A story you won’t read in tomorrow’s Star-Telegram

Laid-off Fort Worth Star-Telegram Watchdog columnist Dave Lieber won two top prizes at Friday night’s 2013 First Amendment Awards Dinner from the Society of Professional Journalists/Fort Worth chapter.

Columnist Lieber, who lost his job after 20 years in January, was the only Star-Telegram staffer who won the contest. SPJ is America’s oldest journalism organization, founded 104 years ago.

press hat small version

Lieber says he’s not ready to give up on newspapers — or his readers.

Other winners came from Fort Worth Weekly, The Oklahoman, San Antonio Current, Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Texas Watchdog, The Ellis County Press, Texas Public Radio and WFAA-TV, Channel 8.

Lieber won first place in the Opinion/Commentary category for his piece called “Texas Insurance Department has made disciplinary information harder to find.” Lieber revealed that the state agency had hidden information from the public about disciplinary actions against members of the insurance industry. He asked the public to complain to the state about this coverup.

Apparently, enough did.  After the column appeared, the policy, initiated by Texas Insurance Commissioner Eleanor Kirtzman, was reversed a few days later and the public information was once again made available. That helped Texas consumers learn whom to avoid in the insurance industry.

Judges from the Indiana chapter of SPJ stated, “A very good example of what a columnist who serves as government watchdog should do – raise enough hell to shame public officials into acting on the public’s behalf.”

Accepting the award, Lieber, who founded consumer rights movement WatchdogNation, told the audience, “I like raising hell.”

watchdog_badge-profile-pic-

Lieber also won first place for Opening the Books for a story that uses business or public records to report on corporate practices. His winning column – “One DFW travel business takes on another” – traced the secret owners of Oasis Getaway, a Southlake, Texas travel club that charged excessive fees for helping consumers plan trips. The company closed its offices after the column appeared.

The judges said, “It was easy to see the digging involved with specific records cited.”

Accepting the award, Lieber cried out with a smile, “I need a job.”

Last year, Lieber won national, state and local journalism awards for his columns. (Read more here.)

In addition, one of Lieber’s heroes, the late Betty Brink of Fort Worth Weekly, was honored posthumously with the Open Doors Award for lifetime achievement. (Read Lieber’s letter to the newspaper when Brink passed away here.)

When Lieber was laid off in January for economic reasons, readers of the newspaper were never informed. Lieber says he still receives letters, emails and phone calls from readers almost every day asking what happened to him. (Read Fort Worth Weekly’s take here.)

For instance, on the day of the April 19, 2013 SPJ banquet, Lieber received this note from a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics: “I’ve always enjoyed your reporting. I kept clicking on the Star-Telegram link, week after week, thinking you must be on an important assignment and would eventually return. It slowly dawned on me you weren’t there anymore. That’s when I started looking for you. If they’d informed me you’d departed, I’d have looked much sooner. That must be why the Dave Lieber button is still there – it keeps us from suspecting anything and turning our attention away from ST.”

And maybe that’s why you won’t read about Lieber’s latest awards in tomorrow’s Star-Telegram.

Final note: Lieber’s winning pieces were edited by his former editor Lois Norder, now the investigations editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Norder was laid off from the Star-Telegram in August 2012, five months before her columnist. (Read “Lois Norder, One of America’s Best Newspaper Editors.”)

One of America's top journalists

Lois Norder

 

Watchdog Nation reveals New Mexico crime ring preying on Texas senior citizens

An identity theft ring based in Albuquerque has stolen the identities of 232 people, most with ties to Tarrant County, Albuquerque police tells Watchdog Nation.

Turns out the thieves got the information from an unlikely place: Tarrant County court records available free online for use by the public.

As readers of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Dave Lieber Watchdog column first learned, millions of records with sensitive information were on the county website.

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A member of the criminal ring showed an Albuquerque police detective on a computer how easy it was to pull names, birth dates, and Social Security and driver’s license numbers from county clerk records, according to a police report.

Data miners, part of a drug ring, used the information to steal the identities of Texans and residents of other states who had ties to Tarrant County through court cases, Albuquerque police say. The ring used the information to open lines of credit in the names of some of the victims.

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Victim Rebecca Watson of Fort Worth says she learned about the ring from Albuquerque police. She says that a detective told her he notified the county clerk’s office in November but that nothing had changed.

The detective was unavailable for comment.

County Clerk Mary Louise Garcia told me that nobody informed her what was happening until early March, when Sheriff Dee Anderson was briefed by Albuquerque police.

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Mary Louise Garcia

Garcia said she took immediate and unprecedented action when she learned of the criminal investigation in New Mexico.

