Is a ‘juvenile grudge’ at root of alleged conspiracy, cover-up by 3 Franklin officials?

The Franklin County officials accused of committing a crime and alleged attempted cover-up may have done it in order to get back at an elected leader who already left office.

New audio and video recordings, obtained by the Tri-City Herald through Washington’s Public Records Act, shed light on why Franklin officials may have decided to deny a $12,500 payment to the HAPO Center’s former management team, and which official was allegedly directing it all.

The recordings also confirm what investigators have claimed in search warrants and their case files — that Franklin County Commission Chairman Rocky Mullen misled investigators about what happened during a secretly recorded meeting.

At that session, he and Auditor Matt Beaton directed the county administrator to write a letter in an attempt to end a criminal investigation into interference over the payment.

Mullen, Beaton and Commissioner Clint Didier are under investigation for alleged official misconduct, tampering with a witness and criminal conspiracy, according to investigation documents previously obtained by the Herald.

Snohomish County Deputy Chief Prosecutor Elise Deschenes in Everett, Wash., is overseeing the investigation by the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office.

Deschenes previously told the Herald in an email that no charges have been forwarded at this time, and her role so far has been to offer guidance and advice on the search warrants.

Two sealed warrants were approved — one to search the county’s data archiving service and the other for Mullen’s cell phone records. The warrants were directed at Mullen because he was using his personal phone, as well as his county-issued phone.

The Benton County Sheriff’s Office also has been helping with the investigation.

Simmons management payment

The alleged cover-up attempt began after Simmons Venue Management requested payment for its final month of managing the HAPO Center.

Why the officials decided not to pay the local company was unclear until now. The Simmons family is best known for running the former Country Gentleman restaurant, now called CG Public House and Catering.

The Simmons took over management of the HAPO Center in 2022 at a tumultuous time for the county. The move came after the entire county-employed management team had quit and then-county administrator Keith Johnson had announced his departure after failed attempts by Mullen and Didier to fire him.

The company managed to stay for about a year before Mullen and Didier moved to replace them, eventually settling on Idaho-based Harris White Leasure last August. The transition to the new company lasted through October. It was this last month of work that SVM was requesting their standard $12,500 payment for.

The new HAPO Center contract specifically gave the county administrator additional oversight to approve reimbursements of up to $25,000 for Harris White Leasure.

In this case, Gonzalez said he gauged how the commissioners felt before making the decision, according to the documents. Gonzalez said Mullen was initially in support, but later changed his mind, Didier did not respond and new Commissioner Steve Bauman supported the payment.

Once Gonzalez found out Mullen had changed his mind, he had the auditor’s office stop the payment.

According to the just-released recorded conversation between Gonzalez and Beaton, Gonzalez believed they should just pay the company and move on. He felt like it would have looked bad if the county stiffed a local vendor who had come in to help clean up a mess.

Beaton said he raised some concerns with the way the handoff of financial documentation was handled when he found out about the payment, eventually leading to a loss of consensus.

Beaton said in the recording that he learned Didier called Wes Harris and Larry Leasure of HWL and told them to process the payment to the Simmons group, despite the commissioners telling Gonzalez not to.

Beaton said he spoke to Didier and told him that he can’t do that, so Didier instructed him to call HWL and convince them to put the payment through and get reimbursed.

Harris called Gonzalez because he was concerned with being put in the middle of county politics. Harris told investigators that Beaton said they wanted to push the payment through in order to make Gonzalez look bad, according to notes about Harris’ interview with investigators.

After that call, Gonzalez mentioned the issue to the county’s legal advisor and an investigation was opened. He also sent an email to Beaton blasting him for his alleged role.

It’s unclear exactly what was said in that email, but in the recorded conversation, Beaton and Mullen implied it was heated and Gonzalez was angry.

Mullen set up a meeting with himself, Beaton and Gonzalez for Jan. 22 in order to convince Gonzalez to write a letter saying he had misunderstood the situation. The sheriff’s office raised concerns with Prosecutor Shawn Sant that this could come across as tampering with a witness, and they were told that an attorney already had told Mullen not to get involved in the investigation.

Gonzalez secretly recorded the meeting, believing he was going to be asked to commit a crime, according to the documents. He gave the recording to investigators on April 2, after Mullen implied that Gonzalez had misled investigators.

Beaton claimed at the meeting that SVM mishandled the books and overstated their financial position in their proposal to continue running the center.

He told Gonzalez he also had questions of whether SVM was still under contract.

A draft contract for Harris White Leasure was approved on Oct. 5, but it was a split vote and the county continued to hammer out the details. Former Commissioner Brad Peck abstained at the time because he wanted to see the changes first.

