Remove ImagesMotion To Fire Fox Falls Flat, Infuriates Alston
June 28, 2012
Late Wednesday afternoon, June 27, Guilford County Attorney Mark Payne released a statement from US Attorney's Office that said an investigation of Guilford County Manager Brenda Jones Fox that began in November was now closed.
The statement reads: "On November 11, 2011, Federal Investigative Agencies received information concerning alleged wrongdoing on the part of Guilford County Manager Brenda Jones Fox. A preliminary inquiry was conducted into these allegations and based upon the inquiry, the matter was closed."
Fox's attorney, Seth Cohen of Smith, James, Rowlett & Cohen, said, "Mrs. Fox is pleased to hear this news but certainly not surprised because she knew that she had done absolutely nothing wrong. This proves that the whole episode was orchestrated by her political enemies and was nothing but politics at its worst. Fox looks forward to getting back to work on behalf of the people of Guilford County."
The Internal Revenue Service has also been reportedly investigating Fox and there is no word on the status of that investigation.
Guilford County Commissioner Kirk Perkins held a "Fire Brenda Jones Fox Surprise Party" on Thursday, June 21, but none of the other commissioners showed up.
For over a year, several of Perkins' fellow commissioners have been talking openly in the media, and at commissioners meetings, about the need to fire Guilford County Manager Brenda Jones Fox; and, at around 6:25 p.m. on June 21 – less than an hour into the commissioners meeting, under new business – Perkins, to the surprise of everyone, blurted out his motion.
"I move," Perkins said, "that we terminate our employment agreement with our manager Brenda Fox Jones – uh, Brenda Jones Fox – and that we dismiss her immediately."
When Perkins made his motion, Chairman of the Board of Commissioners Skip Alston, a strong supporter of Fox, got a very sour look on his face and, when there was no immediate response from the surprised board, Alston said quickly, "That dies for lack of a second."
Commissioner Billy Yow, not sure exactly what he'd just heard, asked of Perkins' motion, "What did he say?"
Alston moved on. "Any other new business?" Alston asked.
Alston was visibly thrown by the motion, and was clearly angry that Perkins – the vice chairman, who traditionally works in unison with the chairman – had made the motion.
However, Alston managed to maintain his cool until moments later when the board went into a closed session and all hell broke lose.
The Board of Commissioners already had a closed session scheduled for that point in the meeting to "discuss the possible location or expansion of business or industry," and, before the board went into that closed session, Commissioner Paul Gibson – one of Fox's longtime critics and one of the first commissioners to call publicly for her dismissal last year – asked that the purpose of the closed session be amended to include a personnel matter.
Everyone knew that meant the commissioners would discuss the firing of the highly controversial manager in the back room.
In the closed session, Fox's supporters and those in favor of firing her had it out over whether Guilford County should keep Fox or dump her.
Fox has already announced that she plans to retire on Feb. 1, 2013, but, for some commissioners and many county residents, that's not soon enough.
However, at the June 21 meeting, when Perkins made his motion out of the blue, he couldn't even get a second from one of the other 10 commissioners so the board could discuss the matter.
The day after the meeting, Perkins told The Rhinoceros Times that he hadn't let anyone know he was going to make the motion at the meeting. Perkins added that he didn't know beforehand whether or not there would be five other votes to support his motion that evening, but, he said, he certainly thought he would at least get a second on his motion and therefore force a vote by the board.
"I wanted to get everyone on record as to where they stood," Perkins said.
Perkins said he was surprised when there wasn't an immediate second for the motion – especially from either Yow or Gibson.
"I thought Billy would second it before it got out of my mouth, and I thought Paul would if Billy didn't," Perkins said.
Perkins certainly had reason to think that. After all, in September of last year, Yow gave a long speech at a commissioners meeting about how the only reason the manager was still working for Guilford County was because the majority of the board was so "spineless."
As for Gibson, he once compared Fox to Bernie Madoff and, for over a year and a half, Gibson has been highly critical of the manager's actions.
Perkins was a brand new convert to the fire Fox bandwagon, so, perhaps the votes to fire her would have been there if the other commissioners who say they want to fire Fox had jumped in and taken the chance that Perkins offered them – sudden and unexpected as it was.
