|
 | ||
| Home | ||
| Venice Florida! dot com stories archive | ||
| ||||||||||||||||
| Venice on the web Whistleblower's attorney threatens legal action, city tries to hide attorney's letter behind loophole in open records laws
Related:
My baby, she wrote me a letter Really? I get strange tips all the time, some of them even turn out to be true. At first, I asked verbally at the city clerk's office if anyone there had seen such a letter, and I was told no, no such letter had been clocked in at their end. So the next step was to file a request.
The response:
Now, before anyone blames Stelzer for withholding the document, this was not her decision. The decision to withhold the document was made by Assistant City Manager Jane O'Connor. That said, here's the statute that Stelzer is referring to:
This is not the first time that the city has hidden behind this statute. The last time they did it to me was over a request I made for spill reports of sewage spills into the Union Missionary Baptist Church. Those were spill reports that were filed with the county and with the Florida DEP. While the city refused to supply copies of those reports, the county was under no such compunction and I was invited by the county to review their copies of the same documents. By that time, the documents had become a moot point, so I never did go look at them. Clearly -- if they were protected documents, as Assistant City Manager Jane O'Connor alleged to me at the time, the county would not have made the offer to let me see them. Now, as to the letter from Tommy Meyer, the city (O'Connor, actually, as City Manager George Hunt has been on vacation since his head-butt with Councilman John Moore last week) is claiming that they have turned the letter over to their insurance carrier and that the mere action of sending it on offers them protection from having to release the letter as an open public record. I have been attempting to make inquiries as to whether the city has actually filed a claim and have asked for contact info on the insurance company, which the Herald-Trib has stated is the Preferred Government Insurance Trust. So far, no response on this from city hall. But is such a letter protected? A letter that, as I understand it, is merely a letter of intent to take legal action? Remember, no legal action has yet been taken by Evans, his attorney or the EPA. That's a good question. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune looked into the legal angle. Earle Kimel of the H-T stated that he contacted Florida's Attorney General's Office. Per Kimel, the the AG's office said that this was not a protected situation. In his H-T story of 12/20/03, Kimel wrote:
Of additional note is that this letter appears to have bypassed the city clerk's office. Jane O'Connor received it by fax, but according to my communications with City Clerk Lori Stelzer, O'Connor apparently failed to clock the fax in at the clerk's office. This may not play well in O'Connor's claim that the document is protected -- how can one claim protection on a document that doesn't yet officially exist? * Personally, I think O'Connor has learned a nifty new trick -- take information that you don't want released to the public, send it off to an insurance company and then claim protection from prying eyes under a nebulous interpretation of a convenient statute. This all leads to the big "Why?" Why all the secrecy over a document that I (and Florida's Attorney General's Office, according to Kimel) believe should not be protected? Why is O'Connor protecting this document as though it were a set of nuclear launch codes? The answer may be a little murky, so bear with me for a moment or two.
The Whistle-blower Early on, Evans apparently tried to warn several council members about the nature of the investigation, urging them to take a closer look at the way the city's utilities department was being run under the guidance of City Manager George Hunt and Utilities Director John Lane. In Venice, no good deed goes unpunished. So, for his efforts, Evans was publicly lambasted at a city council meeting on August 27, 2002 (minutes of that meeting). According to the story that played out in that council meeting, Evans had previously approached council members Martha Hanneman, David Farley, Jim Myers and possibly Mayor Dean Calamaras. Myers refused to talk with Evans, but Evans did talk with Hanneman and Farley. It's not known if Evans ever had a substantive talk with Calamaras. Hanneman immediately contacted the EPA and, according to her statements at the council meeting, relayed the info to EPA Criminal Investigator Dan Green. According to Hanneman, she was instructed by Green not to talk publicly about the substance of the allegations. So Hanneman did the right thing right off the bat, she's in the clear as far as I can determine. Farley, if I recall correctly, only contacted Hunt (he may have contacted some other city officials as well). This was a pretty wild council meeting. This was the same meeting that Hunt announced the famed punishments against four other wastewater supervisors for abusive practices, punishments that would later be overturned in circuit court for Hunt's failure to follow due process. During this same meeting, Hunt particularly lashed out at Troy Evans, singling him out as the worst offender of the lot (see page 2 of Hunt's report, delivered to council that day). In a ragingly angry voice that I can still remember to this day, Hunt announced an indeterminate suspension against Evans, the length of which would be determined at a later date. Martha Hanneman voiced an objection to punishing Evans, stating that punishing Evans could be perceived as retribution for coming forward. Hanneman's objection was dutifully ignored by Hunt, the mayor and the rest of council. More on this can be found in the story I wrote shortly after these events.
