By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter

            County Attorney Anne Bast Brown submitted her resignation on April 7 just four months after all but one of her five bosses on the board voted to give her a 3 percent pay raise she requested.

            Her total compensation package rose to $182,859 when she was given the $1.80 hourly increase in December. She is a county employee who works under a contract.

            Commissioner Mike Joyner was the lone board member to vote against the December pay increase noting county residents had suffered enormous economic hardships during the COVID-19 economic shutdown. Jobs and income were lost.

            Joyner said it wasn’t the right time for Brown to get a pay raise.

Some county employees groaned when she got the December increase knowing she had been given a $1.54 cent increase on June 20, 2020, and a $.24 cent raise on Sept. 26, 2020.

She was getting raises any time the Levy County Road Department labor union – Laborers International Union of North American local 630 – negotiated a pay raise for its members. She isn’t a member of the union.

Brown received 11 LIUNA union-negotiated raises over the course of her career with the county. Brown wrote the county personnel policy and exempted herself and her employee, Susan Haines, from the policy.

Employees chose not to speak publicly about Brown when she got the raise. Her power had grown to the point that employees would only whisper her name to criticize her in private.

 Brown bowed out gracefully in her April 7 letter of resignation, which came a day after the April 6 county commission meeting this past Tuesday. Her resignation wasn’t mentioned at the board meeting.

Calls to County Commission Chairman John Meeks went unreturned Saturday. Spotlight wanted Meeks to comment on her resignation.

Brown didn’t cite any job-related reason for retiring.

“After more than 17 years of being afforded the opportunity to be employed by, and to live in, Levy County, the time has come for me to make some changes for me and my family,” she said.

Her final day at work is June 30. Giving the board two months of notice was a requirement of her contract. The board won’t have to pay severance to the retiring legal counselor because she resigned.

One of her tendencies as county attorney was to assign county legal work to Nabors, Giblin, and Nickerson, a Tallahassee law firm working as a consultant for the county.

She made it clear she wasn’t a trial attorney and didn’t perform courtroom work, so it probably came as no surprise Tuesday when she assigned the job of writing an injunction to stop the 2021 Crab Fest to the Tallahassee firm.

If she is retiring, which wasn’t made clear in her letter of resignation, her retirement will be considerable, considering she finished with an annual base salary of $128,000. She is part of the state retirement system.

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Enterprise Reporting by Terry Witt: April 10, 2021; Posted April 10, 2021