The CareerSource Pinellas Board voted to fire embattled CEO Ed Peachey and send him packing with a $117,000 settlement package amid multiple state and federal investigations involving inflated job placement claims.
“Let’s get this over with and let’s move on,” said board member Mike Mikurak.
Hours later, the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) sent the board chair Jack Geller a letter, urging him to delay any severance or settlement offers to Peachy “especially since multiple agencies are currently investigating troubling allegations.”
Geller said the DEO letter came too late and will refer it to the CareerSource attorney to decide whether the board needs to reconsider Wednesday’s decision to fire Peachey and offer him a settlement that the DEO now calls “egregious.”
The DEO says settlement money given to Peachey may violate federal law limiting severance funded by taxpayers.
“This thinly veiled attempt to skirt federal law governing severance payments would be inappropriate,” the letter from DEO Executive Director Cissy Proctor says.
CareerSource attorney Charles Harris told board members Wednesday the settlement offer is not illegal because it comes from private funds collected by CareerSource, not tax dollars.
Whatever the case, Peachey refused to say Wednesday whether he will accept any settlement offered by Pinellas, or the identical settlement offered last week by Hillsborough County’s CareerSource Tampa Bay agency, which Peachey also ran until the current controversy forced his ouster.
Peachey’s attorney insists he’s innocent of any wrongdoing.
“Even though he has been accused of many things, there is no evidence he’s done anything wrong whatsoever,” Marion Hale told the board Wednesday.
Hale also warned board members what will happen if they didn’t satisfy Peachey’s demands for a golden parachute on his way out the door.
“Everybody is going to get sued and some people are going to get sued personally,” Hale told the board.
Board member Tom Bedwell, one of Peachey’s few supporters, made the motion to give him five months of pay as a parting gift and insisted it’s time to move past all the infighting and get back to the business of serving people who need employment.
“It’s our job now to regain their trust and hopefully go back to doing what we do,” Bedwell after Wednesday’s vote to fire Peachey.
If Peachey accepts settlements from both sides of Tampa Bay, he will collect a total of $234,000.
