Staff say a top doc in Snohomish County bullied them and slept on the job. Officials kept it a secret

People started complaining about Dr. Mark Beatty soon after he was hired as a top health official of Snohomish County.

His mood was unpredictable, nurse Julie Lutz said. “He would be so upset he would physically turn red, get hot and sweaty.”

More complaints arose, records show: Others said Beatty napped during business hours, and that he’d fabricated information in a report. His personnel file notes that he had 21 unplanned days out of the office – within five months.

Still, it took close to two years before he was off the job.

Meantime, his pay increased to nearly $196,000, as a cost of living increase —despite an outside investigation, performance improvement plan, and a formal reprimand.

Beatty’s departure in June, and that of his supervisor, health district administrator Jeff Ketchel, was described by all parties as amicable. But after obtaining over 1,000 pages of documents from the Snohomish Health District, KUOW has learned new details about the strife preceding the departures, and found that it was anything but.

An outside investigation concluded that Beatty repeatedly bullied employees, threatened insubordination if they raised concerns or asked questions, and instructed female staff to babysit his young children at the workplace for him, according to records obtained by KUOW through a public records request.

Beatty’s mood was unpredictable and he would blow up over “stupid” things, Lutz said. “Because we’re nurses, we were worried that he might have a heart attack because he was so upset.”

This summer Lutz retired early in part because of Beatty’s behavior, she said.

While it may seem obscure, the Snohomish Health Officer is responsible for preventing disease and promoting health for the county’s approximately 800,000 people. Recently that’s meant confronting the measles outbreak and the opioid crisis.

Now Snohomish County leaders are looking for a new health officer amid big challenges: a department budget shortfall, loss of funding to supply police with opioid overdose antidotes, and a lawsuit over toxic PCB exposure at a public school in which the Snohomish Health District is a defendant alongside Monsanto.

Beatty said the statements about him conveyed to KUOW and documented in his personnel file are “misunderstandings.” He said he had identified processes that could have been improved and some people felt threatened.

“I didn’t bully anybody,” Beatty said. He said couldn’t explain why someone would say he did.

Beatty denied getting so mad that he would become hot and sweaty, and that he created an unpredictable work atmosphere.

Jeff Ketchel declined to answer questions for this story. Ketchel resigned from his position effective July 1, 2019; his separation agreement does not say why.

Beatty moved to Snohomish County from Korea, where he and his family had been living. He said Snohomish County seemed like a good place to raise small children, do good work, and give back to the community.

When Beatty was hired in a unanimous vote of the Snohomish Board of Health on July 11, 2017, the position had been open for over six months. The board had already interviewed five candidates earlier that year.

“Our patience paid off,” Adrienne Fraley-Monillas, then the chair of the Board of Health, said in News of Mill Creek. “Dr. Beatty has an exceptional mix of education, global experience and passion for public health work.”

Fraley-Monillas did not respond to a request for comment.

Lutz, the public health nurse, recalled administrator Jeff Ketchel proudly showing employees Beatty’s resume.

“He was very excited about it,” she said. Lutz said she believes that’s why Ketchel would later appear to protect Beatty despite employees reporting they felt bullied by him, she said.

Stephanie Wright, the current board chair, referred questions about Beatty to Shawn Frederick, the interim administrator for the Snohomish Health District. Frederick declined an interview “on the advice of legal counsel.”

Beatty started work officially on September 18, 2017, and later told the board his primary focus would be the opioid crisis.

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Within months, staff members complained of threats and intimidation by the top health official, documents show.

Lutz’s job was to collect reports on communicable diseases in the county, such as salmonella, measles, and mumps, and she said Beatty required that she and her coworkers notify him before taking basic steps, like sending a standard letter to schools informing parents their children had been exposed to whooping cough.

If Beatty wasn’t notified “about every stinking little thing,” Lutz said, he would erupt. She said in a single day, he would be angry, then back off, then be cordial, then be angry again.

“You just never really knew what kind of mood he was in or how he was going to treat people that day,” Lutz said.

The stressful environment he created caused her to regain 60 pounds she had previously lost before he was hired, she said.

Public health nurse Megan Whitaker worked on the same team as Lutz and described the job as detective work, where speed and collaboration are essential to track down the source of a disease and keep it from spreading.

But, Whitaker said, Beatty routed most communications through him and would often be unavailable or unresponsive when needed.

“It felt like there was a major block to doing our work,” Whitaker said. “That was just so frustrating.”

