Assistant City Manager Joshua Blubaugh - TERMINATED

DEC 12, 2024

On THU, NOV 21, 2024 City of Aledo City Manager - Noah Simon terminates the employment of the Assistant City Manager. His letter to Mayor and Council can be found here.

We should also point out that 2 months prior, after 13 years of service, City Secretary Deana Mc Mullen resigned. 

Over the past 24 months RNS has received numerous reports of a TOXIC work environment at Aledo city hall. Additionally as stated in the past, numerous former staff members have contributed to the data published on this site. 

Some examples of TOXIC work place: 

1. Employee came in on his day off and printed off a concert ticket. Employee was written up for using city property for personal use. (a single piece of paper)

2. Favoritism and inequities where rampant. Example, one staff member was given more bereavement time off then another despite what written policy dictated. 

3. The City manager created a environment in which he had to approve everything.  There where times in which a decision needed to be made. A call and or text would be made to the City Manager. He would not respond to either. A decision would be made, the City Manager would reprimand you for making a decision without his input. 

4. The City Manager would hold you accountable for situations that either you had no control over or happened prior to your employment with the city. 

5. The City Manager instructed staff to not speak to other staff, vendors or residents. 

6. Day to day staff did not know what was going to happen one day to the next. Staff walks on eggshells in fear that they will upset the City Manager. 

7. Communication from the City Manager was minimum. You knew something was not right when he would not answer your emails and instead want to speak to you in person if he even spoke to you. 

8. If the City Manager wanted you to quit, he would take your responsibilities away and place you on a written corrective action plan. This seems normal, but he would never discuss the plan, progress or any corrections needed. Instead you would be terminated and in your file he would add that you did not follow the plan.

9. Department heads where never given there approved budget. When departments heads asked for them they would be told "I will work on that" but he would never produce the budget for them. 

This list goes on.......

Staff/Contractors that have either been fired, resigned or pushed out since Mayor Nick Stanley has taken leadership:

Chris, Dalton, Gretchen, Kristian, Kari, Karen, Cliff, Gabby, Todd, Nathan, Shawn, Erica, PWE #1, PWE #2, Letty, Deana, Assistant City Manager. 17 people is not a bad employee, this is a repeated pattern of incompetent management. 

After the Assistant City Manager was terminated, he sent a letter to the Aledo City Council. The letter and a statement from him is posted below. Interestingly his concern's are in line with what we a RNS have been posing about the City Manager - Noah Simon and the work environment at the City of Aledo. We at RNS doubt that there will be any change as the Council and City Attorney have been notified on numerous occasions of this repeated pattern of behavior. 

At this point we fell comfortable in making the statement that the issues at the City of Aledo go much deeper than the City Manager Noah Simon and Mayor Nick Stanley. Now you can say that they City Attorney and City Council are as much to blame as none have taken any action to protect the staff and citizens from the tyranny of the City Manager and Mayor.

UPDATE

Unfortunately the City of Aledo sent our request for this letter to the State Attorney General. This is an attempt to block this letter from being seen by the public. It seems that the City Manager - Noah Simon and Mayor Nick Stanley are once again abusing the use of tax payer funds to cover their negative and abusive behavior. They are effectively weaponizing the State Attorney General to keep documents that show there true behavior from being seen by the public. To add insult to injury, we the tax payers are covering the bill. 

More to come......

#DefendAledo #RulesForTheeAndNotForMe