Duscha gets satisfactory evaluation but bristles at 'lies, rumors and intimidation'

Longview's interim city manager pens blistering letter directed at three council members who opposed his appointment; private investigator finds no evidence of wrongdoing by councilors

Interim Longview City Manager Jim Duscha received satisfactory scores and long lists of accomplishments and areas for improvement in a City Council evaluation conducted late last summer.

City Council members Kalei LaFave and Erik Halvorson declined to join the other five councilmembers in signing the evaluation. LaFave and Halvorson did not respond to a request for an explanation.

The evaluation itself is something of a sideshow to Duscha’ s vitriolic, 5,000-word response. In it, he claims he was “subjected to hostile, offensive and intimidating comments from three council members” who opposed his appointment.

“I cannot begin to tell you how time consuming it is to deal with the amount of lies, rumors and misinformation that was flying around,” Duscha wrote, using words like “vicious” and “egregious.”

The September 26 letter reveals just how much bad blood continues to boil between Duscha and Councilwomen Angie Wean, MaryAlice Wallis, and Ruth Kendall, even though City Council relations have improved in recent months.

Duscha, it was revealed, had filed a hostile work environment claim against the councilwomen. According to the city, an independent investigator found no evidence of wrongdoing to support Duscha’s claims.

It was not clear Thursday whether Duscha will pursue the matter further, possibly through a lawsuit. He declined to answer that question and several others that I emailed him Wednesday night, although he did answer a few others.

The city attorney advised council members on Thursday not to comment on the evaluation or the letter.

This embroglio is the latest fallout from the council’s 4-3 decision in March to fire City Manager Kris Swanson without cause. Without any kind of systematic public review, councilors LaFave, Halvorson, Keith Young and Mayor Spencer Boudreau immediately selected Duscha as interim manager at the same meeting. No other candidates or alternatives were considered.

This conflict has led to staff resignations, a lawsuit alleging the council majority violated the state Open Public Meetings Act, and escalating city expenses for legal costs, budget and legal consultants, and employee severance payments. The turmoil is a distraction while the city tries to address its long-term financial crisis, but at least for now it’s on course to adopt next year’s budget on time.

I obtained a copy of the evaluation and Duscha’s letter though a State Open Records Act request that I filed September 5 and which the city fulfilled on Wednesday.

“I am constantly thrown under the bus, lied about and slandered for no reason other than certain council members did not get their way.”

—Jim Duscha, Longview’s interim city manager

The amount of hostility expressed in these documents makes it plain that the council, after several months’ delay, made the right decision to search for a permanent city manager to replace Swanson. A reconciliation seems impossible.

Duscha, who retired as the city’s police chief in 2020, reportedly announced at a Rotary meeting recently that he will not seek appointment to the permanent city manager’s post. However, through city spokeswoman Angela Abel, he said Wednesday he has not decided whether to seek the post. He did not answer my emailed question on this subject Thursday.

A national search began November 1 and the application period closes on November 22, Abel said. It remains to be seen if all this conflict dampers the number of applicants, a concern Duscha himself raised in his letter.

The city manager is the only city employee hired by and answerable to the City Council, which conducts an annual review. All other staff report to the city manager and his/her subordinate department heads.

The council ranked Duscha in 11 areas on a 1 to 5 scale, with 5 being excellent, 3 satisfactory and 1 unacceptable.

It’s pretty easy to see from the tone and conflicting nature of the comments that the review contains a good deal of political bias reflecting council divisions.

The categories include job knowledge, reliability, communication, initiative and creativity, planning and organization, and cooperation. Duscha’s scores ranged from a low of 2.8 for productivity to a high of 3.7 for decision-making judgment.

His composite score was 3.2, a solid “satisfactory” rating. Swanson scored a 4.34 in her only evaluation, conducted in August 2023 by the previous city council. She now is the city manager for Battle Ground.

Duscha’s review also includes 25 anonymous comments by council members listing his accomplishments, 20 comments expressing areas of improvement, and eight suggesting professional goals.

The lists contain some redundancy — no surprise because council members rated Duscha individually, not collectively. And it’s pretty easy to see from the tone and conflicting nature of the comments that the review contains a good deal of political bias reflecting council divisions.

Duscha won praise for hiring and recruiting a new IT director, fire chief, and interim city attorney and finding consultant expertise to develop the city budget. He also received praise for promoting Chris Collins to assistant city manager and retaining Ken Hash to serve as community development director. He also got credit for calming city staff after the Swanson-related upheaval and for being open to new ideas, meeting one-on-one with council members and keeping a calm and professional demeanor.

Criticisms revolved around three central themes: Duscha delegates too much work to subordinates; that staff morale is low; and that he does not communicate well with the council and the public. Several comments question whether he has the expertise needed to run the city. One comment chides him for dredging up old news about the troubled handling of federal grant for the Highlands area police station just to “discredit certain individuals.”

Even though he considered a 3.2 rating “a win,” Duscha let loose a 9-page, single -spaced fusillade in response to the evaluation, saying he knew it would be “slanted.”

During his tenure he’d seen “dysfunction and hate. I am constantly thrown under the bus, lied about and slandered for no reason other than certain council members did not get their way.”

He notes that he never fired anyone despite widespread rumors that he was going to be the council’s hatchet man, and he never had time to prove himself in a toxic environment. (Assistant City Manager Ann Rivers and City Attorney Dana Gigler resigned after agreeing to severance packages with Duscha. IT manager David Wallis — husband of Councilwoman MaryAlice Wallis — resigned in April. An assistant city clerk and the city’s only planner, Mac Kosar, also resigned.)