SVM remained on in a limited capacity, helping with the transition and continuing to run the HAPO Center catering services. HWL was also using SVM’s liquor license until a new one could be obtained for the HAPO Center.

During the 45-minute recording, Beaton repeatedly states that he was just following Didier’s instructions.

“... Didier had actually called Larry Leisure and said don’t pay it,” Beaton said during the recording. “And I said, chair, and I would say the same thing to (Mullen), ‘You can’t do that. It’s unilateral. It’s your call to make.’ I said it was his call to make and ‘You’re gonna act like Brad Peck if you jump into the process and don’t find out if the other two people support it.’”

This was the first mention of Peck, who had resigned at the end of 2023, citing bullying and toxicity in the courthouse.

“(Didier) said, ‘Well call (HWL) and, and you know, stop it.’ ...” Beaton continued. “And I’ll tell you exactly what I told Wes. I told him ‘Business as usual’ and approve it if you would approve it. And he said to me, ‘I don’t support it.’”

Beaton also later admitted that he made a statement about the payment potentially making Gonzalez look bad, but claimed it wasn’t meant that way.

“I said, ‘If he approves it, the commissioners may learn more about him than they want to know, but I don’t believe they will,’” Beaton said in the recording.

He repeated the statement again later in the conversation.

The meeting ended with Beaton and Mullen directing Gonzalez to write a letter to Harris White Leasure and to send a copy to them and Daniel Stovern, a county attorney.

They told Gonzalez what the letter should say in order to stop the investigation.

“We’ve got to be done with it, and it actually stops with us and it’ll stop with a letter that, like (Mullen) is saying will protect Wes (Harris),” Beaton said in the recording. “And just one at a time we each need to just shut the hell up and talk more on certain issues.”

“I’ll tell you what should happen ... is that you should send an email that you sat down with the chair and myself and that you didn’t have the whole story and that there was no issue here and you’re good with it,” Beaton continued a few moments later.

Mullen told investigators that the letter was his idea, but did not disclose during the interview that they had told Gonzalez to make sure the county’s attorney got a copy or that their intent was for it to end the investigation and protect HWL from being involved.

Gonzalez told investigators he agreed to their demands in order to end the meeting, and then Mullen began sending him text messages from both his county and private phone asking why he hadn’t sent the letter. During the text exchange Gonzalez explained to Mullen he was unwilling to lie and refused to write the letter.

Mullen told investigators he lost respect for Gonzalez after he refused to write the letter after the meeting.

Blaming former commissioner

During Mullen’s March 26 interview with lead investigator Commander Marcus Conner and Benton County Commander Lee Cantu, he went on a tangent about whether the Simmons group should have been allowed to manage the HAPO Center in the first place.

In the recorded interview Mullen claimed that Peck decided to install SVM and he and Didier had no knowledge of it.

However, that contract was thoroughly discussed by the commissioners at the time and SVM was awarded a temporary contract to run the HAPO Center after the nearly hour-long public debate at a 2022 commission meeting.

Mullen ultimately agreed to the short term management agreement because the center would have been left without anyone running it at the height of its busy fall season. Didier voted against it.

Peck told the Herald in a statement this week that the assertion that he installed SVM without any input was “ludicrous and utterly false.”

“Video recordings of our meeting clearly show Commission Mullen and I — comprising a majority of the board — voted to hire SVM as the vendor,” Peck said in the statement. “Videos don’t lie, but it appears Commissioner Mullen does if one listens to the secretly recorded meeting between Mr. Beaton, Mr. Mullen, and Mr. Gonzalez.”

Peck also defended SVM’s record and said he wouldn’t be surprised if the decision to deny SVM payment was based on old grudges.

“Given their past behaviors I don’t think anything — including retaliation rooted in petulant, juvenile grudges — can be ruled out,” Peck wrote.

“The Simmons family, and Simmons Venue Management have served Franklin County with unimpeachable integrity and loyalty. They came to the county’s aid when virtually the entire HAPO Center staff walked out on short notice as we were heading into the busy holiday party season. It was SVM that picked up the load and not only ensured the county met all its commitments, but delivered what may have been the first profitable season in TRAC/HAPO Center history.”

Mullen didn’t go into further detail with investigators about the specific reasons he thought SVM shouldn’t have been paid in January.

The infighting between commissioners often resulted in heated debates and shouting matches after Mullen was elected at the end of 2020 and formed a new majority with Didier. Numerous tort claims, from both Sheriff Jim Raymond and auditor office employees, have also been filed against the county over fights concerning auditing issues.