Therefore, for many watching the meeting, it was a mystery why not one of the other commissioners was willing to put his or her vote where their mouth was, or at least second the motion.
Gibson said that, in hindsight, it might have been better if he had seconded the motion and let the discussion take place in the open meeting – rather than, as it did, in the closed session moments later.
Gibson said Fox definitely needs to go, but, he added, when Perkins made the motion it took everyone by surprise; and Gibson said he wanted to know for sure the votes to fire Fox were there before the board voted.
Yow said he didn't second the motion for a number of reasons – one being that he wasn't even sure he had heard it right. Perkins said it quickly and no one was expecting it.
"I asked him to repeat it," Yow said.
Yow said Perkins showed "political ignorance" by proceeding in the way he did.
According to Yow, Perkins should have let the other commissioners – at least the ones who want to fire Fox – know that he planned to make the motion so that the fire Fox advocates could have known if the six votes necessary to get rid of the manager were there. Of course, one very simple way to find that out would have been for someone to have seconded Perkins motion and then let the votes go up on the large monitor that displays the vote count.
Yow said that, when he figured out what motion Perkins was making, he was confused about Perkins' motivation. Yow also said that, in the past, when there has been a chance to fire Fox, Perkins has been in lockstep with Alston. Yow said that, for all he knew, Perkins, by making his motion, was trying to embarrass the commissioners who wanted Fox gone.
"Kirk may have known the votes weren't there," Yow said, "and then the board would have voted, and the motion would have failed – and Skip would have used that opportunity to grandstand, and go on and on about how the majority of the board was in support of the manager."
And in fact, it turns out that, as became clear in the closed session, the votes to fire Fox weren't there that night.
The closed session began with a discussion of economic incentives, and then the economic development officials and Fox were sent out of the room, and the commissioners went at each other in one of the most heated closed sessions of the last decade.
For over a year, there have likely been at least four votes to fire Fox. Commissioners Yow, Gibson, Bill Bencini and John Parks have seemed ready to vote Fox out.
Most recently, Fox angered the commissioners when she buried a $61,000 retirement bonus for herself on the consent agenda – along with other retirement bonuses for other longtime county employees – and the board unknowingly approved those bonuses.
When Fox's impending large bonus was revealed in the May 10 edition of The Rhinoceros Times, many commissioners were outraged and said that they planned to rescind the bonuses. Fox had her lawyer send a letter to County Attorney Mark Payne and to the commissioners stating that Fox might sue if the board took her large retirement bonus away.
That threat angered many commissioners – most importantly, perhaps, Commissioners Mike Winstead and Perkins, who have in the past been on the side of keeping Fox as county manager despite one scandal after another over the last year and a half.
There are too many of Fox's scandals to list here, but at rhinotimes.com, there are 41 articles collected together, dating back to the fall of 2010, that describe in detail the great many controversial moves made by Fox.
In the closed session at the June 21 meeting, according to a straw poll taken, the five commissioners who were willing to fire Fox were Perkins, Yow, Gibson, Parks and Bencini.
The commissioners not willing to fire Fox were Alston, Winstead, Linda Shaw, Kay Cashion, Bruce Davis and Carolyn Coleman.
Several commissioners who say they were willing to fire Fox that night were upset with Winstead in particular, who has been highly critical of Fox lately.
Though the anti-Fox contingent has written off ever getting help from Alston, Shaw, Cashion, Coleman or Davis, there has been a hope that Winstead would join in the effort to oust the manager.
"Boy, some people will say one thing and then turn around and do something else," one commissioner said angrily of Winstead after the closed session.
Winstead said after the June 21 commissioners meeting that he certainly wasn't opposed to getting rid of Fox, but he didn't think that a heated closed session, with everyone shouting at each other in anger, was the right atmosphere in which to make that decision.
Winstead said the commissioners need to have a calm and rational discussion as to how it should be done. He said there needs to be some planning for a transition – for instance, the board needs to have a decision as to who would fill in as manager in the interim. He said there were better ways to do it than to just come into a meeting and get rid of Fox because Perkins happened to make the motion out of the blue.
