Let go for refusing to break law, former Jackson County official wins big settlement
Jackson County is paying a former employee $727,000 to drop the lawsuit he filed after he was laid off after refusing an order to spend taxpayer money illegally.
The amount is believed to be the most the county has paid this decade to settle an employment-related complaint involving a single claimant. Six years ago, the county paid twice that much to settle an employment case, but the amount was split five ways.
Scott Jacoby, the former deputy finance director, was put on leave in early 2018 and terminated that fall after he was caught in the middle of a dispute between his boss, County Executive Frank White, and County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker.
At the time, the county legislature had recently stripped White of control over the $22 million that the COMBAT (Community Backed Anti-Crime Tax) brings in annually. Legislators, instead, put Baker in charge of the sales tax because they objected to how White’s administration had used the funds for things that had nothing to with the program’s twin goals of fighting illegal drug use and violent crime.
Among those expenditures was the use of COMBAT funds to help buy a pickup truck for the exclusive use of White’s chief of staff, Caleb Clifford. COMBAT money also went to pay salaries and expenses of other employees who had little or nothing to do with the program, according to an audit report released in September of this year.
White said the legislature’s December 2017 decision was invalid — an argument he later lost in court — and he tried to continue using COMBAT funds to pay the salaries of aides whose positions the legislature defunded in the 2018 budget.
Chief administrative officer Ed Stoll put Jacoby on paid leave a day after the 15-year county employee refused to follow administration orders to make those illegal payments. For the next nine months, he continued collecting his $98,000-a-year salary without having to do any work. A sheriff’s deputy delivered a discharge notice to his home on Sept. 24, 2018.
He filed suit against the county last spring.
Legislators approved the settlement after a brief closed session Monday morning and declined comment. The county’s legal settlements typically include a non-disclosure clause that prevents either party from talking about the case.
A search of public records on the county’s legistar.com database could find no settlement in the past two decades of an employment-related case involving a single employee that even came close to Jacoby’s $727,000 settlement.
In 2014, the county spent $1.4 million to settle the racial and sexual harassment claims of five women who worked in the assessment department. One woman got half the total , or $27,000 less than the amount Jacoby and his attorney, Carrie Brous, will share. The other women got settlements ranging from $75,000 to $400,000.
Brous did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This story was originally published December 9, 2019 at 3:51 PM.
