‘Miscarriage of justice.’ Manatee Commission is firing Cheri Coryea for doing her job | Opinion
“I was only following orders.”
That defense didn’t spare Nazi soldiers from being convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials following World War II. Even in wartime, soldiers are expected to disobey unlawful orders, the court said.
But what if the defense is: “I was only following orders for a lawful act?” And take the act out of a military, wartime context and put it into one of government bureaucracy. What if a government employee follows the orders of her boss(es) and is fired for doing so? Is that wrongful termination?
Lawyers doubtless could argue the finer legal points of labor law for hours, but in the court of public opinion it’s an easy verdict: Innocent. She keeps her job, and the boss(es) guilty of the miscarriage of justice would be fired. Except elected county commissioners only stand “trial” every four years – at the ballot box. And the Gang of Four bent on firing County Administrator Cheri Coryea, have three years and nine months before they face a “jury” of Manatee County voters.
Make no mistake: It is a terrible miscarriage of justice and abuse of power for the four commissioners to fire Coryea for the reasons they have cited. That is, she followed the request of two commissioners to schedule a special, early-morning meeting and sat in on it, as she does all meetings of commissioners. And she followed the direction of a 5-2 vote by the previous board last fall to complete the $32.5 million purchase of the Musgrave tract on State Road 64 East. That completed a long-range county plan to establish a Central County District Office Complex serving as a Sheriff’s Department Annex, Public Works warehouse and maintenance facility, and a transfer station for the Lena Road Landfill.
What if Coryea had declined to carry out the orders of her commissioner bosses? Indeed, they would have had grounds to accuse her of insubordination and to begin the process of replacing her. But you can’t put an employee into a lose-lose situation as this cadre of special-interest servants have done to Coryea and expect the public to applaud.
As the conspiring commissioners follow through on the threat, Coryea will be entirely justified in filing suit before the National Labor Relations Board for unjust termination, thus dragging the county into a legal quagmire that could cost taxpayers millions.
And for what? To satisfy the Developer Who Would Be King(maker), Carlos Beruff. Apparently controlling the majority of the board isn’t enough for Beruff; he also wants his own stooge as head of county administration, the better to advance his agenda for filling up every square inch of real estate with houses and stores, preferably developed by his company.
The commission’s plan to replace Coryea with a Beruff puppet brings to mind the well-known observation by Lord Acton, 19th Century British statesman and historian: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” While many voters may recognize that succinct truth about despotism in the current Manatee County government context, they may not be familiar with the sentence that follows: “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”
That, it seems, is where we are headed as a conscientious public employee is sacked for doing her job.
David Klement, former Editorial Page editor of the Bradenton Herald, is a writer who lives in East Manatee. His recently published book, “Conscience of the Community: Memoir of a Small-Town Journalist,” covers many local policy issues in the period 1977-2007.