It took nearly 5 hours before the board of Hillsborough Area Regional Transit (HART) decided it would fire its Chief Executive Officer at a special call meeting Monday evening.<\/p>\n
David Armijo<\/strong> had been placed on paid administrative leave while an independent law firm investigated whistleblower allegations of intimidation, retaliation, a hostile workplace, favoritism, among others.<\/p>\n A vote of 7-4 led to his dismissal. Board members County Commissioner Kevin Beckner,<\/strong> Wallace Bowers<\/strong>, Alison Hewitt<\/strong>, David Mechanik<\/strong>, Sandra Murman<\/strong>, County Commissioner Mark Sharpe<\/strong> and Michael York<\/strong> voted for Armijo\u2019s <\/strong>dismissal. Those who were against his firing: John Byczek<\/strong>, Fran Davin,<\/strong> Ron Govin<\/strong> and Steven Polzin<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Much of Monday night\u2019s meeting centered on discussion of Armijo\u2019s<\/strong> boldness in having language in his contract changed on 2 occasions, most recently in 2010. The inserted or changed language in the contract would make it difficult to fire the CEO.<\/p>\n Board chair Alison Hewitt<\/strong> made the discovery of language changes last week while going through the contracts. She apologized to the Board for getting them the information she discovered at Monday\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n Phillip Hale <\/strong>has been named Interim CEO while the Board searches for a new leader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It took nearly 5 hours before the board of Hillsborough Area Regional Transit (HART) decided it would fire its Chief Executive Officer at a special call meeting Monday evening. David Armijo had been placed on paid administrative leave while an independent law firm investigated whistleblower allegations of intimidation, retaliation, a hostile workplace, favoritism, among others. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}