u/makethatnoise

Another FB post from Mike Potter, the board approved this new hire at this mornings surprise meeting with less than 24 hours notice. WHAT is happening in this county!?

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OPINION: Culpeper Is About to Hire a County Administrator in Less Than 24 Hours. The Rush Should Tell You Something.

At 4:00 this afternoon, Interim County Administrator Shane McCrum told county employees that Thomas Hutka will be Culpeper’s next County Administrator. There is just one problem. The Board of Supervisors has not voted to hire him. Shortly after the announcement to staff, a special meeting materialized on BoardDocs. The Board is scheduled to vote tomorrow.

That sequence feels familiar, and it should. This is the same Board that extended its interim administrator on a consent agenda with the compensation line left blank, narrowed a forensic audit by 60 percent behind closed doors, and awarded its financial audit contract without a competitive process. Announcing a decision to staff before the public vote, and posting the meeting after the announcement, is not a break from how this Board operates. It is the pattern.

So before the Board makes this official tomorrow, residents deserve to know who Thomas Hutka is, and to notice what the timeline is designed to prevent them from examining.

On paper, Hutka has real credentials. A civil engineering degree from Princeton, a master’s in public administration from Harvard, a professional engineer’s license, and more than a decade as Director of Public Works for Broward County, Florida, a jurisdiction of nearly two million people. He currently serves as Water and Sewer Director in neighboring Greene County. Nobody should pretend those qualifications don’t exist.

But the recent record is checkered, and it raises questions this Board is giving the public no time to ask.

Hutka’s last several jobs have not lasted long. He led Chattanooga’s Public Works department for roughly ten months in 2022. He served as Town Manager of Newington, Connecticut for about six months across 2023 and 2024. These are not multi-year tenures. They are brief stops, each ending in departure.

The Chattanooga exit was covered by local news there. According to Chattanooga news outlets, city records showed internal investigations into complaints of a hostile work environment, and the city’s own investigators found that Hutka made “threatening and intimidating” remarks to employees. Hutka resigned citing family reasons. He denied wrongdoing and said the people making allegations were retaliating against him for reporting misconduct by others.

That last part is worth sitting with, because it is a recurring theme. In more than one of his departures, Hutka’s explanation has taken the same shape: that he was the target, and that the real wrongdoing belonged to someone else. It may be true. But an explanation that arrives every time is itself something a careful hiring process would examine.

There is also this. Hutka is 68. His recent tenures have each run under a year. And by available accounts his family remains in Florida, where he was, this very month, a finalist for a county administrator position in Flagler County. Culpeper may be hiring, at the very top of its government, someone whose life is anchored a thousand miles away and whose recent history suggests he does not stay long.

Which raises the question underneath all of this. Why does this Board keep filling its most important office with people who are temporary by design? An interim administrator with no permanent mandate. Now, potentially, a permanent administrator who by every outward sign may not finish a year. A county government whose chief executive is always transient is a county government the Board itself never has to share control of.

Maybe Hutka is exactly the right person. Maybe his short tenures really are the price of a reformer who upsets comfortable local arrangements, which is one way to read a record like this. Residents are entitled to weigh that generous interpretation right alongside the harder one.

But they cannot weigh anything in less than 24 hours. And that, more than any single line on Thomas Hutka’s résumé, is the point. A Board confident in its choice, and confident the public would agree, does not announce that choice to staff before the vote and schedule the vote for the next morning. It makes the case in the open and gives the community time to look.

This Board did not do that. Again.

Per Mike Potter's FB Post:

Today the Culpeper County Personnel Committee is considering a proposal for a paid internship program, $20,000 in the FY27 budget — while the county is simultaneously:

• Proposing a $20.2 million draw from reserves to cover a budget shortfall

• Proposing a tax increase on Culpeper residents

• Paying an IT Director nearly $50,000 more than the one they fired

• Paying an HR Director nearly $30,000 more than the previous one

• Paying a County Attorney over $200,000

• Adding a new Clerk position last month at $150,000

• Paying a sole-source IT contractor the equivalent of nearly 6 full-time staff positions every single month. $34,883.33 per month, under a contract with no competitive bidding and a professional services account running at 1,016% over its adopted budget

Paid internships are a great idea, in normal times. But the fact that anyone thought this was the right agenda item for today tells you everything about whether the people running this county understand the magnitude of what they’re actually facing.