Published in the Jun 19 Leader.
Be afraid, taxpayers. Be very afraid. Chet Pleban might be circling – once again.
The wrongful dismissal lawyer’s latest foray into Jefferson County is in one of his favorite lairs – Arnold.
The man who helped long-ago Fox superintendent Diana Bourisaw recover $373,000 after the school board fired her, has returned to the scene of the slime – the Internet trash talk case involving Dianne Critchlow, Fox’s most recent about-to-be-former superintendent.
Critchlow, for those who have been on vacation or in isolation, is the supe whose home was identified as the resting place of a computer that aimed nasty Internet comments at critics of Critchlow and the Fox district.
The third-highest-paid superintendent in Missouri, Critchlow was earning $260,598 annually when she went out on paid medical leave recently about the time the lawyer for the three aggrieved critics discovered, with help of a court order, that most of the anonymous comments originated at her house.
Yep, they’re suing.
Last week Critchlow’s administrator husband, Jamie, was fired by the Fox Board of Education, and Dianne Critchlow was approved for an early retirement that would pay her about $130,000 in October. That payment is from a soon-to-be-discontinued early retirement incentive program at Fox. Using accumulated leave, she’ll collect her regular salary until then.
Pleban, who does not return phone calls to this newspaper, made some noise last week in the great metropolitan newspaper to the north suggesting that just because Dianne Critchlow has the option to retire doesn’t mean that she will.
Taxpayers should be afraid because Critchlow, like Bourisaw, was near the beginning of a three-year contract. In addition to this year’s $260,598, she was scheduled to make $267,468 in the next budget year and $274,338 the year after that.
If she doesn’t retire, does the school owe her that money? Given Pleban’s history of successfully extracting payments for dethroned school and city bigwigs in Jefferson County, you never know.
■ In 2005, the city of Arnold settled a four-year-long case with fired former Police Chief Dale Fredeking that cost the city $135,000 from the police pension fund. The ex-chief also got $40,000 from the city’s insurance carrier, and the city paid about $125,000 in legal fees.
Pleban was his lawyer.
■ In 2009, former Windsor superintendent Rudy Duran got a $412,500 settlement to go away. Want to guess who his lawyer was?
OK, I’ll tell you. Chet Pleban.
■ In 2011, the city of Festus parted ways with former city administrator Terry Draper. He sued and the case is still in the court system. Yes, Chet Pleban is his lawyer, too.
■ In May of this year, Pleban won a $60,000 settlement for former Arnold Councilman Ken Moss who had sued the city of Arnold for defamation.
What I want to know is, has Pleban dedicated a Jefferson County Wing in his manse? If no, then why not?
If there is a high-profile wrongful termination suit to be brought, Pleban is the highest-profile lawyer in that specialty. The man is savvy with the media – he knows how to work television and some print reporters who will tell the story in a light that is favorable to his clients.
He even gets newspapers he won’t talk to, to write about him! Now that’s savvy. That’s even better than a full-page ad on the back of the phone book!
Dianne Critchlow has the biggest salary by far of the four Fox administrators who were identified as being connected to the sliming. One of them, her husband, has been fired. The other two, Dan and Angela Baker, were paid less and were on one-year contacts, so the opportunity for recovering salary would seem to be smaller. They remain on paid administrative leave from Fox.
So there sits the Fox Board of Education, possibly now in a second set of crosshairs.
The first is being leveled by the public, angry at the high salaries paid to administrators who would allegedly engage in such juvenile behavior, potentially at great legal, fiscal and reputational expense to the district.
The district’s newly hired chief financial officer, former Arnold City Administrator John Brazeal (who did NOT hire Chet Pleban when he voluntarily left the city’s employ), has inadvertently thrown some gas on the fire.
Just when the masses were about to storm the castle walls over Slimegate, Brazeal reported to the board that the district ran a $5 million deficit this fiscal year, spending down its reserves by about a third, and that its salary scale is out of whack compared with comparable districts.
The second set of crosshairs could be those on the finely sighted weapon of Chet Pleban. How about that extra half a million or so that Dianne Critchlow would have been paid?
Even though the board granted her request for early retirement, you just never know what might happen if the right legal eagles get involved, sort of like the burglar who sued his intended victims because he tripped in the dark in their messy bedroom and broke his leg.
Ah, lawyers. You gotta love ’em.
