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Ray Bayerl of Lester Prairie and Kermit Terlinden of Glencoe were surprised over firing of administrator Nan Crary
By Lynda Jensen
Editor
Longtime McLeod County Administrator Nan Crary was terminated by the McLeod County Board of Commissioners Tuesday night on a split 3-2 vote, according to McLeod County Auditor Cindy Schultz.
“I move to terminate our employment relationship with the county administrator Nan Crary, effective March 31, 2008,” said Board Chairman Grant Knutson.
“I am making this motion because I believe McLeod County needs to take a new direction,” Knutson said. “McLeod County needs a county administrator that does not get involved in policy issues.”
He also added that McLeod County will honor the severance benefits included in Crary’s employment contract, which was originally signed in Dec. 12, 1995, according to the board minutes.
Crary has been the county administrator for 13 years.
Commissioners Ray Bayerl of Lester Prairie and Kermit Terlinden of Glencoe voted against the action; with both saying it should have been handled differently.
Commissioners Beverly Wangerin, Sheldon Nies, and Knutson (all of Hutchinson) voted in favor.
“It could have been done a different way,” Bayerl said Wednesday. “There were other options available.” Bayerl said he wasn’t given information about the issue at all, and the termination came as a surprise to him Tuesday night.
In fact, Bayerl said that as of Wednesday he still didn’t know the reason why Crary was let go.
As the vice chair of the board, Terlinden said that he was involved in three separate meetings with Knutson and Crary, but was surprised by the action to terminate her Tuesday night, saying that he didn’t think it would reach that point and could have been solved by other means.
The first meeting that took place was the last week of February amongst Crary, Terlinden and Knutson, with two more meetings since, Terlinden said. “Grant did most of the talking,” he added.
“It wasn’t a surprise to me,” Nies commented. “My opinion is that the morale of county employees was low – that was the reason for my ‘yes’ vote,” he said.
Nies further said that there wasn’t any one specific thing that was done by Crary to prompt the action, but that he felt county employees overall appeared “disgruntled,” and that he felt the county needed new leadership.
Knutson had no comment for this article, other than to say that non-Hutchinson commissioners were not left out of the decision making.
Wangerin was out of town and unavailable for comment.
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