The city has terminated Fleet Services Tire Program Manager Bill Janousek, who was partly responsible for ensuring proper disposal of the thousands of tires the city scraps each year. Apparently he didn’t do such a good job with that: As the Chronicle first reported in December, the city had failed to track thousands of scrapped tires since at least 2006 (the first year for which we requested records) and had been, as far back as 2003, abandoning tires on Southeast Austin property leased by Vic’s Tire Service owner Victor Almaguer (see “Tire Mound of Mystery,” Dec. 4, 2009). Almaguer wasn’t licensed to transport or store the large number of tires eventually left there – some 6,000 or so, he estimated last year – but had held a contract with the city to fix flat tires. That contract has since expired.
According to an internal report of the personnel investigation, Janousek told city investigators that he’d given Almaguer a “loan” of more than $30,000 to help Almaguer with medical bills that accumulated over the course of an illness that lasted several months. Almaguer, on the other hand, told the city that the money was not a loan but rather payment for work he’d been doing for the city but had not been paid for – presumably, in part, several years of transporting and storing the city’s scrap tires. City investigators said they could not determine whether the money Janousek gave to Almaguer was, in fact, a loan; nonetheless, Janousek’s actions violated city of Austin personnel policies. “Mr. Janousek did not fulfill his responsibility to act in a professional and ethical manner as stated in policy,” reads the report.
According to an e-mail from city spokesman Reyne Telles, although Janousek has been terminated (he’d been on paid administrative leave since December), an internal investigation into the tire mess is ongoing. Telles had no further comment on the substance of the pending inquiry.
This article appears in April 23 • 2010.