It’s not about scrap tires.
Somebody at City Hall needs to understand, once and for all, that there’s a major managerial mess at Fleet Services. This week, the Chronicle‘s Jordan Smith continues her reporting on the story she broke last December concerning the scrap-tire program at Fleet, which manages and maintains the city’s thousands of vehicles. As Smith documents, Fleet managers were informed of potentially serious problems in the tire program as early as May 2008, yet they did little or nothing to address the issue – beyond asking the personnel at the center of the problem to investigate themselves. About that same time, Fleet managers decided to stop monitoring the city’s considerable inventory of reusable tires, a policy (or rather lack of one) that city officials now say is without “fiscal implications.”
How would they know?
Worse yet, the managerial response to persistent allegations of serious problems within Fleet has been to shoot the messengers. That’s what apparently happened to former Operations Manager Hiram Kirkland, who was dismissed on dubious charges of self-dealing when he tried to clean up Fleet. Now it’s a cloud hanging over Fleet service manager and whistle-blower Daniel Lomas, who this week in Smith’s story goes public with his numerous allegations of mismanagement (and worse), primarily because every attempt he has made to alert city officials about Fleet’s problems – ranging from sloppy record-keeping to alleged bid-rigging – has been met with indifference or obstruction. Instead of treating seriously Lomas’ concerns about the negligent way managers were handling valuable inventory (and not just scrap tires), administrators have either explained the problems away or reprimanded Lomas for raising them.
We certainly hope that Lomas’ decision to make his complaints public will not evoke more of the same from the city. As I wrote in December 2009, such a response “hardly inspires confidence that the current crop of managers is capable of adequately addressing the rest of the mess.”
The Last Resort
Unfortunately, this week’s official response to Smith’s questions suggests that little has changed. In December, Chief Financial Officer Leslie Browder reported to the City Council that Fleet managers only learned of the problems in tracking scrap tires when the Chronicle inquired (in November 2009) about the legally required tracking manifests. Browder reiterated that chronology this week in her latest CYA memo to City Manager Marc Ott, insisting that Fleet Manager Gerry Calk only learned about the “scrap tire pile” through Smith’s November inquiries. About the exact location of the pile, maybe – readers (and City Council members) can review with Smith’s story the litany of memos stretching back to May 2008 (when this ongoing Fleet discussion was apparently first reduced to writing) and consider whether Browder’s version of the history is accurate, or even responsive.
Or they can reflect upon Ott’s own written response this week to Smith’s question, “When were you first alerted to possible improprieties at Fleet involving the tire program?” Ott answered, “Daniel Lomas first contacted me in May 2009 about his concerns related to tire issues.” Among the officials Ott copied on his May 2009 reply to Lomas (“My my, it sounds like we have some very serious issues in fleet”) was CFO Leslie Browder.
Lomas only wrote to Ott after a year of vainly attempting to get the substantive attention of the front-line Fleet managers and administrators, who either dismissed the problems he raised as imaginary or reproved Lomas for bringing them up. Given renewed motivation by a city ethics training class, Lomas wrote to Ott: “Mr. Ott you are my last resort, I have documented many acts of unethical behaviors and have submitted them to my Manager, Deputy Officer’s, Fleet Officer, and the City Audit Department.”
The Lomas paper trail is ample evidence that it simply won’t do for the city to keep insisting that all of this brouhaha about Fleet is a big surprise to everybody in management, and that if he had just made his concerns more specific (another tack taken by the Browder memo), no effort would have been spared in making things right.
Much too little, much too late.
The Buck Stops at City Hall
Fleet officials (and their city managers) may believe that Fleet’s problems disappeared with the dismissal of tire program manager Bill Janousek – dismissed not for mishandling inventory but instead for tangential violations of policies concerning loans to subordinates. We’ve certainly not heard the end of that matter (Janousek is appealing his dismissal, and the Austin Police Department is still investigating), but more importantly, the buck simply doesn’t stop with Janousek – it goes all the way up the chain of command, to City Manager Ott himself. Judging from the self-contradictory responses to the Chronicle‘s questions provided by officials this week, it would certainly be reasonable for Ott to conclude he isn’t being well-served by several of his subordinates, and that Fleet management in particular needs a serious house-cleaning. (Former City Attorney David Smith is no longer available to fade the heat.)
“Something had to be done … and if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t have been done.” That’s what Daniel Lomas told me this week, when I asked him if during the past two years he had ever considered just throwing in the towel on his reform efforts at Fleet – concluding, “I’ve tried, but nobody’s listening,” and just giving up the fight. The strain of being the odd man out has clearly worn on him and negatively affected his health. He’s watched colleagues who’ve taken similar risks be steadily frozen out of meetings and responsibilities, pressured to resign, or worse. Now that his name is public, he fears more retaliation, although he says that in recent weeks, the supervisors who have dismissed his complaints have “mostly just left me alone.”
But Lomas also says he’s been gratified by the encouragement of Fleet staffers who have privately congratulated his efforts, who have said they’re no longer “looking the other way” at unethical or corrupt practices – because, they say, Lomas has shown at last that if you speak up, eventually somebody will listen. “There are a lot of really good people working at Fleet,” Lomas says. “And we know that it can be fixed. This can be done. Something can be done.”
This article appears in July 2 • 2010.
