After just 11 weeks on the job, Kristine Kennedy is out as borough clerk.
The Haines Borough Assembly fired her during its Oct. 22 meeting without cause after a closed-door executive session.
Initially, Kennedy said her preference would be to have the meeting in public.
The assembly justified going into executive session by citing an exemption to the Open Meetings Act on subjects that “tend to prejudice the reputation and character of any person.”
According to state open meetings law, the person who is the subject of such an executive session has the right to demand that the discussion be made public and if that is made – an executive session then cannot be held, at least not on those grounds.
Kennedy ultimately said she would go with the will of the assembly members who ultimately decided to go into executive session and did not invite Kennedy to join.
There was some question of whether she should be allowed to attend after the assembly voted to go into executive session and then immediately took a break. Morphet asked her to stay in the room while he ensured that assembly members intended to exclude her from the meeting.
Doom accused him of trying to influence the process and assembly member Kevin Forster said he thought it had been clear that they were not inviting her to join when they voted.
Morphet later said he had not understood that there was an intentional exclusion. “I just wanted to be clear on who was being invited in,” he said. “By only inviting the manager, they were disinviting the clerk and that was lost on me.”
The result was that Kennedy was excluded from a conversation about her job performance which ultimately ended in her being fired.
Morphet said he’d checked with the borough’s attorney who interpreted state Open Meetings Law to mean that Kennedy had the option to make the executive session public but did not have a right to be in the executive session as it’s the assembly’s prerogative who gets to be included.
As she sat in a dark stairwell outside of the assembly chambers waiting for them to call her back in, Kennedy said she didn’t want to talk about the circumstances leading up to the meeting, or work for an assembly that did not want to work with her.
Interim Borough Manager Elke Doom said the assembly followed a legal process to fire Kennedy and that the decision was well thought out and not just a knee-jerk reaction to a staffing issue. Doom said there were issues with Kennedy that staff made “attempts to address and those attempts were unsuccessful.”
She did not elaborate on what those issues were.
“I would say that Kristine was railroaded,” said her partner Mark Sebens during an interview on Wednesday.
Sebens was visibly frustrated during and after the vote to fire her and spoke briefly about what he characterized as a persistent conflict between Kennedy and her colleagues.
Sebens acknowledged that he has a biased point of view. But he said after the meeting that he had spent the past several weeks listening as Kennedy tried to work through chain of command issues, and feeling as though her authority was often being undermined as she tried to learn her new job.
Both Sebens and Morphet said a lot of these issues came to a head during a heated exchange between Kennedy and Doom last week and it became clear that the assembly would need to step in.
But Sebens and others at the meeting said the process that was used to address those issues was flawed.
During a public comment period toward the end of the meeting Tina Olsen, a borough employee, told assembly members that the circumstances around Kennedy’s termination were destabilizing.
“It worries me as a borough employee,” Olsen said. “Is this the way that we’re all going to start getting fired? It’s going to be really hard to hire people when they’re afraid of losing their job because of – who knows what happened?”
Sebens agreed.
“It’s a terrible blow to anybody to be fired basically for whatever reason,” he said. “But to be fired and not be able to defend yourself?”
He said he imagined it would be hard to find someone to replace Kennedy.
“Who are you going to get now to do this thankless job?” he said. “The stress involved with it. The long hours. The lack of support. It’s not worth it.”
Morphet said he is not sure how long it will take to replace Kennedy, but said her being publicly fired likely would not make it easier.
“The fact that she was a person with a professional pedigree, worked for the State of Alaska as a CPA, and I don’t know that it’s clear to the public why this happened. I think it’s unfortunate,” he said. “I think I would have given her a day in court in the executive session.”
Every assembly member present voted to fire Kennedy after the session.
Newly seated assembly member Mark Smith said he didn’t want to talk about the factors leading to that decision.
“I’m going to go home and pray on this one,” he said after the meeting was adjourned.
Deputy mayor Cheryl Stickler acknowledged that the whole situation was uncomfortable but a necessary part of being on the assembly.
“I think there was a bit of confusion at the beginning, on her part, and in what she was asking us if she wanted to be present or not – or did she want it public or not,” Stickler said. “So we just needed to move forward with this and, again, it was a very uncomfortable, very, very difficult position to be in for everyone involved.”