The enemies list According to a number of different sources, earlier this year Hunt participated in a number of city employee disciplinary hearings. During some of those hearings, Hunt made offers of a plea-bargain of sorts. The offer was along the lines of, 'if you can give me any derogatory information about any of these individuals, I can make this disciplinary action go away.' Hunt apparently wasn't too picky about whether or not any allegations against his enemies were true, just that they be dirty. "Just tell me what I want to know," is a quote that a source who wishes to remain anonymous has attributed to Hunt. As soon as I had enough information to confirm the existence of the enemies list and Hunt's practices, I publicly fired a warning shot across Hunt's bow in the form of the article entitled Expect the Spanish Inquisition. Another name pops up in these enemies list stories, though. Someone else who was present on at least a few occasions when Hunt uttered the words, "Just tell me what I want to know." According to different and independent sources, on the occasions when Hunt uttered the ill-thought out phrase, Jane O'Connor was also in the room. Nobody has so far alleged that O'Connor actively participated in this highly questionable form of inquiry, but she was a witness to these events and she was there as a representative of the city. Hunt's enemies list, his questioning of city employees and O'Connor's presence during such questioning is no big state secret. Most of the city's blue-collar city employees have known about all of this for quite some time, this is part and parcel of the wonderfulness that goes along with accepting a city paycheck -- it's just another day in terrordise. I would guess (and it's a safe guess) that nearly every employee on the city payroll has heard about the practice, the tales have taken on a legendary status within municipal folklore. Nearly every employee, that is, except a very select few -- the folks who sit up on the dais during city council meetings. They have been very carefully and skillfully shielded from all of this. Who would tell them? Certainly not Hunt or O'Connor. The workers have all seen what has happened to folks who have gone around Hunt's back -- I can think of at least three public skewerings in the last two years that Hunt has launched against people who have dared to try to go around him.
Mandatory psych counseling According to my conversation with the attorney, Tommy Meyer doesn't even have to prove much of his case, the city has already done it for him in the form of O'Connor's memo ordering Evans to go to psych counseling as a mandatory condition of employment. If Evans had been involved in an on-the-job altercation, if he had some police problems, if he had tested positive for narcotics in a random drug test, if he had a drinking problem or something along those lines, then yes -- the city could mandate psych counseling as a condition of continued employment. But that's not what happened here, it's not even close. Evans wrote a letter to O'Connor, a letter that protested verbal haranguing that Evans claims to have received from Hunt and from his immediate supervisors, haranguing that Evans believes is a direct result of his cooperation with the EPA in their criminal investigation of the city. For sending that letter, Evans was accused of insubordination, was given a 10-day suspension without pay and was ordered to go to psych counseling. The existence of Hunt's enemies list is, to me, confirmation of the truth of Evans' claim of being harangued. I have no doubt, not an iota, that what Evans and his attorney are alleging is true. In fact, the more I am learning about Evans, the more I am coming to admire the man. Kimel quotes Hunt as wondering why anyone would question the city's administration. Hunt can't understand why anyone would want to raise a ruckus about him or the heads of the utilities department. So he orders Evans off to a shrink, with the admonishment that maybe Evans would be happier elsewhere: "I strongly urge you to use the EAP [Employee Assistance Program psych counseling] sessions to examine why you wish to continue working in an environment you feel is so troublesome to your image of how it should work." O'Connor subsequently orders Evans, in writing, to go get his head shrunk, an act that I am told is not legally permissible under these circumstances. That she was probably acting under the orders of Hunt is not going to make a valid defense on O'Connor's part, the "I was only obeying orders" defense doesn't fly when your actions cross the legal line. Moreover, O'Connor indicates that she sent a copy of her memo to Pat Wilson, Evans immediate supervisor. According to the attorney I spoke with, that's another major no-no, a gargantuan one -- if someone is attending or is ordered to attend psych sessions as part of an Employee Assistance Program, only appropriate Human Resources personnel are supposed to know about it. That kind of information is considered medical in nature, there are inherent legal privacy protections, protections that O'Connor threw out the window by adding a copy of the memo to Pat Wilson's inbox pile. Oooooops. Then there is this delicious irony: Hunt is a man who has admitted to bringing a gun to work in case of a terrorist attack. Hunt is a man who once said that Herb Levine had obviously issued a physical threat merely by referring to Hunt as a liar. This same George Hunt is ordering someone else to go to psych counseling. This is straight out of a Joseph Heller novel. Here's something you may not have known that may play into all of this as well: O'Connor and Hunt have some shared history, going back to 1990 when Hunt was on the payroll of Rockville, Maryland's city hall and O'Connor was, according to her resume, one of the leading insurance brokers in the same town. Rockville's population in 1990 was just under 45,000 according to the U.S. Census -- that's roughly the same size as Venice and the unincorporated areas around Venice [this paragraph corrected - ed.].
Now, back to the Meyer letter So far, O'Connor hasn't returned my phone calls, so I can't ask her directly what her motives were. Even if she denied what I am alleging here, I doubt that I would believe her anyway. I firmly believe that O'Connor's refusal to release the Meyer letter was a total abuse of the statute, that to use the insurance rule in a bogus manner to protect this particular document was an egregious abuse of authority and power. To be continued? Oh you bet!
John Patten is the editor and publisher of Venice Florida! dot com and had previously worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times. |
|
Got a comment? 
