let go for cause.” Before Rush was terminated, he says he was never told by anyone — not Mumm, not Stuckart, not Lowe — that there were any complaints. “HR investigation? This is the first I have heard of it,” Rush wrote after being contacted by the Inlander last Friday. “Candace let me go without explanation. Can you shed light on any of this for me?” A few hours earlier, in response to a question from the Inlander, Stuckart had openly described the concerns about Rush surrounding his termination. By then, rumors about Rush had already leaked out into the general public, thanks in part to an April 11 email that Lowe sent to a number of city managers concerning Rush’s behavior. “I thought it was inappropriate and shouldn’t have been sent out,” Stuckart says.
THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL
The council has shifted in a more liberal direction over the past six years, and Rush considers himself a crucial part of that story. He says he recruited Councilwomen Mumm and Amber Waldref to run for office, as well as former Councilman Jon Snyder. When Rush served on the council, Lori Kinnear was his legislative aide. Today, she’s a councilmember. Rush doesn’t level any criticism for the way his former colleagues handled his termination. “I don’t think I was mistreated in any way by Ben or Candace,” Rush says. But that’s not to say he’s fine with all that happened. He says he first learned about his concerns from HR in mid-April, after he’d been fired, when Lowe wrote him a letter. “[Lowe wrote] there were two city employees who had said not to bug them or not to call them,” Rush says. “I could continue to interact with the city as a citizen, but I could not call any city employees on their work time.” In his reply to Lowe, Rush says, he denied the suggestion that anything improper had occurred, and wrote that if Lowe continued to contact him about those “false allegations” he would seek legal counsel. “The target of the complaint never knows about it or hears about it, and they can’t make a defense?” Rush says. He echoes frustrations raised by Straub — that he never had the chance to defend his actions. He says his interactions with the employees named in the letter have been minimal, and nothing remotely inappropriate had occurred. “My relationships with them were cordial and civil, and quite frankly, I never heard the word ‘Stop,’ ‘No,’ ‘Back off,’ none of that,” Rush says. “One of those people I’ve seen once, or maybe three times in passing. We’re talking people I had just met; they’re acquaintances.” All of this may feel familiar. Rush faced a similar controversy when he was a city councilmember. Former County Commissioner Todd Mielke says the head of the Spokane Regional Transportation Council approached him with concerns about Rush’s interactions with a female employee. Mielke says he was told that a female staff member was bothered by how much Rush was contacting her, and the nature of his invitations to spend time together outside of work. “She was not comfortable making a formal complaint, and just wanted the activity to stop,” Mielke says. In 2008, for example, Rush emailed a female employee inviting her to have lunch at his house, if she was in the mood for a sandwich. Both Mumm and Stuckart say they hadn’t ever heard of those concerns until recently. “This is the first I’ve heard that kind of information,” Mumm says. “I wish I would have known that.” Rush says he’s familiar with the old controversy, but speculates that both the controversy then and the controversy now may be politically motivated. “Given my political success, it’s no surprise,” Rush says. “Countervailing political forces would just as soon see me sidelined.”
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