St. Louis Post Dispatch
The man Ferguson is poised to hire as interim city manager at a meeting tonight is well known to residents of Glendale, Ariz. — after an audit found he misled the City Council while serving in the same role there.
Ed Beasley managed Glendale, a town with a population of 226,000 residents about 10 miles northwest of Phoenix, from 2002 to 2012.
He left a year before an external audit of the city was published that found Beasley and his employees had purposely misled the City Council about the soaring expenses associated with an early retirement program that was initially created to help solve a budget shortfall.
The 2013 audit also faulted Beasley for payments to two high-level executives, stating that the payments were not in the “best interest” of the city. Beasley, the audit said, allowed a human resources director to work remotely after she moved to Mississippi, paying her a compensation package of $140,000.
