File Under "Just Cause"

The Lede blog (New York Times) has a post on Sonia Morphew Pitt, Minnesota's Department of Transportation's director of homeland security and emergency management when the I-35 bridge collapsed.  Pitt had appealed to get her job back; given her "performance" it's no surprise that she wasn't successful:

[A]ll kinds of people in Minnesota, from firefighters and cops up to the governor and several state legislators, said the agency was no help at all, taking days too long to get itself organized and doing little to coordinate the urgent work of rescue, recovery and repair. In short, it didn’t manage the emergency.

Most glaringly, far from rushing home to take charge personally when the bridge fell, Ms. Pitt stayed out of town for another 10 days, on a mixed business-and-personal visit to Washington and to Cambridge, Mass., before returning to Minneapolis and the mess.

After investigations turned up a number of embarrassing things about how she had been operating (using her state cell phone for personal calls on the road, for instance, and claiming thousands of dollars in dubious travel expenses, and skipping a six-week training and certification course in, um, emergency management), she was dismissed from the post on Nov. 9. . . .  After all that, you might think Ms. Pitt would want no more of the harsh limelight surrounding the office she was bounced from. Nope: She filed a formal appeal to get her job back.

The appeal went to arbitration, and the ruling came down today: Forget it. According to The Star Tribune, the arbitrator, Christine Ver Ploeg, wrote that while Ms. Pitt may be entitled to the benefit of the doubt on some of the travel expenses, she had clearly “abused the latitude afforded to her” and the state’s assertion that she had conducted herself unprofessionally was justified.

I'll go out on a limb and predict that is she appeals the arbitrator's decision, she won't have much luck.

-JH