News

Dale Sugerman

By Steve Plunkett

Former Town Manager Dale Sugerman ended the Highland Beach chapter of his career and started a new one the next day 28 miles to the north. Highland Beach commissioners grudgingly approved paying Sugerman and his attorney $215,000 to settle his lawsuit against the town at a special meeting June 26. Sugerman claimed his employment contract was breached and his civil rights violated. “He was totally insubordinate to the commission,” said Commissioner Dennis Sheridan, who took office after Sugerman was suspended and his contract not renewed. “I personally feel he should not get a nickel.” But Mayor Bernard Featherman said they had no alternative.

“We left this in the hands of our attorney and our insurance company,” he said. Town Attorney Leonard Rubin said Highland Beach’s insurance covers $145,000 for the civil rights claim. The town will tap its reserve fund for $70,000 attributed to the breach of contract claim. Sugerman declined to say how much he must pay his lawyer. Rubin said he did not know the specifics of Sugerman’s arrangement, but said lawyers working on contingency typically receive one-third of any money.

On June 27 commissioners in Lake Park ratified a contract with Sugerman making him manager of their town, on the west side of the Intracoastal Waterway between Riviera Beach and North Palm Beach. Lake Park Vice Mayor Kendall Rumsey blogged that he was looking forward to Sugerman’s July 2 arrival. “I am confident that he will provide a leadership we can all be proud of!” Rumsey wrote.

The town at the last minute changed the employment agreement, Rumsey said, raising Sugerman’s salary to $120,000 from $110,000 and making a 10 percent pension contribution instead of 6 percent. Sugerman, 60, was the first choice of four of Lake Park’s five commissioners to become town manager.

“I have worked in Palm Beach County as a local government manager since 1994 and therefore am very familiar with all aspects of being a key leader for a South Florida community,” Sugerman wrote in his application, noting he is also a scuba diver, juggler and motorcyclist. “I have no reservations about Dale’s ability to be town manager,” former Boynton Beach City

Manager Kurt Bressner emailed Lake Park. Sugerman was one of Bressner’s assistant city managers until he went to Highland Beach in March 2005. Bressner also was a consultant to Lake Park for its town manager search. Highland Beach commissioners suspended Sugerman for five months — with pay — until his contract expired June 30, 2011, after learning he planned to suspend Town Clerk Beverly Brown for a month without pay.

Brown by mistake emailed him jokes she was forwarding to friends on her official computer about Canadians not being politically correct. Sugerman investigated and found more jokes, some “sexually oriented or defamatory,” that Brown had forwarded at work, including one alluding to President Obama and using the N-word. A retired Palm Beach County circuit judge reviewed the case in April 2011 and sided with Brown’s lawyer and then-Town Attorney Tom Sliney, saying a suspension without pay would be a “draconian’’ penalty.

A written reprimand in Brown’s personnel file for one year was more than adequate, he ruled. Besides paying Sugerman’s $12,000-a-month salary, Highland Beach let him continue to use his leased Nissan Murano SUV during the suspension.

Commissioners hired Kathleen Weiser, a former Punta Gorda assistant city manager, as his interim and later permanent replacement. Sugerman, a Hypoluxo resident, was a finalist to become Lantana’s town manager in April, the same month he and his wife became first-time grandparents.

Last August, his wife posted a picture online of them sitting in front of the Taj Mahal in India. At a May court hearing Sugerman’s attorney said her client was in Europe. While Brown kept her monthly $6,200 salary intact, she had to pay a $6,000 legal bill from fighting the proposed suspension. Sliney told Brown the town should not reimburse her attorney’s fees, she said, because she admitted sending the emails, a violation of town policy.