She said she hired a vendor to audit 12 million court documents in her office’s online repository.

The vendor found that 2 million records on the website listed birth dates or Social Security or driver’s license numbers. Those included divorce records, real estate and family law records, and a dozen other types of court documents.

Garcia ordered that records with sensitive information be removed from online viewing. The vendor is deleting sensitive information before Garcia places the records back online.

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The process, which will cost about $89,000, should take several weeks, she said.

The paper versions of the 2 million documents containing sensitive information are still available for public viewing at the courthouse, as required by law.

Worries that online court records could be an easy source for ID thieves have been voiced for years, but county officials say this is the first major case that has come to their attention.

“It’s one of the vulnerabilities we all face,” Anderson said.

Five years ago, county clerk offices statewide rebelled after an attorney general opinion said they must redact Social Security numbers from court records, including those online. Offices froze in confusion, and some shut down. A week later, the attorney general’s office, citing complaints from legislators, rescinded its opinion.

Then the Legislature enacted a law permitting people to ask that their own Social Security numbers (but no other identifying information) be removed from paper court records as long as the requesters know the document, page and volume number.

County officials say only a few people each year do that, because most don’t know what’s in court records from old cases. The problem is that, for decades, sensitive data have been routinely used in court documents to legally identify the parties involved.

Some, such as County District Clerk Tom Wilder, want state law changed to allow a “sensitive data sheet” to be included in court filings but available for use only by the parties and court officials; it would never see the light of day in public paper files or online.

Because of the grand scope of this criminal investigation, lawmakers may look at requiring online records statewide to be scrubbed in a way similar to what Tarrant County is doing.

The law did not require Garcia to pull records and remove personal information. “It’s something we want to do in our office to protect our constituents,” she said. “The minute I found out [about the investigation], my administration — we moved on it.”

County officials know little about the criminal investigation, but Albuquerque police spokeswoman Tasia Martinez told Watchdog Nation that officers are immersed in writing a report detailing what happened to the 232 victims.

About 40 are thought to live in Tarrant County. The office has sent letters to victims, though some have been returned with bad addresses.

Several New Mexicans have been charged with theft.

Watson says thieves opened accounts in her name and ran up large charges. Her sensitive information, a detective told her, was culled from her 1999 divorce records.

One of the people arrested in the case told police that she searched divorces on the Tarrant County website until she found papers with Social Security numbers, then copied down the information, according to a police report.

Watson filed a redaction form with the county to remove her Social Security number from paper records. With the online cleanup under way, too, anyone who tries to access her divorce records will get the message, “Access is denied to that item.”

That’s all she ever wanted.

# # #

Want to protect yourself from ID theft? Are you tired of fighting the bank, the credit card company, the electric company and the phone company? They can be worse than scammers the way they treat customers. A popular book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, shows you how to fight back — and win! The book is available at WatchdogNation.com as a hardcover, CD audio book, e-book and hey, what else do you need? The author is The Watchdog columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Visit our store. Now revised and expanded in a 2012 edition, the book won two national book awards for social change. 

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How to give the city water company a dose of its own medicine

Stephen Geis checked his bank account online and found an unexpected overdraft of $19,000 from his account. Minutes later, his wife called and told him their monthly Fort Worth water bill had arrived in the mail totaling $19,000.

What happened? Error upon error upon error.

His actual water use for the month totaled a measly $22. But he wouldn’t learn that until Watchdog Nation investigated. Geis also never learned the cause of the problem until we told him later. Water Department staffers later tried to explain it to him, but the words they used were so confusing that it made no sense.

As readers of the Dave Lieber Watchdog column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram first learned, Geis had been billed for 3.6 million gallons of water his family had supposedly used in one month. That’s enough to fill more than five Olympic-size swimming pools.

Put another way, his bill was about 863 times higher than it should have been.

Fortunately for Geis, he had overdraft protection on his account so only one check to somebody else bounced because of the city’s error. But before the drama ended last week, Geis had to pay a $35 bank charge and postage to send certified letters of complaint to the city. He also made three frustrating trips to his bank to clear the matter up and made phone calls and sent faxes to city staffers. He says he spent three hours of work time on the matter, and since he’s a lawyer, those hours don’t come cheap.

To top it off, the city demanded that he refund an additional $19,000 that he kept in his bank account for two weeks after the city reversed the charge and the bank did, too. That meant he suddenly went from negative $19,000 to positive $19,000.

City staffers demanded it back, but they wanted him to do a costly wire transfer from his bank, which he declined, or they wanted him to come to City Hall and pay in person, which he also declined. When a city staffer called him about it last week, a city official told me later, he hung up the phone. But Geis says he didn’t hang up.

