Point Austin: The City's Tired Story

We're pleased that, in the wake of embarrassing publicity, the city has taken steps to clean up its scrap tire disposal program. What's not yet clear is whether those steps are anywhere near enough to fix the ongoing problems.

Regular Chronicle readers are aware that staff writer Jordan Smith has uncovered tire "disposal" practices at the city's Fleet Services department that are at best incompetent and negligent – and perhaps criminal, since at a minimum the city appears to have violated state law concerning the environmentally safe disposal of the tires. (See "The Tire Mound of Mystery," Dec. 4, and "Untiring Efforts," Dec. 11.) Smith reviewed the city's own state-required records supposedly tracking the tires from their "generation" as discards from city-owned vehicles, through several years, to what should have been their final, environmentally sound resting places. She couldn't find a single completed manifest successfully tracking the tires and instead was provided with randomly filled-out forms completed by people who may or may not have had any legal responsibility for the tires. At the end of this sloppy trail, she found Victor Almaguer of Vic's Tire Service plaintively wondering what to do with the several thousand city tires he had accumulated at the behest of Fleet management – although without a valid city contract, payment for his work, or the means of finally disposing them himself.

Since the situation was exposed in early December, the city has scrambled to contain the damage and clean up the mess, says it is working with the Texas Commission on Environmental Qual­ity to achieve compliance with state regulations, and even called in the Austin Police Department to go out and have a look at Vic's tire collection – reporting helpfully to Chief Financial Officer Leslie Browder that at least some of the tires "do not appear to have come from City vehicles." (The city reports magnanimously that it will dispose of those as well.) In case you're wondering, the CFO wrote the memo because Fleet Services is ultimately her responsibility.

All this is summarized in Browder's Dec. 8 memorandum on the affair to City Council, which concludes that the tires and the record-keeping will be cleaned up posthaste.

Hear No Evil

If it happens, that's just terrific. Unfor­tun­ately, Browder's memo also suggests that the impulse to deflect official responsibility is very hard to stifle. For example, Almaguer's name gets kicked around a bit for having no contract with the city to handle tires – despite the fact that he's been trying to get the city to accept its responsibilities for several months and has publicly stuck out his own neck to do so (a trait rather more rare among city bureaucrats). Along those lines, Browder claims that only the Chronicle's open records requests alerted Fleet management to the inadequate state of its tire records – although when Fleet supplied those records, it made no mention of any such problems, and from Almaguer's inquiries alone there is strong reason to believe that management has been aware of these problems for months if not years.

Similarly, Browder identifies only an "anonymous tip" to the Health and Human Services Department as previously indicating the existence of the scrapped tires, a tip that supposedly died at the desk of Tire Program Manager Bill Janousek, who has since been placed on paid administrative leave. We've since tried to verify this information by means of open records requests but thus far have been stonewalled by the city's legal department. On Wednesday, Browder told me she is trying to determine whether the "anonymous tip" – a phone call – was ever reduced to writing. Citing "pending investigations," they won't supply any documentation of the anonymous tip or any similar communications and have appealed to the state attorney general to withhold any other related documentation – which, according to Brow­der's memo, doesn't in fact exist.

Which is it?

Ask Us No Questions ...

Unfortunately, this is par for the course for city legal, which told us that Fleet managers couldn't talk about the scrap tires because of a seemingly unrelated whistleblower lawsuit that has since been dismissed. As Jordan Smith duly reported, the city's attorneys insisted, despite our puzzlement, that the two matters were related; now Browder has told City Council that "Although the article seems to point to a relationship between the lawsuit and the allegations regarding scrap tire disposal, none exists." (She throws in a few gratuitous sentences celebrating the city's victory in that unrelated lawsuit; we hope they amused the attorneys who drafted them.) Maybe Browder should walk over to City Attorney David Smith's office and ask him to get his story straight.

While she's over there, perhaps she can ask him why the city reflexively hides behind the attorney general whenever somebody asks questions to which the answers might be embarrassing and why the city attorneys inevitably delay the full, statutory 10 business days to file their appeals to the A.G. – even when David Smith knows damn well on day one that he has no intention of responding to an open records request and will instead stonewall for as long as possible.

Late Wednesday, City Attorney Anne Morgan told me that at first the city wrongly thought the whistleblower lawsuit might be related to our inquiries, and subsequently the answers had become part of a pending investigation – either way, we're out of luck.

The Chronicle is in fact not asking for legally sensitive documents, just those that very likely reflect that Fleet officials, as well as city managers, knew quite a while ago that Fleet's scrap tire disposal system had long since gone into the ditch, and nobody was paying sufficient attention to clean up the mess. If there are no such documents, then city officials shouldn't have to appeal to the Attorney General's Office to withhold them, and Browder shouldn't have to embarrass herself by attempting to distract the council with "unrelated" information.

As Jordan Smith also reported, the scrap tire fiasco is hardly the only managerial cloud hanging over Fleet Services. But if this is the way the city responds to that rather specific, narrow problem, it hardly inspires confidence that the current crop of managers is capable of adequately addressing the rest of the mess.