The Empire Strikes Back

In a move that will chill the willingness of any municipal employee who is not a cop to report misconduct by municipal employees and officers, the State Personnel Board gave its blessing yesterday to Towns like Quartzsite to fire employees in retaliation for disclosing information of public importance evidencing illegal conduct, mismanagement, gross waste of money or abuse of authority.

If you work for a school district or the county, you are protected. Towns and Cities, however, are free to engage in illegal conduct, mismanagement, gross wastes of public money and abuses of authority and then fire anyone (other than a cop) who dares expose such misconduct with the blessing of the state of Arizona and it’s personnel board. Is this really what the legislature intended? The discouragement of public employees working for cities and towns from disclosing such misconduct and encouraging cities and towns to slap the piss out of employees who do? The state personnel board seems to.

If you don’t think its right for city and town employees to be abused just because they work for a city or town and not for a county or school board, ffs, tell your state rep or senator to fix this broken law. Or to replace the (strangely enough for an all-male) board with some people with the balls to do something about this sort of misconduct. In addition to being all male, the board was all white, too. Definitely representative of who has power in Arizona, but not at all representative of Arizona’s employee pool.