He merely told the staffer he was sending another fax with his questions about the refund, and he would talk to the staffer after the fax arrived at City Hall.

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Only when the city provided him with a post office box so he could mail the $19,000 back did he do so. And don’t think he could have mailed the check to the regular address that collects payments, because that turns out to be a different postal address than the one the city wanted him to use.

In the city’s defense, a department spokeswoman explains that the $19,000 overcharge was removed from his checking account a day after he alerted the city.

But for Geis, that didn’t end his water bill nightmare.

So how did this happen?

First, I’ll share the city’s explanation given to me and to Geis, and then I’ll try to translate.

“Our Meter Services group was updating meter inventory records in our billing system to add meter warranty data. A change to the meter inventory record resulted in all previous meter readings being reset to zero, as noted in the consumption history chart on the billing statement.

“The meter reading on Nov. 9 was 4807.50. The system should have subtracted from the last meter reading of 4799.10 reflecting a total monthly consumption of 8.4 ccf. Instead, the billing system subtracted 4807.50 from zero and billed consumption at 4807.50 ccf.”

OK, here’s what that means. The water billing system messed up and didn’t compare the previous month’s usage to the next month’s usage. Instead, the automated system took all the water used from the very beginning of the meter’s operation many years ago and billed for all water used ever in that one month bill — five Olympic-size pools’ worth.

The error was compounded when the system discovered the higher-than-normal usage and a field investigator was sent to Geis’ address to look for obvious leaks. Finding none, the investigator signed off on the usage as correct, and the bill went through as an accurate one.

“Yeah, you’re right,” city spokeswoman Mary Gugliuzza said. “Someone should have caught that this was an outrageous amount for a residential billing, and that wasn’t done. But we corrected the error immediately.”

Yet there was another error: The city sent him the first page of a two-page letter. Then the city resent the letter, but only the second page arrived.

Also, Geis expected another of his checks to bounce because of a lack of funds in his account — one to the Internal Revenue Service. Fortunately, it didn’t. “That’s all I need: The big gorilla after me,” he said.

When it comes to bills, the big gorilla is all relative.

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Dave Lieber shows Americans how to fight back against corporate deceptions in his wonderful national award-winning book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong. Are you tired of losing time, money and aggravation to all the assaults on our wallets? Learn how to fight back with ease — and win. Get the book here.

Read The Watchdog Nation manifesto here!

Utility price increases often start earlier than you think

Dear Watchdog Nation:

We were hoping you could help us with our water bill from the city of Watauga, Texas. They passed a rate increase of 30 percent for water and sewer and 100 percent for drainage fees, effective Oct. 1. We received our bill for September, and they charged us the new rates. We called to complain and they basically said we had to pay it, and if we didn’t like it we could attend the next council meeting.

We also tried to e-mail the city manager, Dr. Scott Neils, but we never heard back from him. It’s like they don’t care at all. We don’t feel we should be charged for usage in September for a rate increase that went into effect Oct. 1. Thank you for any help you can give us and the other residents of Watauga.

— Kathy and Robert Moran

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Dear Mr. and Mrs. Moran:

This is an issue of government transparency. As readers of the Dave Lieber Watchdog column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram first learned, anytime a government is going to take more money out of your pocket, as the Watauga council voted to do in late September, officials have to be crystal-clear about it. That didn’t happen here.

But while Neils, who has been in office for six months, did not answer you, he more than made up for it after The Watchdog pushed your cause.

Here’s the big news: The city manager tells me that Watauga is postponing all three rate increases until Dec. 1. Plus, 6,000 of the city’s 8,200 customers who were charged the higher rate for their September usage before the effective date will get credits in the November bill. A refund!

Neils told me: “I agree that the information for the customers may have been unclear as to the effective date of the rate increase and when the billing with the new rate would begin.

“When I received the e-mail from the Morans, I began an evaluation of the impact on our consumers given the amount of increase in the rates and the larger consumption patterns we noticed from our customers, even with the water conservation programs in place.

“After this analysis, I have concluded that, given the unusual circumstances, it is appropriate to provide some relief to our customers.”

Credits will show up on the November bill, he said, adding, “We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers and to the Morans in particular. We hope that this solution will be acceptable to all.”

City staffers will manually adjust 6,000 bills to apply the credits. (Note that software used by most cities for water bills cannot adjust when there’s a rate change in the middle of a billing cycle. But electric meters can do that, according to the Texas Public Utility Commission.)

It comes down to this:

Officials should clearly explain to customers that a rate increase doesn’t apply to the time when the water was used, but to the date the bills are issued. That’s a lesson for area cities increasing their water and sewer rates.

