Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s Election Commission appointee – who is being sued for trying to fire an internal critic – joked in a February e-mail about canning the city’s entire election staff.
“Can we fire everyone and hire an outside contractor? Who did the election in Iraq?” Wayne Vaden wrote his fellow election commissioners Feb. 24.
Vaden, Hickenlooper’s city clerk and recorder and lone appointee to the three- member election board, first said Thursday he didn’t remember writing the message, then recalled that he sent it “just for fun.”
“At that point in time, we were having a lot of staff bickering. It was horrible,” he said.
Vaden was named in a federal free- speech lawsuit filed this week by Election Commission employee Fred Sandoval. The suit says Vaden retaliated against Sandoval, calling for his firing after Sandoval said the city intentionally limited turnout in the May 3 election that approved a $378 million justice center.
Also named in the suit were Susan Rogers and Sandy Adams, the two elected members of the Denver Election Commission, as well as its executive director, Karon Hatchett.
Hatchett did not return phone calls about personnel problems in her office.
Her spokesman, Alan McBeth, this week found a draft of his own termination notice in an office meeting room. The letter slams McBeth for “being grossly negligent” in making “editorial comments” in an April 23 interview about the justice center.
McBeth contends his comments were fact, not opinion. As of Thursday, he had not formally been fired.
Vaden’s February quip came as he, Rogers and Adams were exchanging e-mails about employee grievances that long have plagued the department.
As several staffers tell it, discontent increased around the November election when, among other problems, the commission was late in mailing some 30,000 absentee ballots, resulting in an untold number of Denverites not voting.
Rogers e-mailed about a policy requiring that workers complain directly to commissioners rather than to Hatchett.
“People were concerned about Karon doing reprisals,” she wrote.
Rogers said she “vaguely” remembers Vaden’s comment about firing the whole staff, saying it was motivated by “frustration” over personnel problems.
Adams said she didn’t remember receiving Vaden’s e-mail but then said she “thought it was funny at the time.”
“Considering what we’re dealing with right now, nothing seems funny to me,” she said of the continuing staff woes.
Michael Bennet, Hickenlooper’s chief of staff, said Thursday he believes Vaden’s message expressed “his hope that the people at the Election Commission will get along with each other.”
Staff writer Susan Greene can be reached at sgreene@denverpost.com or 303-820-1589.