Citizen Review Editorial ~
Recently, the “Cancel Culture”* demanded the resignation of Sequim City Councilor Mike Pence, claiming that he had misrepresented his work experience while employed at the City of Liberty, Missouri. This was reported on the air at KONP and in the pages of the Peninsula Daily News (PDN) as news stories. Both reports contain statements from current and former City of Liberty employees who seem to make the case that Mr. Pence did indeed falsify his resume. Since Mr. Pence was appointed to the Sequim City Council by a majority of his fellow councilors, based in part on his resume, it would seem at first glance that demands that he resign are fair.
The Citizen Review will not be so quick to judge. Looking more closely at the two articles, several red flags pop up. Their main source of information is a retired employee who was, at one time, Pence’s supervisor. Two currently active employees, according to the articles, are cited, one for each article. However, only one of these employees is directly quoted. The other is only obliquely referenced.
According to KONP, Susan Cox, identified by KONP as the City’s Assistant Director of Human Resources, “confirms that Pence was never the Director of Public Works but a Maintenance Supervisor.” As the article continues, she “further points out that Pence’s claim of being responsible for supervision and development of water and sewer departments would not have been part of his job description.” On the other hand, the PDN article provides the only direct quote from a city employee, Beth Vanderhoorn (also spelled Vanderhooven in the article), identified as the “city recruitment coordinator”. She is directly quoted, “He was not the director of public works, nor was he ever an interim or anything.” Again, note the decisive character of her remarks.
The Citizen Review reached out to the City of Liberty Director of Human Resources and Risk Management, Amy C. Blake, IPMA-SCP, SHRM-SCP. We asked her several questions regarding the timeline of Mr. Pence’s tenure at Liberty. She responded via email: “In order to validate information from the beginning of Mr. Pence’s career, we will need to obtain his personnel file which is now stored offsite.” She further stated that this process could take several weeks as the employee who regularly does this is on extended medical leave. Note that according to KONP, Ms. Blake’s assistant, Susan Cox was able to state definitively that Pence was “never” a Director of Public Works without having the benefit of those same offsite records so essential to Ms. Blake. Before Ms. Blake is willing to make an on the record statement, she must see those records.
According to her Linked In page, Ms. Cox’s tenure of employment with the City of Liberty began in 2011. Mike Pence had separated from City employment in 2009. Obviously, given the two year gap, Ms. Cox would never have encountered Mr. Pence on the job nor had any reason to process any paperwork pertaining to him. Yet, without ever knowing Mr. Pence, and deprived of access to the precious offsite archives, she can say conclusively and with much authority that Mr. Pence never held that title: something her superior is unwilling to say.
Ms. Vanderhooven (correct spelling) does not appear in any directory or organizational chart on the City website. The Citizen Review was unable to find Ms. Vanderhoorn listed by name or by job title in any directory or organization chart on the City of Liberty website. There is no LinkIn profile for a Beth Vanderhoorn nor could we find a Facebook page that would definitively identify with the Beth Vanderhoorn cited in the PDN. We did find, in browsing archival minutes of the City Council, her name mentioned as in attendance on several occasions: once in 2018 as Human Resources/Administration Specialist, and twice in 2020 as Recruitment Coordinator. We do not know whether or not her period of employment overlapped that of Mr. Pence.
Which brings us to the ex-supervisor, Steven Hansen, who retired from the city in 2016 and took a job with Emery Sapp & Sons, a government infrastructure contractor. Mr. Hansen’s current title is “design-build advisor“, which most likely means government marketing back to the people for whom he used to work.
His opening statement is loaded with meaning, “(Pence) has misrepresented himself and he has been less than truthful and I have no idea what his motive is.” Some 12 years after Mr. Pence’s separation from the City of Liberty and 5 years after his own retirement, in talking about events that took place 30 years ago, Mr. Hansen is quite comfortable directly calling Pence a liar and worse: a liar without cause to lie, in other words, a pathological liar. It takes a special kind of animus to make a statement such as that. This becomes especially clear when one realizes that his statement is not relevant to the conversation. He did not need to make it to confirm or deny Pence’s credentials.
As his former supervisor, Mr. Hansen should be in a position to provide factual information concerning Mr. Pence’s actual job descriptions during his tenure. Mr. Hansen declined to do so, choosing instead to provide inflammatory vague chatter about Mr. Pence being demoted and Mr. Pence being unhappy about that. A word such as demoted is loaded with built-in meaning, traditionally (and often legally) interpreted as referring to formal, documented action being taken against the employee. However, in using that word, demoted (twice) rather than a neutral alternative such as downgraded, Mr. Hansen chose to disparage Mr. Pence without directly accusing him of those performance failures which would have to be thoroughly documented if he were demoted. Again, we need to see those pesky archives.
The Citizen Review believes that there is much more to this story. The normal procedure for twenty-first century Human Resources (HR) Departments is for the Director of HR to state that, “Yes Mr. Pence worked here from 1988 to 2009. He departed under good terms. Thank you for your inquiry.” However, in this case, we have two junior members of the HR staff making statements way beyond the standard HR response and well beyond their personal knowledge. We now know that they did so without proper documentation in hand. Did they also do so without proper authority? Did somebody instruct them as to what they should say? If so, who and why? We have a former director of a public works department (in name only; in reality it is just a City Roads Department) who also goes well beyond the required answer to call his former employee a pathological liar and more.
The Citizen Review will ask the necessary questions and keep asking until we find the truth. We invite the reader to stay tuned for additional work in this series.
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*There is no single accepted definition of cancel culture, but at its worst, it is about unaccountable groups successfully applying pressure to punish someone for perceived wrong opinions…The victim ends up losing their job or is significantly harmed in some way well beyond the discomfort of merely being disagreed with. (Forbes)
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