Of course the board has had a long time to plan a transition in county leadership. It's been well over a year since it became clear Fox was making secret deals and wasn't being open with the board in other ways, and also that she was destroying the county's relations with the cities and towns and with major private-sector partners, in addition to her other incidents of mismanagement.
Winstead also said Fox was close to retiring already and he didn't want to pay her $61,000 – four months pay – which is called for in her contract if she's fired.
Yow said the board had no problem getting rid of former managers with no plan in place.
"We didn't have a transition plan when we fired Willie Best; we didn't have a plan when we forced out David McNeill," Yow said.
Some of the names that have been suggested for interim manager are Guilford County Budget Director Michael Halford, Assistant Manager Sharisse Fuller and former highly respected Department of Social Services Director John Shore. Shore has also served as a former deputy county manager as well as served as interim county manager several times.
Another possibility, according to some commissioners, is that Guilford County could bring in an outside director to serve during a search – perhaps a well-respected retired manager from another county, since Guilford County government is so dysfunctional right now that it could benefit by bringing in an interim manager with absolutely no ties to the county.
Gibson said it didn't really matter. He said that the board would have to look far and wide to find a worse county manager than Fox.
"I'll take anyone from the first 200 names in the phone book," said Gibson, who didn't second Perkins' motion to fire Fox at the meeting.
Yow said this week that Perkins' motion was for the most part a ploy to help him in the election.
"It's political," Yow said.
Yow said that Perkins knows he's about to get beat by Republican challenger Alan Branson, and so, now, Yow said, Perkins is trying to "act like a conservative who isn't at the beck and call of Skip."
Perkins said the reason he dragged his feet on firing Fox before is because he thought for a long time that Fox would leave of her own free will.
"I felt she was going to retire," Perkins said. "Then the budget came and went last year and she stayed; then she announced it, and it would be in February."
Perkins added that the weight of the evidence against Fox has been increasing weekly and it is to the point now where it is obvious that the manager needs to go.
He said that the recent move to sneak a retirement bonus for herself, and her subsequent threat to sue the board, left a bitter taste in his mouth.
Still, Fox has her backers on the board. Alston, for instance, was described by some in the closed session as "furious" and "bullying."
These days, Alston is still saying that Fox is the best manager Guilford County has ever had and that there is nothing wrong with the way she has been running the county. Alston is not an ignorant man, so he must know his statements are ridiculous – which, of course, has just about everyone in the county wondering his real motivation for his adamant and unwavering backing of Fox.
According to several accounts of the June 21 closed session, Davis, Cashion, Coleman and Shaw remained almost entirely silent during the heated discussion. Their motivations for continuing to support Fox are also unknown, but that night those four sat there playing the part, literally, of the silent majority.
Gibson said he had spoken with Cashion, and she told him that people call and email her frequently in support of Fox.
"I told her that is not what I am hearing," Gibson said. "The folks that are calling and emailing me are universally in favor of firing the manager."
Alston was upset with all the commissioners wanting to fire Fox, but especially with Perkins, who isn't just another commissioner: He's the vice chairman of the board – and the unwritten rule has been that the chairman and vice chairman coordinate their efforts.
Several commissioners in the closed session said Alston shouted that he would call a press conference the following morning – or maybe even later that night – and ruin the chances of some commissioners of ever getting elected again.
"He told John [Parks] he'd never hold elected office again," one commissioner said of Alston's threats at the closed session.
Yow said he was critical of a move earlier that week by Alston, who had called for Payne to look into the nature, extent and origin of the FBI and the IRS investigations into Fox's actions.
Payne contacted the US Attorney's Office, but at that time that office did not provide Payne with any useful information.
Yow said Alston or Payne should have notified the board that Payne was seeking the information from the federal agencies, but Alston said he had special rights as chairman to ask the county attorney to find out what he could.
Yow said he told Alston that simply wasn't true.
"It takes six people on that board to take action," Yow said.
After the June 21 closed session, haggard looking commissioners returned into open session, conducted a few moments of relatively routine county business and then adjourned, with Fox remaining the county manager.