It has come to CNHT’s attention that Paul Beecher, once city manager in Kansas, Dover NH, and most recently, booted from that position in Kingman, Arizona, is now a finalist for city manager of Hingham, Mass.
See: Patriot Ledger
This article from the Kingman Daily Miner from June of 2007 does a good job of recounting Beecher’s background.
Excerpt:
“It has become quite obvious that Mr. Beecher’s agenda for this town closely resembles the same outrageous behavior he displayed in the last town he was asked to leave, Dover, N.H. Kingman cannot afford to allow Mr. Beecher to continue on the path of financial ruin for this great town. His idea of growth is to take on massive debt and load it onto the shoulders of the taxpayer so that the big-time developers can come in and reap millions of our taxes for egregious profits at our expense. There still is time to stop this, but we must act swiftly.”
From Kansas City, Mo., to Dover, N.H., and Kingman, controversy follows city manager
KINGMAN – Despite being at nearly opposite ends of the United States, the cities of Kingman, Ariz., and Dover, N.H., the former place of employment for Kingman City Manager Paul Beecher, have a number of things in common.
The policies created under Beecher’s 13-year leadership have remained prevalent topics in Dover, and they’re beginning to draw attention in Kingman, as well. Some of them include withholding of public records, significant salary increases for government employees, questionable relations with the media and council meetings not being aired on television.
Beecher resigned because of scandals and pressure by the residents and city councils in both of his last towns. In Kansas City, Mo., a behind-the-scenes lighting contract signed by Beecher led to his resignation. It also drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In Dover, Beecher faced an external audit of city finances and employee compensation when residents began calling for his suspension or termination. Beecher’s policies in Dover also drew the attention of the FBI.
His annual evaluation here is Friday. And while the mayor has said that he expects differences of opinion from City Council members, many residents in town – those from the building community, a city watchdog group and even some Realtors – are already publicly calling for Beecher’s termination.
The mayor told the Miner on Friday that other influential business leaders in town are pressuring him to take action.
Much of the recent controversies stem from the content, which turned up in dozens of public records requests in the last several months, and most recently, Beecher’s e-mails.
Public records
Similar to Beecher’s policy in Dover, the city of Kingman recently withheld 75 percent of a public records request for Beecher’s e-mails.
In Dover, the city found itself on the losing end of a lawsuit because Beecher and his successor declined public access to city employee compensation records.
Although the city of Kingman has been open about its salary and benefits compensation, it hasn’t been so forthcoming with Beecher’s e-mails.
Approximately 2,400 were turned over to local developer Travin Pennington. But 7,000 were withheld. Nearly 4,000 of those were deemed personal by Beecher and unnamed city employees, according to City Attorney Carl Cooper.
Kingman Council may take action Friday in determining whether 4,000 personal e-mails in four months is excessive and a violation of the city’s electronic communication policy. But similar to Dover, the city of Kingman may soon be concentrating not on a violation of an internal policy, but rather looking down the barrel of a lawsuit over the non-disclosure of the majority of the request.
Pennington and his attorney are drafting a letter referencing portions of the city’s policy, which states that all communication from government-owned equipment “shall withstand public scrutiny,” as “electronic communication is considered a public record.” According to Arizona state law, municipalities shall err on the side of disclosure, and anything relating to business constitutes a public record.
When a former New Hampshire state representative and eventual Dover city councilman asked for payroll and other financial records of the city, Beecher, and later his successor, denied the request. Councilman David Scott said the city was in violation of New Hampshire’s open records law and eventually sued. The city lost the lawsuit and was ordered to disclose the compensation of city employees, according to several news reports.
The information released highlights another similarity between the two cities: significant increases in salaries to city employees.
City salaries
In 1999, Beecher offered higher compensation to Dover city employees for dissolving their union, according to an article from Foster’s Daily Democrat. Those increases, as well as some questionable contracts, are now the subjects of a $10,000 audit ordered by Dover Councilman Bob Keays.
More controversial than the network of highly paid officials with which Beecher surrounded himself were the contracts he signed just weeks before his resignation. One in particular stood out, making it into an article in USA Today. The article highlighted the trend of government agencies surpassing private enterprise in their compensation policies, and it used Beecher’s contract in Dover as an example of egregious payouts by government agencies to their employees.
This particular contract came to more than $3.1 million over 10 years, equaling more in retirement than the employee made while on the job. Due to a merit plan created by Beecher and ordered for review this year, Dover Police Chief William Fenniman “added more than $200,000 for severance, sick leave and other payouts into his three-year salary average when he retired …,” USA Today reported in February of this year. “This will boost his retirement benefit to as much as $125,000 a year, more than he made as chief.”
Fenniman wasn’t the only one to receive such a contract, and he also wasn’t the only one to resign after courts ordered the agreements be released to the public. Lawsuits filed over the contracts are still unresolved.
A public records request is still pending at Kingman city hall on severance packages given before and after Beecher was hired. The one severance payout made public two weeks ago was rejected by Council. It included a $34,700 payout to Jeff Weir, whose economic development department and position were dissolved by Council and taken out of next year’s budget.
