Investigation Finds Hostile Work Environment in Civil Rights Office

Carol Johnson (Courtesy of Carol Johnson)

Nelson Linder, president of the Austin branch of the NAACP, worries the city's equity-focused offices are coming dangerously close to free fall. Carol Johnson, head of the city's Office of Civil Rights, remains on administrative leave as the city determines what it can do with the results of an investigation that found her office hostile and dysfunctional. In the meantime, Brion Oaks, the head of the city's Equity Office, left this month "to pursue an opportunity with another entity," the city confirmed to the Chronicle July 19. (Oaks' LinkedIn has not been updated with a new workplace.) Over at the Office of Police Oversight, Director Farah Muscadin is on parental leave. With all three offices lacking heads for the moment, and the OCR's situation seeming dire, Linder believes City Council bears some responsibility for "not getting involved" in unbearably stressful work environments.

An investigation report obtained by Com­munity Impact through a public information request July 13 tells a grim tale about the city's nascent Office of Civil Rights, created in 2020 to gather together functions previously in several different departments, including Human Resources. Johnson took over as the city's first civil rights officer in February 2021, and by April of this year, six OCR employees had together filed a complaint about her conduct. They claimed she'd forced them to work in person during the pandemic as retaliation while hardly being present in the office herself. They also said she'd created unreasonable performance goals so she could document their low success rates and threaten penalties or firings. Finally, they said the highly stressful environment had contributed to several employees' illnesses. "The OCR is being destroyed from within due to the abusive, exploitative, unprofessional, and retaliatory management style and personal behavior of the civil rights officer," the six staffers said in their initial complaint.

The office is supposed to be responsible for ensuring fairness and nondiscrimination in housing and employment across Austin (the Equity Office focuses on the impacts of city programs themselves) through investigations of complaints and by educating the public on its rights. Linder told the Chronicle that while the Austin NAACP conducts many investigations itself, in 2020 it directed people to the OCR and heard good things about its attentive staff. But since Johnson took over, NAACP referrals had found it difficult or very slow to get in contact with staff there, he said. As a result, the NAACP stopped directing people to the office for help within a couple months of Johnson's hire. At an April Human Rights Commission meeting, Linder made his frustrations public and told commissioners that Johnson needed to be placed on leave.

While Linder observed dysfunction from the outside, an investigation by Lynch Law Firm (at a cost to the city of $15,000) supported most of the employees' claims. "The city of Austin has a history of hiring people in these positions which are very stressful and just leaving them there," Linder said. "If you're getting these complaints, why aren't you intervening? … The time to address this was last year when it first began to simmer. They didn't address it and it just got worse to a point that is basically irreparable."

The Lynch investigation also found that Johnson had misled other city staff and the public about what was going on at OCR. "The work environment created and maintained by Ms. Johnson … violates nearly every 'fundamental objective of good personnel administration' as outlined in the preamble of the city's personnel policies manual," the report said. The outcomes of these practices have included low community engagement rates, extremely low morale among staff, high staff turnover, and at least one failed program, according to Community Impact.

Chas Moore, co-founder of the Austin Justice Coalition, said that group hasn't worked much directly with OCR and expects the office to still be finding its footing. Often, people who reach out to AJC are best served by a connection to an attorney, he said, and he isn't sure what people could or should really expect from such an office. "With them trying to find out who they are – some of these things are gonna happen. … I think these entities can become really powerful things if they're community­-focused and community-driven, but the community [itself] can get shit done – probably a lot better and a lot faster – if we're able to galvanize each other and understand that we are our greatest strengths." He differs from Linder in thinking that the free hand given the OCR (and other new offices like it) by the City Council and upper management is by design, an attempt to allow them the autonomy to figure out how to best serve the public and execute their missions.

The OCR has a $2 million budget for the current fiscal year, which is about $700,000 more than the prior year, which was about $500,000 more than was spent on the civil rights unit within Human Resources two years ago. It has 16 full-time positions, five of which are vacant.