MOSES LAKE – Before resigning from his position as Moses Lake’s human resources director, Carlos Salazar raised concerns about whether top officials had given raises to themselves and favored departments.

According to letters between Salazar, his attorney and city officials, Salazar had concerns that then-Interim City Manager Kevin Fuhr withheld documents from city council members in order to secure pay raises for himself and favored departments. Salazar was placed on leave shortly thereafter due in part to his conduct while raising those concerns.

For his part, Fuhr said that the salary adjustments were long-needed, across the board and based on sound reasoning. For years, wages for city classified staff hadn’t kept up with compensation offered by comparable cities, posing issues for recruiting and retaining staff, Fuhr said in an interview Monday.

In June, human resources consulting firm Condrey and Associates presented a salary study the city had requested, presenting different options to reclassify staff positions and to increase wages across the board.

In all, the salary schedule that city officials chose to work with would have increased wages by over $670,000 per year. But, Fuhr said, while the salary schedule produced by the consultants factored in experience to determine salaries, it only looked at experience with the city.

This failed to resolve the issue of recruiting and retaining qualified staff from outside of the city, where their previous experience would not result in higher pay, Fuhr said.

He pointed to himself in his capacity as police chief as example. Though interim city manager at the time of this conflict, Fuhr has since returned to his permanent role as police chief, a position he began in 2016. Fuhr stated that he and police Captain David Sands both started their careers in 1992. Sands would be paid more than him if he was promoted to police chief, Fuhr said, because the bulk of Fuhr’s experience was from before he was recruited to the city.

He also said that, while police chiefs usually make more money than fire chiefs, he made less money than Fire Chief Brett Bastian because Bastian had worked with the city since 1992.

Fuhr said he and other department heads met to discuss recommending further wage increases, above what the Condrey study had suggested, based on that outside experience. That “director’s adjustment” recommended an over $115,000 increase over the consultant’s suggestion, spread across around 35 positions, a total of around $787,000 above previous wages. Around 88 percent of the suggested director’s adjustment benefited the Police Department, Municipal Services Department and Parks and Recreation Department, which account for about 65 percent of classified staff.

For some of the lowest-paid employees, the adjustments meant massive salary increases, while a small handful saw only nominal increases. On average, Fuhr said, employees saw a 12.5 percent increase.

Fuhr himself got a raise of over $15,000 as police chief, or about 13.7 percent, around $6,000 of which was based on the director’s adjustment. This raise intentionally put Fuhr on par with Bastian’s salary, Fuhr said Monday.

Believing he was sufficiently familiar with the original study, Fuhr presented the recommended wage increases to the city council himself without the aid of the consultant group.

But, according to documents released by the city, Salazar believed that Fuhr intentionally kept documents from the city council in order to secure those raises, namely a spreadsheet showing which employees in which departments would see which raises.

In late November, Salazar sought to bring his concerns anonymously to the city council, fearing reprisal if he expressed them openly, asking the council to investigate. He enlisted the aid of a city employee to deliver an unsigned note to Council Member Dean Hankins, who told Hankins the note came from Salazar, according to documents from the city.

Hankins then raised the issue with Fuhr, Salazar and City Attorney Katherine Kenison. In that meeting, Hankins asked Salazar if he had requested the city employee deliver the note to him, and Salazar said he hadn’t, then said that the city employee must have been the one lying, according to documents.

He later admitted to lying about the issue, saying that he believed that he would be punished for raising his concerns. In a letter to the city, Salazar later wrote that Hankins said in their meeting that “he did not like liars” and wanted the person who wrote the note to be fired.

After the meeting, Salazar told the city employee to delete text messages from him regarding the incident, which he later stated in a letter to the city was an attempt to protect the employee from getting in trouble.

In early December, Salazar admitted to Fuhr and Kenison that he had in fact asked the city employee to deliver the message and had lied about it previously. Partway into the meeting, Salazar, believing Kenison was not present to represent his interests, asked to have an attorney present before answering further questions. Fuhr reportedly refused, and told Salazar he was being placed on leave.

In a pre-disciplinary letter dated Dec. 6, Fuhr wrote that he had placed Salazar on leave due to his previous dishonesty, though Salazar would write back claiming it had in fact been because he had stopped answering questions without an attorney present.

In addition, Fuhr wrote in his Dec. 6 letter that Salazar had also failed to adequately perform his duties by not bringing employee concerns, including regarding the salary study, up through the proper channels, which would have been the interim city manager.

However, Fuhr said that while he believed he had given Salazar no reason to believe Fuhr would punish Salazar for speaking out, if Salazar did not trust Fuhr he could have gone to Kenison or the mayor and did not.

Salazar categorically denied failing to perform his duties, saying that to the extent he had not raised issues with Fuhr, it was due to Fuhr’s disinterest when he attempted to broach concerns.

In a rebuttal sent to the city in January, Salazar wrote that while he regretted his previous dishonesty, he believed Fuhr had violated the same policies by withholding information from the city council “so he could get the new pay plan approved.”

Fuhr rejected the claim and said that he had withheld the spreadsheet with individual employees’ names because he did not want the document to become public record, believing it would violate the privacy of the employees.

He also said that Hankins had come to him with the concerns raised by Salazar’s anonymous note, and that the council member had been satisfied with Fuhr’s explanation of the salary adjustment and his omission of the detailed spreadsheet at the earlier council meeting.

Though Salazar had previously expressed interest in being able to retain his position with the city, he resigned Friday, effective immediately. The Herald reached out to Salazar’s attorney Thursday but did not receive a response before deadline Tuesday. The salary schedule Fuhr had brought before the city council has since been adopted with only small adjustments from the earlier proposal, according to Fuhr.

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6745332-Fuhr-s-Letter-to-Salazar.html

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6745333-Salazar-s-Attorney-Response.html

NOTE: City officials state they did not receive this letter, dated Dec. 31, until mid-January. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6745334-Salazar-s-Rebuttal.html