Although Kingman hasn’t seen any headlines on skyrocketing severance payouts, the payroll budget for city employees in the past two years has increased 52.6 percent, or more than $5 million. In the current fiscal year, approximately 10.3 percent of the total payroll budget is going to department heads, meaning that about 3 percent of city employees account for more than 10 percent of the budget.
The payroll increases were implemented to counter what the city said was a high turnover rate. Investigations by the Miner, however, have revealed little turnover in department head positions, yet those were the employees who saw the highest increases – averaging more than $10,000 per year.
In one case, an employee was promoted to director despite a lack of both educational and experience requirements for the position. Human Resources Director Jackie Walker, who was responsible for reporting the pay adjustments to Council, did not possess the required qualifications for the director position, according to public records obtained from the city.
In the past five years, Walker has seen $41,778 added to her salary – more than half of which came in the last two years. She is now the eighth highest paid city official at $94,680 a year.
Beecher had the largest increase in 2006, totaling more than $19,000 after his first year. He now makes $149,148.
Staff increases
Another trend that seems to have followed Beecher is the increase in the number of city employees.
In Dover, municipal staff is approximately 38 percent higher than neighboring cities, a trend that began with Beecher, according to documents from Dover.
The city of Kingman had 306 employees the year before Beecher was hired. Now, the city employs 378 full-time workers. That’s 29 more than Bullhead City employs. Lake Havasu City, however, has 530 city workers, but accounting for population, Kingman employs a much larger percentage of the population than its neighbors.
According to records on full-time employees obtained from the three cities, one out of every 71 residents in Kingman is employed by the city; one out of every 115 Bullhead City residents is employed by the city; and one out of every 105 residents in Lake Havasu City is employed by the city.
Media relations
In Dover, Beecher was rarely questioned by the press. Rejections of public records requests were not challenged, and the daily newspaper’s editorial staff, according to Dover Councilman Scott and several residents, continually attacked those who questioned the city.
Partly because of this trend and partly because another weekly newspaper folded recently in Dover, a group of residents, including Scott, started their own weekly newspaper in May. The paper’s editor, Caren Peloso, says they are focused on questioning city practices. In fact, the lead story in the first edition centered around Beecher’s actions here in Kingman.
With more than 30 years of public service, Beecher told the Miner in February that he has learned how to deal with reporters. However, when questioned by this reporter about controversial issues beginning in April, including questions concerning his background for this article, Beecher refused to comment. Looking at some of his e-mails, Beecher’s stonewalling policy isn’t across the board.
Beecher and local radio news reporter Dave Hawkins often go back and fourth talking baseball, making jokes about boring council meetings and “snoring” when members of Residents Against Irresponsible Development, a city watchdog group, address Council. The e-mails also refer to “freak speak,” when residents address the Council during public meetings.
Other e-mails between the two show a close relationship, including Hawkins giving advice on how to handle certain situations, and Beecher sharing unpublicized information. For example, in March, Beecher told Hawkins that a representative of Las Vegas developer Rhodes Homes said he “is going to double his cash bid and give us four acres of our choice elsewhere,” but that information was never made public.
Hawkins, who also writes for the weekly newspaper The Standard, often sends his articles to Beecher before they’re published, according to a half-dozen e-mails between the two.
TV broadcasts
Other similarities between Kingman and Dover include controversies over the airing of council meetings.
According to online minutes from Dover, a council meeting unflattering to Beecher was not aired, although all the meetings were supposed to be.
In Kingman, a member of the local watchdog group RAID asked the Council several months ago to look into why the meetings were not on the local TV station. According to city officials, problems stemmed from the city installing new technology to record the meetings, instead of having the station record them. During this time, the city was renegotiating its contract with the TV station, according to Beecher.
Problems remain, however, as several Kingman City Council meetings are aired weeks to months behind, and some meetings aren’t aired at all. When this was brought to Council’s attention, Beecher said it’s not the city’s fault if they’re not being aired.
Kansas City
Before moving to Dover, Beecher worked as an assistant city manager in Kansas City. After six years, Beecher was pressured to resign over a controversy, according to news articles in the Kansas City Star in 1991.
Beecher had side-stepped both the city council and the city manager by signing a lighting contract for $1 million, the paper reported. In the weeks following his resignation, the paper said Beecher had taken at least three trips paid by the lighting company, one to Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C., and two to Winsted, Minn., the headquarters of Sterner Lighting Systems, Inc.
The cost to the city for the lighting agreement, according to estimates by the finance director quoted in the paper, was likely to reach $4 million because of the type of financing proposed by Beecher. And because the construction already had begun by the time Beecher brought a resolution to council, there was little that city officials could do to pull the plug on the deal.
Beecher resigned and moved to Dover, where he remained for more than a decade as city manager. In 2004, Beecher resigned after months of criticism from the public, calls for his suspension and/or termination and the possibility of an audit into the city’s spending.
A unanimous vote to accept his resignation put Beecher on his way to Kingman, where he applied for the same position in December 2004. Having won the hearts of several public and city review boards, Kingman City Council went into executive session to vote on the hiring of the man who would become Kingman’s next city manager.
Contrary to popular opinion, Council was not unanimous in hiring Beecher. One councilman and even the mayor, Monica Gates, cast dissenting votes against Beecher because they said he had shown little knowledge of the city and general area. He had given only blind reassurances about fixing the city’s financial problems, they said.