Whitaker was afraid of Beatty’s anger, she said, and she avoided talking with him alone. Whitaker quit this summer after 16 years at the health district, citing workplace stress and her struggles with chronic migraines.

“I just couldn’t tolerate it any longer,” she said.

Following employee complaints, the health district paid a law firm to investigate. Twelve witnesses stepped forward.

The investigator found: “Dr. Beatty’s personal interactions with staff have been antagonistic and unprofessional; Dr. Beatty has indiscriminately threatened staff with insubordination charges when they have voiced concerns or asked questions.”

In an interview with KUOW, Beatty said his interactions were not antagonistic and unprofessional.

The investigators report continues: “Dr. Beatty has also behaved disrespectfully during meetings and conversations with staff.

“In one instance, for example, Dr. Beatty put his hand in front of a female colleague’s face during a meeting while she was speaking and instructed her to stop talking.

“In another meeting, he became visibly angry and “stopped the conversation with a slap on the table” before disruptively leaving the room.

Other examples of unprofessional behavior include having made a sexually inappropriate joke during a meeting that upset several staff members,” the report said. “On two separate occasions, Dr. Beatty instructed female staff members to babysit his young children at the workplace while he attended to other matters.”

In an interview with KUOW, Beatty said he had put his hand up to signal “stop” because she was “insulting him.”

“My hand was not in front of her face, it was in the air,” he said.

The “sexually inappropriate joke” was actually a reference to the title of a research abstract written by a presenter from the CDC, Beatty said.

And as for telling female staff members to babysit for him: “I did do that, I didn’t realize it would be a big deal,” Beatty said.

After all, he said, he was moving from Korea to take the job, he had told the health district he would need help with the move, and at the time, he and his wife were working on the details of getting a house.

Beatty said he has been the victim of “mobbing” after he pointed out problems, such as how the health district would misrepresent data in graphs, make spelling and grammar mistakes in reports, and use inappropriate research methods.

“All I tried to do was implement change,” he said.

Last spring, the legal investigator found that Beatty’s actions didn’t violate the law, but he did violate the district’s employee handbook for how co-workers should treat each other.

As a result, Beatty was reprimanded.

"Since your hire as Health Officer September 18, 2017 it has become increasingly clear that your leadership skills, judgment, and ability to address staff in a professional manner is inadequate,” administrator Jeff Ketchel wrote May 9, 2018. Ketchel added it was not the first time he’d addressed such issues with Beatty.

Ketchel implemented a three-month performance improvement plan, including working with a coach. The plan included expectations and strategies for success, such as, “Your tone in addressing staff and community members should be professional and exclude yelling, curt responses, and inappropriate jokes, and sarcasm.”

In June 2018 Beatty obtained a certificate of achievement for a training on "Ethical Behavior for Local Government" but Beatty’s bad behavior didn’t stop, according to his personnel file.

(“I always act on the Hippocratic oath and I always act ethically,” Beatty said.)

In March 2019 an employee complained Beatty arbitrarily made up information in a report measuring the health of Snohomish County residents.

According to records in Beatty’s personnel file, the employee alleged that Beatty had devoted a paragraph to describing a conversation that didn’t occur at an event where he was not present.

(Beatty said he was clarifying the methods that had been used to produce the report, after he had reviewed research literature.)

The next month, the state Department of Health found an antibiotic resistant organism at a nursing home. Over the phone, Beatty repeatedly questioned the credentials of a PhD-level state disease control manager and belittled him until he cried, according to an email the manager sent to Ketchel.

Beatty said he does not remember this incident.

Then there were the 21 “unplanned days out of office” that Beatty had from February to June 2019. Health District Administrator Ketchel approved all this time off, Beatty said.

And when the measles outbreak touched down in the county, Beatty issued orders that contradicted instructions from the state Department of Health, “causing confusion and anger in the community,” Jeff Ketchel wrote.

“I’m not aware that it caused confusion or anger,” Beatty said. “So I don’t know why he’d write that, but I do know that Jeff no longer works for the Health District.”

Now the Snohomish Board of Health is trying to recruit new leaders, including a new health officer.

“Hopefully they’ll do a better job of picking somebody next time around,” Lutz said.

Lutz’s former co-worker, Megan Whitaker, hopes for more accountability for whoever allowed Beatty to stay at the health district for so long.

“Something is really broken in the system,” she said. “If they hire a health officer who’s not able or willing to do the job, will they recognize that right away and will they actually act on that? I feel like this time they didn’t.”