Don't pay, Council

Former Baker City Manager Steve Brocato is not legally entitled to severance pay.

But he thinks he deserves it.

The City Council should not oblige him.

Not with the taxpayers’ money.

By negotiating a severance deal with Brocato, whose lawyer recently sent the city a letter demanding compensation for the former manager, the Council would set a potentially costly, and possibly permanent, precedent.

Like his predecessors, Brocato took the city manager job knowing he had no employment contract, and that according to the city charter a majority of the Council could fire him at any time, for any reason.

The Council fired Brocato, by a 4-3 vote, on June 9.

In her letter to the city, Brocato’s attorney, Anne E. Denecke, writes that Brocato is seeking a severance package “following his highly suspect and sudden termination from employment as the City Manager of Baker City.”

That sounds pretty sinister. But the words “highly suspect” and “sudden,” besides being subjective, are, in the context of Brocato’s firing, irrelevant.

The city charter doesn’t put any conditions on the Council’s authority to fire the city manager. It says the Council can do so “with or without cause.”

Conspicuously absent from the charter is any reference to the firing of a city manager being either “highly suspect” or sudden.”