By Steve Plunkett
An independent hearing officer has set aside the unpaid one-month suspension of the Highland Beach town clerk who forwarded racist jokes from her official e-mail.
Hearing officer Kenneth Stern, a recently retired Palm Beach County circuit judge, ruled Wednesday that Beverly Brown should instead receive a written reprimand to be removed from her personnel file after a year.
Town Manager Dale Sugerman planned to suspend Brown after she by mistake sent him a joke she was passing along to people outside Town Hall. He investigated and found other inappropriate jokes Brown had forwarded from her office. Town policy forbids employees to send or receive defamatory materials at work.
The proposed punishment sparked an upheaval at Town Hall as Brown appealed: Sugerman was suspended with pay until his contract runs out in June, while Mayor Jim Newill lost a reelection bid to Bernard Featherman, who made the e-mail case a campaign issue.
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