It’s always tough to be the new kid but for Elbert County Manager Shawn Fletcher, things have been more than just tough during the 18 months he’s been at the helm of the 21st-largest county in the state. In fact, he says they have been downright complicated, and at times—scary.

In the tight-knit conservative county of 28,000, Fletcher has been demonized as an outsider and an opportunist with no desire to live within the county he serves.

Not helping matters, newly minted pay bumps and employment contracts for both Fletcher and longtime County Attorney Bart Greer have ignited public scorn and fueled questions from the media and blistering comments from residents on social media.

As for the “outsider” moniker, Fletcher said he kind of takes issue with it because he grew up in Colorado Springs and attended the Cheyenne Mountain school system, where he played football and ran track until his senior year.

“My mother was an executive at the Broadmoor Hotel,” he said. “She started at the front desk and worked her way up to become one of the assistant hotel general managers.”

A deeply religious man, Fletcher says he’s drawn strength from teachers, pastors, his mother—who raised him alone—and a long line of U.S. Army veterans in his family, eventually, himself, serving in the U.S. Navy as a firefighter at Camp David.  

In an interview with Colorado Politics, Fletcher said he’s tried to keep his nose to the grindstone and away from the flurry of social media posts often directed at his job performance, his staff, and at times, directly at him.

Fletcher admits since taking the job, he’s been the subject of harassment, including that of a racial nature.

A national search firm specializing in county and government administration recruited Fletcher for the Elbert County Manager position. After several interviews, including a live panel interview with local county stakeholders, Fletcher was offered and accepted the position.

The timeline presented to Fletcher by the Elbert County Board of Commissioners gave him very little wiggle room to pack up his family and move them from Dodge City, Kansas where he was the Ford County assistant county administrator.

He lived out of a hotel room in Castle Rock for several weeks and commuted back to Kansas as he prepared to move.

While Fletcher and his family eventually settled in a home just outside of Elbert County, some remain skeptical of his overall commitment to the county. 

“It is really fascinating to me when they say I’m not committed because I sold my house, I quit a very secure job, I left my church, I left tons of friends, and was enjoying being a clinical chaplain for veterans,” Fletcher told Colorado Politics. “I asked my wife to give up her career to come to Colorado, and we moved our kids to a different school system. So, I think I’m all in.” 

As for not living in Elbert County, Fletcher explained that it was not because he hadn’t tried.

“I have a large family, so we looked for rentals first because we had to sell our house (in Dodge City),” he said. “You can’t just go buy a house when you own a house—the economics of it are tough.”

Fletcher said his family’s size made finding a home big enough to accommodate everyone extremely difficult.

“I felt like there was no affordable housing in Elbert County to move my family into, and so that’s why we ended up living where we are,” he said.

When asked about his new contract and salary and why they are not aligned with what has been typical in the county, Fletcher points to the county’s historical problems with staffing in general and the fact that when he arrived, almost a quarter of the positions within the county were vacant.

“I would argue that Elbert County was underpaying its staff altogether, and when I first got here, there was a vacuum in HR,” he explained. “We didn’t have an HR director. I had to find a qualified candidate. We had 40 or 50 open positions (out of 200). Can you imagine that coming in? Not having an HR director, and having that many open positions in the county?

But just filling the HR position didn’t solve the problem, he said.

“As we started recruiting, what we found out was, when we’d hire a truck driver, for instance, with public works, they would accept the position, and then the next week, right before they were supposed to start, they’d call us and say, ‘I got hired in Castle Rock; they’re paying me more money.’” Fletcher said. “Or, ‘I got hired in Aurora, they’re paying me more money. I got hired in Parker. They’re paying more money.’”

Fletcher said it didn’t take long to understand what was happening and why it was happening.

“And how far away are these places from us?” he said. “Look at who we are in competition with for the biggest resource—our people. We are, fortunately, or unfortunately, located next to places that pay more money for the same talent. And so, now, we have to figure out how to attract good, talented people to Elbert County.” 

However, local residents still have questions about Fletcher’s most recent contract extension and 40% pay increase.

“The extension of the contract was not early, truly it was delayed,” Elbert County Commissioner Chris Richardson explained. He said the Board of County Commissioners was almost six months late in conducting Fletcher’s formal personnel evaluation.

Elbert County expects its county manager to always be forward-thinking and not “ever think the tracks ahead end.” 

“For that reason, we have traditionally extended the end date of the county manager’s contract by at least a year after every evaluation period ends,” Richardson said. We don’t want our manager to ever think the tracks ahead of us and we cannot afford to come to a stop.”

He added that the county came to a stop in 2010 when the recession hit, and it has taken more than a decade to recover.

Richardson emphasized that the board’s main concern is the potential loss of several key elected officials in the county over the next two years. Due to term limits, retirements, and other factors, multiple positions, including those of two current commissioners, could be vacated. He suggested that securing the county manager and county attorney roles could help mitigate this uncertainty.

“That is the sole basis of the choice for the extended contract end date (for Fletcher and Greer),” Richardson said.

On Aug. 14, a group of Elbert County residents retained a law firm, accusing the county of violations of Colorado’s Open Meetings Law and pushing the county to rescind those contracts. 

Accusations that Fletcher is attempting to interfere with the hiring of law enforcement officers in the sheriff’s office have also been troubling.

“That is not true in any way, shape or form,” he said. 

By county policy and by statute, Fletcher said the sheriff hires and fires their own officers.

Also, rumors of county layoffs resulting from outsourcing have been fodder for several social media sites.

Fletcher confirmed the county has brought in a company called SafeBuilt, to assist with inspections and other functions that a county building department would do.

He said the idea was to bring in the company to handle backlogs and to give the county a scalable solution to handling delays and complaints within the department.

He said only two positions within the department were eliminated “for business reasons.” 

However, perhaps the biggest head-scratcher for Fletcher has been the suggestion that he is not “visible” in the community.

Fletcher says he attends several community meetings and would like to meet other stakeholders, but “invitations to more would always be welcome.”