Mayor’s behavior becomes an issue at City Hall, as employees complain of angry outbursts

In many ways, Kit Kuhn is the perfect mayor. Genial, gregarious and outgoing, he loves mingling with crowds, cutting ribbons and pressing the flesh.

Behind the doors of Gig Harbor’s Civic Center, some employees say, Kuhn is an obsessive micromanager who is rude, abusive and prone to explosions of temper.

“He yells. He turns red in the face. He screams,” said Lindsey Sehmel, a former city planner. “It’s a temper tantrum if he can’t get his way.”

Halfway through Kuhn’s third year as mayor of Gig Harbor, there is an increasing undercurrent of anger and dismay in the Civic Center about his treatment of employees, especially women, and it is starting to bubble up in public.

Complaints and a payout

The city has quietly settled at least one discrimination complaint against the mayor, The Gateway has learned. It paid several thousand dollars to the city’s former tourism and marketing director, Karen Scott, who said she was loudly berated and bullied by the mayor, and told she should be a “cheerleader,” not a player, in a staff softball game.

The long-simmering issue of staff turnover rose to the surface last month with the sudden resignation of Nicole Jones-Vogel, the city’s parks manager, after one year on the job. She told at least one City Council member that the mayor had made it difficult to do her job.

Shortly afterwards, the union representing Gig Harbor police officers sent a letter to council members, accusing Kuhn of fostering a “totalitarian” regime that “radiates volatility, frustration, and exhaustion.”

‘Scary to be around’

The officers’ complaints echoed others by former employees who told The Gateway that Kuhn often ignores his own chain of command, meddles in the running of departments, discounts expert advice and loudly berates and belittles lower-level employees, including his own assistants.

“It’s not just women. He has created fear in everybody. In general, he’s just scary to be around,” said Sehmel, who is now the principal planner at Pierce Transit.

Grievances filed by employees against the city are piling up — as many as three dozen currently, some employees said. The city has about 100 employees. Asked if the number was correct, city administrator Bob Larson would say only that the city “has a process in place for our employees and their unions to raise grievances.” A union official did not return calls.

Last Thursday, the City Council met in executive session to discuss the issue. The mayor, who normally sits on the council, was asked not to be present. The agenda item read, “To receive and evaluate complaints or charges brought against a public officer or employee.”

Popular mayor

A retired jeweler, Kuhn was elected in 2017 on a platform of controlling the city’s exploding growth. It was a popular issue, and Kuhn won by a 70% majority over the incumbent, Jill Guernsey. Since then, he has presided over planning changes, including a housing moratorium, that sought to rein in what his supporters saw as runaway development.

The mayor gets high marks for his gregariousness with the public, his willingness to officiate at ribbon-cuttings and meet-and-greets, his unflagging promotion of the city and his work ethic. Though it’s supposedly a part-time job, Kuhn is at his desk nearly every day.

But city employees — and some council members — say the mayor can be difficult to work with.

Employees have described shouting matches in the mayor’s second-floor offices so loud they could be heard in the Police Department a floor below.

More than 20 key employees, including department heads and longtime supervisors, have quit or retired since Kuhn became mayor.

Besides Scott, Jones-Vogel and Sehmel, they include the planning director, Jennifer Kester; and the city engineer for 19 years, Steve Misiurak. Greg Foote, the city’s operation manager, took retirement after 32 years, and Kay Johnson, the city’s Information Technology manager, retired abruptly in December.

In a strong-mayor system like Gig Harbor’s, the mayor has considerable power to hire and fire. Some employees contend he uses that power to make their lives miserable.

“He rules by fear, by making people afraid for their jobs,” said Misiurak , the former city engineer.

Many of the present or former employees who spoke to The Gateway would not allow their names to be used, citing career concerns. Off the record, they spoke freely, and with some anger.

Kuhn declined to be interviewed or reply to written questions sent to him by email.

“Based on my belief that talking about employees or former employees is not helpful to running the city of Gig Harbor, I will not be providing any additional comment,” he said in an e-mail in January. A second request on Saturday received a similar response.

A nice guy with good ideas

Kuhn can be a puzzle, those who know him say.

“He can be a nice guy. He’s not a monster. He’s got some good ideas, and he obviously loves his city. But he has very poor hard skills,” said Sehmel, using shorthand for management experience.

Robyn Denson, who has served on the Parks Commission under Kuhn and is now on the City Council, said she has never had a problem with the mayor.

“I would say that my relationship with Mayor Kuhn has been positive,” she said. “He has always made time for me, and I feel comfortable sharing my opinions with him, even when I know he doesn’t agree.

“At the same time,” she added, “I definitely want staff to feel comfortable, and I would be concerned if they are not.”

