The mounds of tires moldering on land leased by Vic’s Tire Service just southeast of Downtown – on which we first reported Dec. 4 – still remain moldering. Victor Almaguer, who has been accumulating abandoned city-owned tires since at least 2003 – without a city contract and seemingly in violation of state environmental regulations – said that fire marshals visited the site this week and have asked him to rearrange some of the tires in order to ensure they are not a fire hazard, a job he said he’s currently working on. When the city will finally remove the tires from the land remains to be decided, he said. (For more on the story, see “The Tire Mound of Mystery,” Dec. 4.)
On Monday, after some delay, the city legal department released to the Chronicle 35 selected pages of documents concerning parts-tracking problems at the city’s Fleet Services Division. We’re still reviewing the documents, but they contain no references to the scrap tire program that’s at the center of an investigation into how and why thousands of city-owned tires were junked on a piece of property just miles from City Hall. We’d been looking in particular for documents that might mention problems in the tire program, but, apparently because any such documents have been considered exempt from disclosure while the Austin Police Department investigates the program, they weren’t released to us.
The documents that the city did make available cover the period from 2006 to 2009 and do reflect considerable dispute among managers – including Fleet Officer Gerry Calk and former Fleet Operations Manager Hiram Kirkland, whose whistleblower lawsuit against the city concerning alleged malfeasance in Fleet Services was dismissed by a Travis County judge earlier this month. The disputes center around the tracking of salvage parts and similar matters as well as related, sometimes personal disputes over which managers are responsible for the problems. So many pages have been withheld or redacted that it is difficult to determine their importance – but the documents reflect longstanding management problems within Fleet Services that the city has not been able to rectify.
This article appears in December 25 • 2009.