid $10 per hour up to 29 hours per week.

“This was supposed to formally come before you guys in June, but for various reasons, it didn’t get on the agenda,” he said.

All three commissioners said they could not recall an agreement to change the hours.

Evertson said the veterans service committee wants to meet with the commissioners at the July 21 meeting to straighten things out.

Nolting said everything is on hold for every office in the county until a budget is approved in September. He added there are no changes or expanded duties until a budget is approved.

Engstrom said he thought the hours were set at 20 per week until the budget was approved. He said the commissioners must follow the normal procedures. Evertson said the probationary period ended July 1 for his administrative assistant position and the numbers were to change then.

Nolting said one concern is that the 29 hours is on the cusp of being considered full-time. Evertson asked why 29 hours has been talked about for six months?

“Because we said 20,” Nolting said.

County clerk Cathy Sibal read from the April 21 minutes in which the commissioners approved to hire a temporary part-time assistant at a pay rate of $8.85 per hour at no more than 20 hours per week. She said those notes matched the ones from Elliott. The position was to be reassessed July 1. Evertson was also to present a letter to reduce his hours and pay.

Elliott said a pay raise could be retroactive if approved by the commissioners during the budgeting process.

A visibly frustrated Evertson said certainty needed to be developed and there was no time to mess with “bureaucratic stuff” that takes away from the mission of the office. Evertson added there was a difference between strict letter of motions passed and discussion.

Engstrom said they would have to go forward as is at this time and go through the budget process, and then sit down again and discuss things in September.