It is not unusual for employees in any organization to dislike the boss. An argument can be made, as it was in an op-ed last week by Jeff Katke, a supporter of the mayor, that staff turnover is inevitable when a new mayor tries to shake things up.

“I can attest to the fact that changing the culture of an organization often results in people leaving,” said Katke, who is CEO of Metagenics, Inc., and was a major donor to Kuhn’s campaign. “People leaving during a culture change is not a symptom of ‘rampant disrespect,’ but rather a healthy improvement of the city’s culture which will lead to improved service to the citizens.”

Pompoms on the desk

It began with a pair of pompoms.

In June 2018, the mayor was chatting with employees about organizing a city softball team.

Karen Scott, the city’s tourism and marketing director, had been a college athlete. She asked if she could play.

“Mayor Kuhn turned to me and told me I could be a cheerleader,” Scott said in her complaint.

Shortly afterwards, Scott alleged later, a pair of pompoms appeared on her desk.

“This created a very uncomfortable work environment,” she wrote. “I felt bullied.”

The encounter, and others, led to a discrimination claim by Scott against the mayor, which the city settled with a monetary payout in May 2019. Details of the settlement were obtained by The Gateway in a public records request.

Scott, who resigned after 14 years with the city, declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement that was part of the settlement.

In her complaint, she described several other incidents, including one in which she was loudly berated by the mayor for failing to show up to photograph him at an event on her day off.

“He continued this for such a long period of time, that I got emotional, wept and was unable to speak,” Scott wrote. Both Wade Farris, the city administrator at the time, and Kamiel Borders, the human resources director, were present, she said, but neither intervened.

Investigation and payout

Scott’s claim resulted in an investigation by an outside attorney on behalf of the city’s insurer, the Association of Washington Cities. Neither the city nor the AWC would release the resulting report, citing attorney-client privilege.

The payment to Scott was relatively small — about $27,000 — and the city admitted no wrongdoing.

In a demand letter to the city, Scott’s attorney, Loyd Willaford, wrote that “we have spoken to multiple women who have worked with Mayor Kuhn over the past year. They all confirmed Ms. Scott’s account of this year-long history of sexist and demeaning behavior toward women by Mayor Kuhn.”

Willaford did not name the other women.

Kuhn declined to discuss the settlement, as did Borders.

No comment from HR

Borders also declined to say whether her department has taken any action to moderate the mayor’s behavior, or whether Kuhn has been advised or required to undergo counseling. She did not reply when asked if there had been any other complaints against the mayor resulting in settlements or monetary payouts.

“I will not be discussing City employees’ (current or former) personnel matters with the press,” she said in an email to The Gateway.

The city’s May 17, 2019, settlement agreement with Scott was signed by Farris, then the city administrator, who was forced to resign only two months later, after unspecified allegations that, according to the mayor, he “treated women differently than men.”

People inside the Civic Center were surprised by the allegation against Farris. Of the half-dozen women who spoke to The Gateway for this story, none said they had a problem with Farris. The person who is said to have complained has never been identified.

‘Those girls out front’

No one has accused the mayor of any overt sexual harassment. Rather, women in the Civic Center say, the mayor is dismissive and condescending toward women in professional roles.

“If a woman told him a disagreeable fact, he could discount it, because it came from a woman,” said Sehmel. “Attractive women got the worst from Kit,” she added. “He didn’t like it if anyone told him no. If someone attractive told him no, it was worse.”

In one anecdote repeated by several people — and included in the Scott complaint — the mayor once spoke of the two women on the planning department’s public desk as “those girls out front.”

Jennifer Kester, then the planning director, corrected him.

“Please don’t call my employees ‘girls,’“ Kester told the mayor, according to people who heard the conversation. “They are women.”

The mayor was livid at being corrected, these people said, and Kester was later summoned before the city’s human relations office and made to sign a statement promising to treat the mayor with greater respect. Ultimately, her job was downgraded and she resigned.

Kester, who is now the planning director for the city of Sea-Tac, declined to comment.

New mayor in a hurry

From the first, employees said, Kuhn was anxious to fulfill his campaign promises to slow the city’s runaway residential growth. But he often wanted to shortcut procedures, which could have subjected the city to lawsuits, and sometimes skirted state or federal rules, employees said.

“When you tell him, ‘Kit, you can’t do that,’ he loses it,” said Sehmel “His attitude is, ‘I don’t give a (expletive) what the law says, this is what I was elected for, and this is what we’re going to do.’ He’s very fond of quoting that 70 percent majority.”

Misiurak, the city engineer, said his experience was similar.

“Heaven help you if you challenged or rebuked the mayor on any of his decisions,” said Misiurak. “People became afraid for their jobs. Fear, that’s the environment he’s created and fostered at the city.”

