Terminations of four former Jefferson County highway department employees upheld by county board 

Four road grader operators were terminated from their positions on the Jefferson County highway department just before Thanksgiving of last year. They’ve been protesting those terminations in a rare grievance hearing against the county. 

Now, two and a half months later, those four former county employees learned the fate of their wrongful termination case: on Tuesday morning, the Jefferson County commissioners voted 3-0 to uphold the terminations of Roben Ruhnke, Danny Meyer, Ron Bray and Steve McNitt.  

The case dates back to November 18, when the four men, then all employed as road graders for the Jefferson County highway department, gathered in Harbine at 7:30 that morning and came to Fairbury around 9:30, reportedly to meet with the county commissioners as part of their weekly board meeting.  

The employees did not clock out of their shifts to attend that meeting – which never actually occurred – which highway department supervisors Terry Blas and Jason Eyer construed as timesheet mismanagement. The four workers stayed in Fairbury until after 11 AM, and from there returned to Harbine to return to their scheduled shift. That's about four working hours unaccounted for, Blas claimed; the employees felt what they were doing should have counted as county business.  

In the first round of the grievance hearing last month, Bray and others testified that the workers had heard about an email sent to commissioner Danielle Schwab criticizing the quality of the road work delivered by the four employees. Those criticisms, they said, were never shared with them by their supervisors, so they tried to go directly to the commissioners – the county bosses, as McNitt put it – to learn what the issues were and how they could improve.  

Blas and Eyer felt that constituted insubordination and a failure to follow workplace policies. On November 25, exactly one week after the initial incident, Blas and Eyer met with the four employees, two at a time, and told them they were being terminated. After the first round of the hearing two weeks ago ran more than five hours, the process recessed until Tuesday to allow for both sides to present their closing arguments and the commissioners to present their final conclusions.  

Representing the county, Jerry Pigsley from Lincoln law firm Woods Aitken presented a basic PowerPoint outlining the county’s final points.  

“This is not about second chances, it’s about whether this county should reinstate employees who committed serious misconduct in clear violation of county policy and the collective bargaining agreement, and whether doing so would undermine the safe, orderly and trustworthy operation of county government,” Pigsley began. “The evidence in this record leads to only one reasonable conclusion: the terminations were for just cause, the employees received all the process they were due, and reinstatement would be harmful to the workplace and contrary to the county’s obligations to its employees and the public.” 

Representing the grievants and their union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, attorney John Corrigan from Omaha law firm Dowd & Corrigan rejected the county’s claim that due process was fully followed, saying that employees cannot be terminated without just cause and calling the four firings a “termination by ambush.” 

“Combined, we have 46 years of experience abandoned because the management of the county roads department decided that when they saw the gentlemen at the courthouse that day, they would ambush them,” Corrigan opened. “The concept that this was not a misunderstanding was refuted by the testimony. Every one of the employees, with all of their experience, testified that they thought they were engaged in work activities. There’s no reason to believe any of these employees wouldn’t respond to questions about what they were doing.” 

Corrigan cited the circumstances of Roger Behrends, who testified on the grievants’ behalf last month. Behrends worked for the highway department for just over 40 years before he retired last April, and he set up a meeting with the commissioners to tell them he would be leaving. He never told Eyer and Blas about that meeting and didn’t clock out from his shift to be there. That’s the same thing that Bray, McNitt, Meyer and Ruhnke tried to do, Corrigan argued, and yet Behrends faced no punishment or correction. 

Last month all four employees had indicated that they would be willing to return to the department and accept a penalty they felt was fairer, like loss of pay for hours missed or even a suspension. Pigsley argued that bringing these employees back into the fold at this stage would do more harm than good.  

“Reinstatement in this case would be disruptive and harmful to the workplace. The union’s proposed solutions would not fix the situation – it would just create new and lasting problems,” Pigsley argued. “It will undermine the supervisory authority and morale among employees who follow the rules. It will signal that serious misconduct does not lead to meaningful accountability, it will create division, tension and distrust within the workforce, and it potentially exposes the county to further risk if similar conduct occurs again.” 

“Mr. Pigsley said that the misconduct was not disputed – we had six and a half hours of a hearing where we disputed the issues in this case,” Corrigan concluded. “We don’t dispute that the employees should not have used county time, and if the county had simply conducted a fair investigation and done actual management of those employees, this all would have been avoided. But no, this is about something besides the genuine concern of the employer to punish misconduct – this is about punishing dissent. Punishing the employees because they wanted to talk to the county board members about how they were going to be able to do their jobs better because that information simply wasn’t getting to them.” 

Keeping county attorney Joe Casson, the hearing’s arbiter, present to provide legal guidance, the board recessed for almost exactly 20 minutes. Everyone present returned to the room, where commissioner Danielle Schwab swiftly presented and Mark Schoenrock seconded a motion to uphold all four terminations.  

There have been other county employees, even members of the highway department, to dispute their firings to this county board in the past, but chairman Michael Dux, a member of the board for more than two decades, said previously he had never been part of a grievance hearing as public as this one.  

All in all, Tuesday’s proceedings lasted just about exactly an hour. And that brings to an end this unique two-and-a-half month grievance hearing process – unless further litigation is levied, something the union side seemed to suggest could be a possibility.