Duscha objected to the innuendo he said was implied when council members questioned whether Councilwoman LaFave — who nominated Duscha for the interim manager position and has been his most vocal council supporter — should vote on his appointment because of their “relationship.”

“I will not put into words what they were implying because it was so disgusting and hurtful,” Duscha wrote. He declined my question to describe their connection.

He objected that Councilwomen Wean and Wallis, when he was up for council approval, brought up his cover up and gentle disciplining of a school resource officer for inappropriately texting a student in 2014. He called it an attempt to “slander and discredit me.” Other officials were in on the disciplinary decision, he said.

On Wednesday — a day before receiving the legal advisory to refrain from comment — Councilwoman Ruth Kendall said she ‘“was in shock” when she read Duscha’s reply.

She specifically challenged one of Duscha’s accusations that she, Wallis and Rivers, the former assistant manager, conspired to get him fired. (Politically, Kendall and Wallace would not have had the votes to do so.)

“I did talk with Ann a few times, but I did not meet with her to plan (Duscha’s) ouster. We talked about a lot of miscellaneous things,” she said, calling Duscha’s allegation “total hearsay.”

“I made an effort to try to work with him,” but since Duscha submitted his evaluation letter in late September, ”I have been reticent to meet with the city manager one on one.”

— Longview Councilwoman Ruth Kendall

Kendall said that the way Duscha was hired was “not smooth. We had no vetting process and the minority members (of the council) had never talked with him or had a chance to meet with him and never saw a resume. There were a lot of questions and doubt about him in my mind. (Duscha) should not have been surprised” at the reaction to his appointment.

In his email, Duscha said he was “publicly vetted and heavily scrutinized at several council meetings prior to the acceptance of this position.” But this mischaracterizes the rushed, haphazard and highly charged way this came up and how the council decided to hire him immediately after firing Swanson. There was no thorough or deliberate process here.

Duscha also said by email that he was unaware of the hot-button nature of the debate and took the job because he wanted to help the city.

“Longview is too good a city to let slip away into decay. After 42 years in law enforcement, taking on challenges is nothing new to me,” he said in the email.

(I had reported the effort brewing against Swanson and the council majority’s intention to appoint Duscha nearly three weeks before the council actually took action. Duscha said he does not read The Daily News or social media.)

Kendall said she met with Duscha multiple times, sometimes with LaFave, to make suggestions about city issues.

“I made an effort to try to work with him,” Kendall said, but since he has submitted his evaluation letter in late September, ”I have been reticent to meet with the city manager one on one.”

The council has agreed to work with Duscha until a new manager is aboard, she said.

“I think the council has been making progress in working together as a team. And I felt that when the letter came out it was an intent to divide us again into the 3-4 split. That is very unfortunate.”

Duscha said by email that “my continued goal is keeping staff morale up and being a bridge between the city and the council.”

Release of the evaluation and letter prompted David Wallis, the city’s former IT director, to speak out for the first time since he left the city to work for Lower Columbia College on May 1. The college approached him when officials saw the turmoil in the city, he said, reporting that LCC’s was one of two unsolicited offers to hire him away from the city.

“Duscha did not understand his role and was not prepared at all”

— David Wallis, former Longview IT director

In his evaluation letter, Duscha said Wallis (he didn’t actually use his name) “left soon after I arrived, and he said to my face he was a Kris Swanson fan and not a fan of mine. He also said if I fired him he would fight it and sue me. This from an at-will employee. Why did he think I was going to fire him, and who told him that?”

By phone call Wednesday night, Wallis disputed Duscha’s account. He met Duscha three times, he said, emphasizing in the first meeting that he would be happy to work for him if Duscha brought competency and ethical behavior to the job. Duscha told him he was “not a hatchet man” and was not there to fire him. The closed-door meeting ended amicably, according to Wallis.

At the time, Wallis said, Duscha told him he liked to “lead by wandering around” and visiting with staff. He told Wallis that Swanson had reportedly been too aloof. Wallis said he disagreed and considered Swanson highly competent, Wallis recollected.

During the next few weeks he found Duscha unprepared for meetings to discuss upcoming council meeting agendas. “He did not understand his role and was not prepared at all,” Wallis said.

Wallis, the husband of Councilwoman MaryAlice Wallis, was in the midst of developing a “strategic operations plan” to evaluate the effectiveness of city operations for budgeting purposes. Duscha was interested in the effort, which Wallis described in a staff meeting in the city manager’s office, but then Duscha asked Wallis if he was satisfied so far with his performance as interim city manager.

“I told him he had big shoes to fill” because he thought highly of Swanson, and that “the jury is still out” about Duscha’s leadership, Wallis said. He said he believes Duscha took exception to his comparison to Swanson.

Duscha declined my request to discuss Wallis’s remarks.

All this conflict could have been avoided had Mayor Spencer Boudreau and the new council members elected a year ago — Halvorson, LaFave and Young — not come into office with a zealous intent to “clean house,” as some of the new majority have called it. They never took the time to evaluate Swanson fairly or thoroughly. They ignored ample public advice not to act rashly.

There were many alternatives to hiring Duscha — and perhaps, too, there were ways to justify hiring him — if only the council majority had listened and not rushed. The foursome had no mandate because turnout in the 2023 council elections was low and they kept their plans hidden until the last minute.

I still don’t think Duscha was the best choice. However, the lesson to learn here is that the best decisions usually arrive from open and honest consensus building — not fiat, arrogance and haste.

The city is now paying the price for the council majority’s stubborn insistence on having its way. It is clear that this conflict is irreconcilable. Let’s hope it does not thwart the path to hiring a new city manager and establishing a better path forward.