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Joe Rizzi resigned from county employ in July 2014 after numerous complaints about his leadership of the Office of Emergency Management. Some of those complaints were deeply concerning—including allegations that Rizzi was rarely at work, preferring long lunches and spending time with his girlfriend, that he implied female coworkers had been mistaken for prostitutes, and that he discriminated against veterans and minority employees.
Those allegations were never investigated, and Rizzi rejected them at the time. He did so again today. In a "name clearing" hearing before county Chief Operations Officer Marissa Madrigal and Human Resources Director Travis Graves, Rizzi categorically denied the allegations that had been lofted by a former employee, Rachel Novick.
"I believe this complaint was filed by a disgruntled employee who was upset by her performance evaluation," Rizzi said today, repeatedly using the words "outright lie" and "slander" to characterize the allegations against him. He said any investigation into the claims would clear him of wrongdoing. Such an investigation wasn't undertaken, because Rizzi resigned days after Novick filed her complaint.
Rizzi says he resigned for one reason only: An investigation that found he'd been recording staff meetings on his iPad without alerting other meeting participants, a potential misdemeanor in the state of Oregon. While Rizzi says he didn't know the practice was illegal, he admitted to recording meetings so as to keep a complete record.
"Even though I feel my recording was not wrong, I was told I broke Oregon statute," he said this afternoon. "I made a mistake in recording meetings and wold therefore resign for my mistake."
It was a bit more than that. Rizzi acknowledged after the hearing that there "were challenges" in the office and that "the politics were very involved." He said he'd been headhunted by other jurisdictions during his time at the county, and figured he'd cut his losses and find a new job quickly.
That hasn't happened. Instead, Rizzi says he's spent the last two years looking for work. Interest in his qualifications dissipates, he says, when prospective employers read about the complaints against him. Rizzi says he made the decision to resign before he had any inkling of the substance of Novick's complaint. He'd have stuck around and fought her claims if he'd known the details.
"When all these complaints came out and there was no rebuttal...then it makes me look bad," he said today. "It makes it look like these are all the bad things that happened."
Rizzi's version of events hasn't changed much. He believes Novick filed the complaint solely to get him fired, and says she lied egregiously. Novick has stood by the substance of her complaint.
As he maintained when the Mercury first spoke with him in 2014, Rizzi said today Novick was exacting revenge for a middling performance review she'd been given, in which she received a one percent "merit" raise while others saw three-percent bumps.
Novick has denied that, saying she'd been raising issues about Rizzi's absences for months and that the lower raise was a form of retaliation.
Rizzi said today it was Novick who needed to show up to work more. He repeated again and again at this afternoon's hearing that a county investigation found Novick hadn't been working enough hours, and that that finding led to her one percent raise.
"I believe this complaint was filed by a disgruntled employee who was upset by her performance evaluation," he said.
Novick, wife of City Commissioner Steve Novick, said this afternoon she stands "behind every word" of her complaint. "This is something I thought really hard about," she said. Novick left her job at the emergency management office last year, and now works for the county's Department of Community Justice.
She says she has no idea whether there was an investigation into her work hours, let alone the outcome of any such investigation. A county spokesperson hasn't responded to our inquiry on the subject. We've also asked for confirmation of Rizzi's claims this afternoon that two previous complaints about his leadership had been unsubstantiated.