This is a tale of two county employees, That I have personally witnessed ocuring at the county commissioner meetings. One is still working for the county, the other was recently fired with cause. Both in an effort to save the county money made a mistake that ended up costing the county money.
In case one , in the summer, during a power outage sever UPS’s failed in the server room resulting in the need to manually reboot the system and the servers being out of commission for a wile, the IT director decided that since they where scheduled to be replaced anyway he would wait to replace them as scheduled. Come December another power outage, another UPS failure, this time the loss of a server and a tape backup unit. The IT director immediately went into the commissioners explained the problem with the solution and costs, admitting his mistake. The result was that the commissioners although upset about the costs took no action against the employee.
In case number Two, as a result of loosing a law suit, the county was forced to pave Upper Woodchuck lane to the county line . The county commissioners then tasked the county road superintendent with paving the road as inexpensively as possible, which he proceeded to do. Come the next spring after some unusually heavy rains it became apparent to landowner in the area that some needed culverts had been left out and some shortcuts in compacting the road way had been made, and the so informed the county in writing.
This is where the stories diverge, instead of coming clean and admitting to the commissioners that mistakes had been made and offering a remediation plan, the road superintendent tried to conceal theses mistakes from the county commissioners, not just once but at several meetings generated buy several more letters form the land owners. In fact the commissioners where forced to take matters into there own hands and order the road superintend to make repairs after a threatened law suit by the landowners. This forced the commissioners to begin an investigation into what happened, the result of this investigation was that the road superintendent was fired with cause after a hearing before the county commissioner . Why?
Because the county commissioners can no longer trust the road superintendent to make truthful reports to them as a result of his actions in this case.
In conclusion, through the above actions it is clear that the commissioners have sent a message to all county employees. Make a mistake, come clean, and the mistake can be forgiven, but covering it up will not be forgiven , all they expect from their employees is honesty and integrity. And they will deal with honesty and integrity with you. These are the type of employers that I‘d to have but are hard to find.
William Menager
Hamilton
Editor’s Note: The above letter is printed exactly as submitted. Headline provided by Bitterroot Star.