Currituck County votes to censure commissioner
Beaumont alleged to have committed ethics violations
CURRITUCK — The Currituck County Board of Commissioners voted 5-2 at a special meeting Thursday night to censure Commissioner Paul Beaumont over allegations he violated several sections of the board’s Code of Ethics.
The censure was “for the releasing of private or closed session information, outright false information that was provided to the press and the creation of a job posting with Insight Global,” Chairman Bob White said.
The action, which White called “a public reprimand,” came after nearly 1½ hours of discussion.
White, along with Vice Chair Selina Jarvis and commissioners Mary “Kitty” Etheridge, Mike Payment and J. Owen Etheridge voted to censure Beaumont.
Beaumont and Commissioner Kevin McCord voted against the resolution.
The board tabled until this week’s meetings a separate resolution to remove Beaumont from his advisory board positions.
Beaumont maintained that he did not authorize the job posting for county manager that Insight Global had published. He, with White’s knowledge and permission, asked the company to conduct “ghosting,” or background searches for potential candidates before a position was open.
Beaumont also contended that what he shared with The Daily Advance newspaper from an October closed session meeting was public information, and he’d gotten an opinion from the University of North Carolina School of Government prior to talking with it.
Payment expressed frustration at being named in the resolution about how Beaumont shared information with the media. He acknowledged receiving a phone call from Beaumont, in which the two discussed closed session matters. But Payment said his understanding was that discussion was between commissioners and would remain so.
Beaumont apologized to Payment, saying said he didn’t understand “how you got lumped into that.”
Beaumont had told The Daily Advance that “the county manager’s contract was voted on but not renewed,” White said during the meeting, and stressed that the board taking a poll in closed session is not a vote.
Jarvis, meanwhile, was upset by not being included in conversations that led to Insight Global being contacted in the first place.
“I was duly selected as vice chair by this board, but no one bothered to ever have a conversation with me,” she said. “I would charge this board, regardless of the actions we take tonight, to be considerate and include everyone’s opinion — whether you know they are going to agree with you or not.”
White had said at the beginning of the meeting that Beaumont was excluded from emails among the other commissioners about him, comparing the situation to “parents that have a child that has done something wrong going to the room to confer on how to deal with the child.”
He also insisted the emails did not violate the state’s open meeting law, as they were not simultaneous.
“This whole process looks bad on us as a board,” McCord said before the vote. “There’s a lot of stuff we need to be getting done.”
McCord said he’d had arguments with everyone on the board except Etheridge.
“We just wasted a lot of time and resources on this, and it could have been avoided,” he said.
Beaumont said that an Insight Global staffer admitted to posting the job on her personal LinkedIn page, even though he said she was not authorized to do so.
“The severity of the accusations, the lack of documentation and the failure to interview me resulted in an incomplete investigation based solely on hearsay and a lack of supporting documentation,” Beaumont said.
“There are going to be unanswered questions,” White said. “This is not a court of law.”
White acknowledged that the screenshots of text messages between Beaumont and Insight Global staff about the position of county manager that were before the board “could be the ghost thing that Paul’s talking about. We’ll never know.”
He maintained that the relationship Beaumont had with Insight Global was “the causal factor in all of this.”