Chapel Hill leaders know where the Kerry Bigelow-Clyde Clark case is going.

You could see it at the hearings, as the two men’s former supervisor, Lance Norris, fumbled his way through conflicting and contradictory statements to the Personnel Appeals Committee charged with making a recommendation to the town.

You could see it as Tiffanee Sneed, the town’s senior legal adviser, gamely danced her way through legal gyrations that would have made Atticus Finch’s courtroom opponent in “To Kill a Mockingbird” blush.

Even the detective who was provided to the town by a union-busting company based in Raleigh acted as if he didn’t know who he was working for.

The town is doing its best to sell this comedy of errors as a disciplinary issue with two belligerent and rude workers, but the case that has been made is well past its freshness date. The stink the town is now trying to pass off just gets worse.

Why is the town doing so much dancing? So it can prop up a lie to maintain its façade of this being a cool community run by a cool town staff that is way beyond racial issues and job issues. But that flies in the face of what has been revealed in this case.

So here’s how I believe the Bigelow-Clark deal will go down:

The committee that has heard testimony at two hearings for the former sanitation workers will recommend that the town was wrong to fire Bigelow and Clark and that they should be reinstated. That recommendation will go to Town Manager Roger Stancil, who will deny it and rule that the two will remain fired.

Then it all goes to court as civil rights lawyer Al McSurely, who represents the two fired workers, oversees a discrimination lawsuit on behalf of the men. McSurely will win that lawsuit, and the town will have to settle with Bigelow and Clark. Because some town supervisors so mismanaged this affair and the Town of Chapel Hill willfully embarked on a dubious smear campaign against those workers, this will end up with some very big checks being written out to the two men.

Because for the town, saving face is what this is all about.

The irony is that we’ve seen this all play out before in a strikingly similar case. McSurely represented Keith Edwards, the first black female police officer on the UNC police force. Edwards claimed the police department’s practices were discriminatory after a white male officer with less experience was promoted over her. UNC tried its best to blacken her reputation. It lost in court.

Does that sound familiar?

Instead of firing Bigelow and Clark, the town should take a look at Lance Norris and Roger Stancil, the two town officials who got us into this mess. They should be fired. And the town should definitely try to deny them unemployment benefits.

–Don Evans

If I weren’t convinced that the firing of Kerry Bigelow and Clyde Clark was motivated by the town’s desire to squelch unions, Id think the lesson learned from last night’s Personnel Appeals Committee hearing was this: If you work for Lance Norris, you’d better hope he doesn’t feel dissed by you; otherwise, you’re toast.

Several interesting points came to light during Clyde Clark’s appeal:

 Lance Norris made his decision to fire Bigelow and Clark – moments before the start of a meeting the two had organized to gauge interest in a union – without having read CAI’s report that the town paid handsomely for. Norris said he didn’t have access to the report until later because of “attorney-client privilege.” (CAI gave the report to town attorney Ralph Karpinos.) Yet Norris claimed to have had a number of conversations with the CAI investigator and believed he had enough information to fire Bigelow and Clark.
 Though Norris said he’d presided over at least 15 grievances, he’d never fired anyone until Bigelow and Clark. He said the complaint from the customer constituted a “serious incident,” and he felt pressured to act right away, even though he felt no similar urgency to look into the complaint originally. No one followed up on the complaint for nearly 2 months, looking into it only after Bigelow’s and Clark’s union-organizing activities became more focused.
 The CAI investigator regularly teaches classes to companies on remaining union-free.
 The incident when a sanitation worker driving a pickup truck near the Bigelow/Clark crew came to check out a commotion was drawn by the customer’s raised voice, not the crew members’. Clark disputes that the pickup truck driver was drawn by any noise, as the driver wears two hearing aids and still is hard of hearing.
 Norris claims he fired Bigelow and Clark because of “discourteous treatment of the public.” Yet that is not behavior that warrants termination, according to town policy, and the town did not follow its set procedure if supervisors believed the men were guilty of unsatisfactory job performance.
 Norris claimed he fired the men because customers felt threatened; yet the two neighbors who spoke anonymously on the phone and wouldn’t answer any follow-up questions, said their complaint was that the trash wasn’t being picked up adequately, not that they felt threatened.

Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems, and that applies to people, too. Clark tended to take full advantage of his sick days; Bigelow seemed to be disgruntled about being passed over for a promotion. Rather than fester as dissatisfied workers, though, they apparently took a proactive stance to work toward getting a union. From the information that came to light last night, it looks like their efforts cost them their jobs.
– Nancy Oates

When the hearing for fired town worker Clyde Clark opens tonight at 7 at the Chapel Hill Public Library, it’s important that residents stand up for this man and support him against what is looking more and more like a grave injustice.

Clark and his former co-worker, Kerry Bigelow, were fired by the town in October in what increasingly looks like an effort to silence the two for speaking up about unsafe working conditions and racism in the Public Works Department.

It became obvious at the hearing for Bigelow last Thursday that the town blew this one big-time – not only blew it but has railroaded these men. Secret witnesses, vindictive and incompetent town functionaries, detectives hired to dig up dirt on town workers, fabricated complaints, contradictory testimony, whispers and innuendo. Not only blew it but is doing everything it can to make it go away.

This would be prime stuff for any town run by a venal corporation or some petty crime boss. But this is Chapel Hill – aren’t we supposed to be better than that?

We like to think of ourselves as an enlightened community and a beacon to the rest of the state. But when town leaders pass over a qualified black man to give a position to a less-qualified white man, when the town proceeds to persecute that black man for pointing out that injustice, when the town spends more than $22,000 to hire a company to trump up charges against that black man, we have strayed a very long way from the ideals residents like to point to when describing their town.

Feels like we’ve been transported back in time to those awful 1950s and ’60s, when folks risked their lives by standing up for the truth. We come across looking like another backwater town in the unenlightened hinterlands.

The hearing for Clark is to be in the meeting room of the library. Clark and Bigelow requested that their hearings be open to the public. That should be a sign to anyone that these men have little to hide and in fact want the community to know just what’s going on.

If Joe Straley, Charlotte Adams and Hank Anderson were alive today, they would be at this meeting. They would stand beside Clark and Bigelow in reminding the town of the principles we all cherish. Clark and Bigelow come across as honorable men. Wish I could say that about town staff.
–Don Evans