An independent investigator found no evidence supporting Sen. Don Benton’s whistleblower complaint against County Manager Mark McCauley, public records show.
According to records obtained by The Columbian through a public records request — which do not mention Benton by name but match the complaint he filed in April — Trish Murphy of the Seattle firm Northwest Workplace Law found no evidence to “substantiate improper governmental action.”
The investigation was completed in late August, but records weren’t released to The Columbian until Friday.
Records show the contract with Northwest Workplace Law to do the investigation has cost the county $14,990 as of Sept. 23.
Benton could not be reached for comment Friday.
McCauley, meanwhile, was unsurprised by the results.
“That’s the outcome I expected,” he said. “I didn’t feel this whistleblower complaint was any threat at all. Just nice to see it in writing.”
Benton, a Republican state senator from Vancouver, filed the complaint just weeks before he was ousted from his job leading the county’s Environmental Services Department. Benton alleged in the complaint that McCauley mistreated Environmental Services employees, violated the Open Public Meetings Act with three Clark County councilors and retaliated against Benton for political reasons.
McCauley announced in April that he was dismantling the department, which Benton was appointed to head by Republican Councilors David Madore and Tom Mielke in 2013 without allowing others the opportunity to apply. McCauley estimated that dissolving Environmental Services and assigning its functions to other departments would save the county $1.26 million over the next 2½ years.
Benton and three others were laid off in the move.
Benton filed his complaint after the county council’s meeting on April 26, where Republican Councilors Julie Olson and Jeanne Stewart and Chair Marc Boldt, no party preference, voted to overturn Madore and Mielke’s decision in 2015 to declare as surplus 20 acres of land near Paradise Point State Park.
Benton claimed that McCauley in that meeting, and in separate emails to Madore, had asked him to prepare for the reversal of that decision on the grounds that a majority of the council had decided to reverse the sale. Benton alleged that McCauley had obtained that information by meeting with the councilors in violation of the Open Public Meetings Act.
But McCauley, Olson, Boldt and Stewart all told Murphy that there was no decision on the matter when McCauley asked Benton to prepare for the policy reversal. McCauley told Murphy in an interview that “part of the county manager’s job is to filter, distill and anticipate,” and that based on individual conversations he’d had with the three councilors, he believed they would want to reverse the earlier decision to sell the land.
In her report, Murphy said the chances that the four met behind closed doors in advance seemed “highly implausible and simply strains credulity,” according to the report.
Benton also accused McCauley of treating Environmental Services employees unfairly, of illegal financial impropriety and of political retaliation.
In no case, however, did Murphy find evidence supporting Benton’s accusations.
