EVERETT — Complaints about race and gender discrimination at Snohomish County’s Public Works Department spurred more than $100,000 in outside investigations, which found no wrongdoing by top management.

The issues are far from resolved, though. And once again, the county’s handling of worker

harassment complaints is coming under criticism.

Two of the employees at the center of those complex investigations have filed lawsuits against the county.

The employees, a man and a woman, are both African-American and allege they were mistreated because of their race, among other factors, and suffered retaliation. Both still work for the county.

The cases are not directly related.

Collectively, the investigations waded through dozens of witness interviews, generating thousands of pages of reports. County officials provided redacted copies of two investigation reports in response to public disclosure requests.

“The outside investigation conducted at my request has been completed without a finding of discrimination by the county,” Public Works Director Steve Thomsen said of the investigation into the female worker’s complaint.

Thomsen went on to say, “The report substantiated all actions taken by management.”

The report into the male worker’s concerns also found the county took the right disciplinary action, he said.

Deputy Executive Gary Haakenson said the county administration was “absolutely” satisfied with Thomsen’s leadership.

Snohomish County has been racking up a hefty tab for outside investigations of workplace issues.

Last year, the County Council approved paying the MFR Law Group of Mill Creek up to $115,000 for an investigation of mutual allegations between Anthony Stigall and his coworkers in Public Works’ environmental services division.

Stigall, in a November lawsuit, says a supervisor told him, in 2007, that “you and your kind” should not be working for Snohomish County. He maintains that a supervisor gave him instructions not to look at three women, all white, and that he was restricted from parts of the office because other staff considered him intimidating and harassing.

Before the lawsuit, Stigall filed a $150,000 damage claim against the county.

Stigall’s attorney declined to comment for this story.

The law firm’s report, nine months in the making, found insufficient evidence to support any of Stigall’s claims of discrimination or that managers retaliated against him. It also failed to substantiate coworkers’ allegations against Stigall, including that he harassed women in the office because of their gender.

“The evidence shows that Public Works took seriously its obligation to promote a safe and healthy workplace for all its employees regardless of race or gender,” it concludes.

The other case involves Colleen Moore, a full-time, roads-maintenance worker with the county since 2007, who started with the county in 2004 working part time.

Last year, the County Council authorized nearly $29,000 for private investigator Daphne Schneider of Seattle to probe Moore’s allegation that a male supervisor had discriminated against her because she is a black woman and that management refused to do anything about it. At the same time, Schneider looked into coworkers’ allegations about Moore’s conduct on the job.

Schneider’s seven-month investigation found a tense workplace that divided employees into separate, opposing camps, some siding with Moore and others with her accusers. The private investigator did not find convincing evidence that the supervisor broke county policies regarding harassment or safety. And though the county’s responses were not as thorough as Moore wanted, Schneider determined that managers did take action.

Schneider could not determine whether allegations about Moore’s behavior at work were true, given available evidence.

Moore filed a $350,000 damage claim against the county in June, followed by her lawsuit in September. The claim accuses the county of employing Schneider’s investigation as a form of retaliation.

The suit recounts racist jokes and sexist comments a supervisor allegedly made while Moore was working on a roads crew in 2009.

Elsewhere, the suit claims, “Moore received unsolicited and inappropriate text messages, which included sexually graphic or racially insensitive content, from her coworkers at Snohomish County.”

Moore’s claim and lawsuit came only after she filed complaints with the county’s workplace-harassment investigator and the federal government, according to Kasey Huebner, her attorney.

“Snohomish County sat on Ms. Moore’s race- and gender-discrimination complaint for nearly nine months and did not hire Ms. Schneider to conduct an investigation until after Ms. Moore filed a federal claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Huebner said. “Receiving no resolution or response to her complaint from the county for more than a year, Ms. Moore filed a suit.”

Schneider’s report was released months later and did not address “any of the violations of state and federal anti-discrimination laws asserted in Ms. Moore’s lawsuit,” Huebner said.

The investigations at Public Works unfolded in the aftermath of embarrassing revelations about how the county had been handling harassment complaints from its employees.

Former planning director Craig Ladiser was fired, and was later convicted of criminal charges, for exposing himself and rubbing his bared genitals against a female building-industry lobbyist while drunk at a Redmond-area golf tournament in June 2009.

Before that incident, female planning department employees had long complained about gender-based discrimination and the apparent lack of action by higher-level managers. Last year, a former human resources manager in the department received $600,000 from the county to settle a discrimination lawsuit.

Some workers described as a “black hole” the Equal Employment Opportunity office tasked with looking into harassment concerns — the same one Moore says sat on her complaint for months.

A year ago, the attorney in charge of that office resigned. Mark Knudsen’s departure came shortly before the release of an outside review that found sloppy record-keeping and a lack of consistency in his work. The report said employees often waited months, even years, to hear back from Knudsen after filing a complaint.

County Executive Aaron Reardon’s former deputy apologized to all county employees for not doing a better job of overseeing Knudsen’s work. The deputy, attorney Mark Soine, later resigned.

Haakenson, whom Reardon hired to replace Soine, said the recent Public Works investigations were so complex that they would have been performed by an outside consultant, regardless of whether Knudsen or somebody else was in the job.

Since Knudsen’s departure, the county has been more responsive when workers raise concerns, according to James Trefry, a union representative from Council 2, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees affiliate that represents a majority of Snohomish County employees.

Knudsen’s replacement, attorney Chris Katahira, has inspired confidence in ways that Knudsen did not, Trefry said.

“Since Chris has been in that job, every time I’ve been with somebody and met with him, he’s done a good job,” he said. “He’s been very thorough and very responsive.”

Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465, nhaglund@heraldnet.com.