While Mullen is often more reserved about his opinions and frequently votes along with Didier, he indicated to investigators that he was also upset about Peck’s relationship with the Simmons.

“Somebody put SVM in there because they were, I don’t know if you want to say ‘buddy buddy’ or friends. That’s bullshit,” Mullen told investigators. “If I was looking from the outside, how was Brad putting somebody in there that, that he wanted in there?”

Mullen claimed he had never heard of SVM before they offered to run the HAPO Center.

He then shifted from SVM to other commission issues he didn’t agree with Peck about, including the county chipping in for roadwork in an industrial area near Darigold.

Then Mullen told the investigators that he hadn’t wanted to fire the previous county administrator, Keith Johnson, but once he had a conversation with him, Mullen decided he had to go because he was working too closely with Peck.

Mullen said he invited Johnson to his home for a meeting in which Johnson explained how his administrator role had worked with commissioners in the past.

“And that’s when he explained to me how in the past the other commissioners took an aerial view and let Brad (Peck) do what he wanted. And I said, well, we need better communication because that is not how I operate ... I want to know what’s going on. And nothing changed after that meeting,” Mullen said. “And so that’s why I had made that motion again to let him go. Because at that point, I’m like, ‘Well, obviously he’s not changing. Does he want to get fired?’”

Didier had been on the board since he won his seat in the November 2018 general election.

The move to fire Johnson proved so unpopular that city leaders from across the Tri-Cities wrote an open letter to the county in support of him.

Before Johnson left six months later, he signed SVM’s interim contract after the commissioners approved it.

Peck told the Herald that the fighting he saw on the board has only gotten worse with time.

“The present dysfunction, lying, half-truths, blame-games and general incompetence are consistent with what I observed from Commissioners Didier and Mullen, and Auditor Beaton during my time working with each of them,” he wrote.

“It has become more and more difficult — since my departure at the end of 2023 — for them to blame me for their problems,” he wrote. “Although they no doubt will try to sell that nonsensical excuse as long as they can. Even to the untrained eye, it looks like a hot mess of deep insecurities, anger issues, and incompetence.”

Didier allegedly directed

Only Beaton and Mullen were named in the initial unsealed search warrants. A third, unnamed elected official, later confirmed to be Didier, was mentioned in a news release as also being under investigation by the sheriff’s office.

Over the course of the 45-minute audio recording of the January meeting, Beaton explained to Gonzalez that he was only involved at the direction of Didier.

“I can tell you the chair asked me to at that time, Mr. Didier told me to (call HWL). And the reason he did was that your position had changed on SVM,” Beaton said in the recording. “I called Rocky and said, ‘Did something change?’ .... the staff said no, (Gonzalez just wanted to make the payment) and it’s within your authority, and it is.”

In the recording Beaton also mentioned an instance in which Gonzalez was attempting to order a table for the courthouse and Didier allegedly called the auditor and told him to put a stop to it.

Beaton acknowledged that Gonzalez had the authority to make certain financial decisions within limits, but did not explain why the commissioners would attempt to interfere with them.

In his March interview with investigators, Mullen was adamant that Didier’s name never came up.

Sheriff’s Commander Marcus Conner told Mullen that he was informed that Beaton had said Didier directed him to call Harris.

“Matt replied that Clint made him do it,” Conner said, referring to the Jan. 22 meeting.

“That’s news to me,” Mullen responded.

“Do you remember Clint’s name coming up?” Conner asked.

“Not even once, no,” Mullen said.

During the investigation, Conner made clear to Mullen that they were investigating a crime. He was also asked at the end of the interview if everything he said had been truthful.

After the investigation began Didier allegedly began ordering Gonzalez and Office of Public Defense Manager Larry Ziegler to fire Conner’s wife, who works at the OPD as an administrative assistant.

Whitney Conner’s attorney sent the county and Didier a cease and desist letter on April 30. At the time, the county’s attorney noted that she had not been fired and warned the commissioners against attempting to take any further action against her.

Didier and Gonzalez also allegedly had a public blow up in May after the Herald’s initial reporting on the investigation became public, with the two shouting in Didier’s office as the courthouse was opening for the day.

His office doors were open, and the conversation was overheard by courthouse employees, according to an update to the case report.

During that conversation Didier allegedly told Gonzalez, “I think you’re the problem around here.”

Peck said he believes that Mullen and Didier still have not fully grasped what the law defines their role as. He said he tried to limit his comments about their behavior while serving on the board.

“As a commissioner I constrained my comments about the performance of fellow elected officials. There was much to share, but it would not have benefited anyone to do so,” Peck wrote. “Today, as a private citizen, I’ve had enough of their childish antics and want the people of our county to know what they really have in the courthouse.”