Resumé time

It is not unusual, say planning professionals, for city planners to have to look for a new job when a mayor or council with a different philosophy takes over.

But the pressure on Kester and Sehmel, her senior planner, was particularly nasty, co-workers said, beginning with the election campaign, during which Kuhn intimated that city planners were too cozy with developers.

“During the election, the rhetoric, the talking points,” said Sehmel. “He took dedicated public servants, trying to do our best for the public, and he just ripped us apart, denigrating the value of our work.”

After winning the election, Kuhn told the Kitsap Sun pointedly that city employees “need to remember that they work for the people of Gig Harbor.”

“For six months, Jennifer worked really hard to create kind of a bubble around the planning staff, so we could have some normality,” said Sehmel. “Then the bubble was broken, and he started micro-managing everything. “

In the end, Kuhn engineered a reorganization of the planning staff, creating the new position of Community Development director and eliminating Kester’s job.

Sehmel took a job as planning director in Lincoln City, Oregon, and later moved on to Pierce County Transit, where she is now planning director.

A finger in every pie

Employees describe Kuhn as a micromanager. The mayor countermands and often bypasses his own department heads, employees complain, leaving confusion about who is in charge.

“What we’re witnessing is the death spiral of a micro-manager,” said former City Council member Michael Perrow.

Kuhn gets upset if experts on the staff, or even outside consultants, contradict his own ideas, employees said.

“When Kit is hyper-focused on his solution, he tends to dismiss rational thought,” said Sehmel, the former planner.

Misiurak, who had been city engineer for 19 years, said he suddenly found “each and every professional engineering decision and judgment called into question by the mayor.”

Micromanagement from the top has caused “a systemic breakdown,” said Misiurek. “Every engineering decision, every improvement project, has to go into a council work session. It’s a real bottleneck, and it’s making it hard to get anything done.”

At age 60, Misiurak resigned and took a job in British Columbia.

Rails for kids

Greg Foote, the public works operations supervisor, pulled the plug on a 32-year career with the city after tangling with Kuhn.

“The mayor doesn’t work with the chain of command,” said Foote. “He goes around his department heads. He wants to have his hands in everything.”

“He acts like a little mini-Trump. It’s his way or the highway. Not that other mayors don’t come in and try to change the world — I’ve seen quite a few come and go, but this guy was quite radical.”

For Foote, the last straw was being berated by the mayor for asking to put safety railings on the bleachers at the city’s sports park.

“It would have been a 5-foot fall, and we’re talking about kids,” he said. Foote asked for $15,000 to do the job.

“The mayor called me up and yelled at me for wasting his time,” Foote said. “He said the rails were too expensive, and besides, if anybody fell, the city’s insurance would cover it. In my 32 years with the city, I’d never been chewed out like that before — and for erring on the side of safety.”

“That’s when I said, ‘OK, I’m done,” Foote said. He retired shortly afterward.

Stanich stripes

Misiurak and Kuhn locked horns in 2018 over parking restrictions on Stanich Avenue, near where the mayor lived. Because it’s a steep street with a curve at the bottom, the engineering map showed a “red zone” where parking should not be allowed, on either side of Short Lane.

The mayor and his neighbors were annoyed because it removed parking spaces, Misiurek said. The mayor met him at the intersection, and they had a ferocious argument about reducing the red zone.

“I’m not leaving here until you reduce the red zone,” Misiurak said the mayor told him. To keep Kuhn happy, the engineer agreed to reduce the red striping by a few feet on each side.

But there was another uproar, this time over a painted yellow center line.

“It’s a steep street, which has numerous intersecting side streets, and limited sight distances,” said Misiurak, so he had a double-yellow stripe painted down the middle to restrict passing.

The mayor thought it was ugly.

“He just came unglued. He ordered a city crew to go out and have the striping ground out,” over the objections of both Misiurak and the city public works director.

The mayor declined to talk about either incident.

Council intervenes

The mid-July resignation of Jones-Vogel, the parks director, shocked and upset the City Council.

“I am truly frustrated and stymied at why our city keeps losing our talented employees,” said Council Member Le Rodenberg during a council meeting June 13.

Council Member Tracie Markley said in an interview, “She was a tremendous employee, and another in a whole string of major employees we have lost in the last couple of years, and I really need to know why this is happening.”

The council agreed to name a three-member committee, with Rodenberg as chair, to investigate staff morale, and if necessary, hire an outside consultant to conduct the survey. Rodenberg insisted that the consultant should report solely to the council, not to the mayor or to the city administrator.

The council was scheduled to take formal action on the proposal on Monday, Aug. 24.

Reach Kerry Webster at kwebster@mcclatchyservices.com

This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 12:00 AM.