Five high-ranking officials in the Leelanau County government wrote a letter imploring the county board to accept the results of a recent staff culture and climate survey and move forward with its recommendations. That letter was a core topic at a board of commissioners meeting held Tuesday night, where the fallout over the survey – and disagreements among commission members on how to handle it going forward – continued to drive tension.

The letter, signed by five key department heads – Prosecutor Joseph Hubbell, Sheriff Mike Borkovich, Probate Judge Marian Kromkowski, Treasurer John Gallagher, and Register of Deeds Jennifer Grant – was a response to board discussions at an executive board session held last Tuesday. At that meeting, two commissioners – Melinda Lautner and Jamie Kramer – criticized the survey for being incomplete and unprofessional.

Commissioners hired the Michigan Leadership Institute (MLI) late last year to interview members of the Leelanau County government staff, in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the county’s workplace culture in the wake of numerous major staff departures. MLI’s Dr. John Scholten ultimately surveyed 85 of the county’s 117 employees, who collectively gave the county a grade of 3.8 out of 10 – with “1 being broken, and 10 being healthy.” Many staffers also called out specific county government players – among them, Lautner and the members of the county clerk’s office – as “toxic” or otherwise problematic.

Lautner and Kramer both took issue with the naming of names in Scholten’s report, with Kramer saying it “did not feel professional.” Both commissioners also called for MLI to provide more data, including full employee responses, interview transcriptions, or other notes. MLI’s actual report was relatively concise, focusing on Scholten’s key takeaways rather than on specific staff responses.

“We paid $6,500 for that report and got part of it,” Lautner said at last week’s meeting. “We are entitled to that entire report.”

Board Chair Ty Wessell agreed at last week’s executive board session to contact Scholten and inquire about getting the “raw data” from the survey process, so long as employee names and other identifying information could be redacted.

Speaking during public comment at Tuesday’s meeting, Kromkowski told commissioners that last week’s conversation – specifically the board’s decision to seek more data from the MLI survey – had prompted “further discussions among the department and office heads, and then led to the collaborative letter that we drafted.” Kromkowski then read an abridged version of the letter.

In the letter, the group outlined worries that the board’s pursuit of raw data from the survey might risk compromising the anonymity of staff members who participated. “They were assured of confidentiality and that must be honored,” the letter reads. “To do less, would be a disservice to the county employees.”

Kromkowski and her fellow department heads also suggested that the key findings would still be the same even if commissioners were furnished with all the raw data. “It is time for the board to move on and accept these findings as either perceptions or reality. It does not really matter which they are. To reject them would be disrespectful not only to those who gathered the comments, but also to the 85 staff that participated in the recent survey," they wrote.

In advocating that the board accept the survey report as is, the group also urged that commissioners take action on multiple items recommended by Scholten, including governance training for the board of commissioners, a new government-wide code of conduct, the execution of an independent wage scale study, and a commitment “to the prior board-approved decision to move forward with the separation of finance and human resources from the responsibility of the county clerk’s office.”

The letter ended with the undersigned pledging to “take a stronger leadership role in combatting the ‘malaise’ among staff.”

While most commissioners thanked Kromkowski, Lautner bristled at the letter, seeing it as an attempt at “telling us how to do our job.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re outside of your lane,” Lautner told Kromkowski.

The board ultimately did vote to accept the MLI survey report and move forward with Scholten’s recommendations, but not without heated debate. Early in the discussion, Wessell informed commissioners that Scholten had declined the request to provide raw data from the survey. Lautner bristled at that, too: “So, in other words, he says he will not give us the information that we paid for,” she said, arguing that some employees “gave documentation which backed up their responses” as part of the survey, and that the format of Scholten’s report “buried” those responses and documents. “I disagree with all of those comments being buried,” she said.

“[Scholten] was asked to do a survey,” countered Commissioner Kama Ross. “A survey did not have any stipulation that we would get all the raw data; that was never an expectation... [Scholten] was never contracted to sift through documents... He did not present that because it wasn’t part of what we asked.”

Ross added: “I think it is time to put this behind us, and I am going to echo Judge Kromkowski’s call for us to start moving forward and not argue about some employees not behind heard, because they still will have a chance to be heard. This conversation is not over; this is just the start.”

Kramer disagreed with Ross, suggesting that the board is “not going to be able to move any of these employees forward” with the limited information MLI provided. “I think we need to figure out something else,” she said. “We need that raw data. We need to know the entire story. And we can’t. It has, essentially, been cherry-picked.”

Ross ultimately moved that the board “accepts the survey as presented” and move forward “on a plan to include all voices as we go forward…and to come up with a plan to create a more positive climate in this building.” The motion passed 4-2, with Kramer and Lautner opposed; Commissioner Doug Rexroat was absent.

Pictured: Marian Kromkowski addresses the Leelanau County board of commissioners.