Jefferson County to resolve grievance hearing with four fired highway department employees Tuesday

Four men who were fired from their roles on the Jefferson County highway department in November are protesting their termination in a rare grievance hearing against the county. On Tuesday, the Jefferson County commissioners will present their final conclusions in the case. Here’s a recap of where things stand before Tuesday’s final proceedings.

“We feel like we’ve been run over.”

That was the sentiment Terry Blas, Jefferson County’s assistant highway supervisor, shared with four members of the county’s roads department when they were fired just before Thanksgiving of last year. Now, two months later, those four former county employees are protesting their termination in a grievance hearing against the county.

The highway department alleges these four workers - Roben Ruhnke, Danny Meyer, Steve McNitt and Ron Bray - improperly used company vehicles and company time and did not take time off when they tried to schedule a meeting with the county commissioners on November 18.

The department has access to GPS data showing the four men met in Harbine around 7:30 that morning and were standing outside the Jefferson County courthouse in Fairbury when Blas and fellow highway supervisor Jason Eyer left their scheduled meeting with the commissioners around 9:30. Blas said he received an anonymous call asking why some of his employees were standing around downtown – when he and Eyer returned to the courthouse around 11 AM, the four workers were still there.

Blas testified that two other department members contacted him separately on that day, inquiring about a union meeting the four county employees in question had set up for that morning. Those two workers had taken time off – one was already scheduled to be off that day – to attend that meeting – but that meeting never happened.

One week later, on November 25, Blas and Eyer held meetings with the four employees, two at a time, and told them they were all being terminated, citing misuse of county time and county vehicles, falsifying timesheets, and insubordination.

The four workers believe they have been wrongfully terminated. Their claim in January’s grievance hearing was that they all met in Fairbury on the morning of November 18 because they had tried to reserve space on the commissioners’ regular weekly agenda. Bray testified that Blas and Eyer had received emails from county commissioner Danielle Schwab outlining complaints about the quality of the road work performed by Bray, Ruhnke, Meyer and McNitt, but that no one – neither the commissioners nor the supervisors – had ever shared that feedback with the workers directly. Their stated goal was to meet with the commissioners to learn what the criticisms were and how to improve – but they were never able to meet with the county board because they were never placed on the weekly agenda.

"We had made this appointment three weeks ahead of time, everything was kosher,” McNitt said in his testimony. “As far as I knew we had the right to be there, we had the right to take the paycuts, I mean...we're county employees going to talk to the bosses [the commissioners]. Why are we in trouble?"

Blas testified that those complaints were not the reason any of the four employees were fired, and that all of them had received previous conduct warnings.

Bray said he first knew they had all committed a fireable offense “the day they terminated us.”

“The only thing I see that I did wrong is that I didn’t notify Jason or Terry [about going to the meeting],” Bray said in his testimony. “I wanted to have a meeting with the commissioners about the complaints that we’re supposedly getting, and I would like to know why we’re not being informed of them. And if Jason and Terry aren’t telling us about it and the commissioners are getting the complaints, they can come to us. That’s what we wanted to ask.”

“We were going to have a discussion about this. If I had got a response from Ms. Schwab, none of us would be here today. All she had to do was pick up the phone and call me back, that was it,” McNitt said. “And because of that, we’re up here doing what we’re here to do today: trying to get to the bottom of why Terry Blas and Jason Eyer will not tell us what’s wrong with our areas. Danny [Meyer] and I have gone in there after every rain and asked about what roads are getting called on, never any [response]."

Blas testified on behalf of the highway department; Eyer did not. All four grievants testified on their behalf, as did Roger Behrends, who retired in April after more than 40 years on the team, including the last few as teammates of the four workers who were fired. IBEW lawyer John Corrigan and Behrends cited an April meeting Behrends set up with the commissioners to inform them of his retirement later that month – he never sought out approval from the highway department to have that meeting, nor did he clock out of work during that time. But the county never questioned him about it.

“These employees that got fired, based on what you know about the facts, you’ve been sitting here all day, do you think they’re being adversely treated?” Corrigan asked.

“Yes I do,” Behrends answered.

“Why do you think that?”

“To me, if anything, they should’ve got a couple a days off or something. But I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to go to the [county board] meeting on county time.”

The county board is acting as the “jury” in this hearing, despite a motion from the grievants to force them to recuse. The commissioners maintain they had no knowledge of or involvement in the November firings, and are thus able to remain impartial and now determine whether or not those terminations should be upheld.

The first phase of the grievance hearing on January 27 ran from 1 PM to after 6 before the board, with county attorney Joe Casson acting as the arbiter, declared a recess. Now, two weeks later, the process enters its final phase. On Tuesday morning, the group will reconvene inside the Jefferson County courthouse, where both sides will present their closing arguments, and the commissioners will come to their final conclusions. The proceedings begin at 9:30 AM and are open to the public.