Former North Las Vegas City Manager Qiong Liu appears at a city council meeting Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2018.
Sunday, Feb. 6, 2022 | 2 a.m.
A state ethics complaint filed by the city of North Las Vegas against its former city manager details how, according to the city, Qiong Liu used her position of authority as chief executive to pressure subordinates to push through a $30,000-a-year raise and then try to cover it up.
The 237-page complaint, pending for more than two years and obtained by the Sun, sheds light on the back and forth between the parties. Lui on Jan. 27 sued the city a third time claiming wrongful termination.
“Liu was more concerned with padding her pension than she was with impartially discharging her public duties,” City Attorney Micaela Moore wrote in the December 2019 complaint.
The complaint shows how Liu instructed staffers to increase her pay from $190,000 to $220,000, which would go into effect in September 2016 and be retroactive to November 2015. That would have netted her a $25,000 lump-sum payment for back salary and increased her future pension payments.
The city council voted to fire Liu in February 2018 “for cause” without a severance package other than a payout of unused time off. The cause, the city said, was Liu trying to extend the raise without council approval.
Liu said she was trying to correct an accounting error and believed she was entitled to the salary adjustment, although the internal investigation concluded that her actions were “inconsistent with such a belief.”
Memo’s delivery at issue
The ethics complaint came to light in April 2020 when Liu successfully sued North Las Vegas to cover her costs for defending herself against the claim.
The state typically keeps ethics complaints confidential until they are decided, but the city provided the complaint to the Sun in response to a public records request.
The complaint says an independent investigation by law firm Fisher Phillips concluded that Liu had her executive assistant forward paperwork authorizing the raise to another of her subordinates, then-director of human resources Cass Palmer. She attached a supporting memo addressed to the city council discussing why the 2016 raise should be retroactive to November 2015, her work anniversary.
All five council members, however, confirmed that they had never received the memo.
The investigation also found that she instructed IT staff not to share her work emails with city officials and wiped her city-issued cell phone.
A summary of Palmer’s recollections in the ethics complaint shows that Liu turned on him when he told her that the city council had to authorize the raise.
“Liu raised her voice and, in a threatening tone, directed Palmer to process the payment, and to process it quickly,” the complaint reads. “Palmer believed that if he did not process the payment, his job would be in jeopardy.”
Multiple lawsuits
In addition to the city’s ethics complaint, Liu has filed three lawsuits against her former employer in two years.
She filed her first lawsuit in January 2020 against Mayor John Lee and current City Manager Ryann Juden, claiming that the longtime friends and associates conspired to interfere with her contract by forcing her out of her job and blocking her proposed, $613,000 severance package. The case is scheduled for a jury trial in September.
The second suit, filed three months later, argued that her employment contract required the city to pay for Liu’s defense in any ethics complaint, regardless of who filed it. The judge in that suit awarded Liu about $44,000 last July.
The most recent lawsuit, filed Jan. 27 against the city as an entity, is for wrongful termination. It says none of the reasons given for her firing met her contract’s definition of “cause” and restates the accusations of cronyism.
Liu has said her firing was a personal vendetta after she fired Juden — then the assistant city manager — following an argument and sending council a memo calling his hiring “the biggest mistake that I have made” and accusing him of causing “widespread fear and damage” at City Hall. She rescinded the firing the next day.
In this year’s lawsuit, though, she said Juden “had consistently been insubordinate” and that he threatened her job on Lee’s behalf.
Liu worked for North Las Vegas from 2005 to 2018, starting out as deputy public works director. She was appointed as city manager in 2014, when the city was in the midst of a financial crisis. Her LinkedIn profile shows she now works for a California-based software management company and that she is “retired” from North Las Vegas.
Andrea Champion, Liu’s attorney, declined to comment on the ethics investigation, citing the state’s confidentiality of pending complaints.
To the lawsuit filed late last month, Champion said Liu “was forced to file this complaint for wrongful termination because the city has not acted in good faith to resolve her claim as promised.”