North Richland Hills does it correctly on its website by stating an increase in water rates “will go into effect with the October 2011 billing cycle which is primarily water consumed during the month of September.” However, the city states on an insert that went into water bills that the increase “will go into effect Oct. 1.”

City spokeswoman Mary Peters agrees with the need for transparency and said, “It wasn’t as specific as it was on the website. We probably could have done a little better there.”

In Fort Worth, an increase in water and wastewater rates will take effect Jan. 1. Spokeswoman Mary Gugliuzza says that because of the way the city’s billing system is structured, a small number of customers will pay for only a few days of water usage in December at the higher rate.

In Arlington, the city approved a water rate increase that went into effect Oct. 1. As in Watauga, customers were charged for the previous month’s usage at the higher rate because of the billing cycle.

“You just have to pick a date and make it the effective date,” Water Utilities Director Julie Hunt said.

Watauga Finance Director Sandra Morgan explained the thinking behind the city’s decision to postpone the increase. “You have to put yourself in the citizens’ shoes. Certainly, if we haven’t communicated well enough, we have to go back and do it better.”

The Morans’ reaction to the news: “WOW. We fought City Hall and won!”

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Assistant city manager in patronage flap resigns

An assistant city manager at Fort Worth City Hall resigned in October 2011 after Fort Worth Star-Telegram Watchdog columnist Dave Lieber revealed that she had helped orchestrate secret pay raises for a select few employees and top managers.

Her boss, the interim city manager, didn’t even know about most of them.

At the time, most city employees had gone three years without a raise.

Karen Montgomery had served with the city since August 2006.

Former assistant city manager Karen Montgomery

City officials declined to say whether the raises or any other issue led to her resignation, according to the Star-Telegram.

Read about Montgomery’s role here at Watchdog Nation. (Note these stories originally appeared in the Dave Lieber Watchdog column in the Star-Telegram.

Part I: A City Hall human resources director faces a lonely battle against patronage

Part II: When 100 City Hall workers out of 4,500 get raises, that’s patronage at its finest

 

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Part I: A City Hall human resources director faces a lonely battle against patronage

PART I: This is a story about patronage, which still exists in the 21st century despite attempts to bring sounder management practices to government. Patronage is about jobs and money. Patronage is about flouting the rules. Patronage is about running over little people who raise a stink.

If you work for an employer that faces a multimillion-dollar deficit and hasn’t given across-the-board raises to its employees in three years, can you still wrangle a raise?

Apparently so if you work for the city of Fort Worth, where City Hall officials figured out a way in recent months to break the logjam for 10 lucky employees out of thousands.

As readers of the Dave Lieber Watchdog column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram first learned, six of the 10 quietly got annual raises of 10 percent or more, including a 32 percent raise for one and 35 percent for another.

How did that happen? The employee’s job title was changed so he or she was bumped up to a higher classification. Then, the employee’s salary matched at least the minimum for the new pay grade.

In the months preceding these raises, officials talked of a $31 million budget deficit and watched as departments were consolidated and 165 jobs were eliminated. Furloughs for employees continue.

Among the lucky 10 employees, six work in the Law Department and four on the Enterprise Resource Planning team, which runs the city’s troubled new payroll and timekeeping network.

Boss Tweed, or a satire of him here, served as leader of NY's patronage haven, Tammany Hall.

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The Police Department also asked for title changes and pay raises for 11 employees who worked on the same ERP project, but the request was denied by assistant city managers who handled these decisions, city records show. The Police Department declined to comment.

The job title changes and raises can go through without City Council approval, officials say. They were approved by top city staffers at the assistant city manager level in April and May.

A city spokesman explained that the raises were necessary because members of the ERP team had undergone extensive training at taxpayer expense. The raises were needed to keep them working for the city.

All four received their raises with retroactive back pay to Oct. 1.

Although memos referred to the raises in the Law Department as “special merit increases,” the official word in a written answer to my questions is that they stemmed from new City Attorney Sarah Fullenwider’s reorganization of her department “from two divisions into seven sections, each led by a section chief. … The purpose was to provide more oversight and better service.”

The raises came with a price.

Internal discussions about the planned actions sometimes became heated, according to records I read after making a Public Information Act request. At nearly every turn, one City Hall official kept raising red flags.

By the end, he wrote that he felt “harassed and bullied” by an assistant city manager who insisted on the changes.

The objector — Assistant Human Resources Director Richard Hodapp — kept asking in numerous memos whether the raises and promotions followed city rules. He fretted that the pay raises, if handled improperly, would harm morale.

As a fail-safe, city policy requires that raises of 10 percent or higher be approved by a top-level superior with a written waiver.

In an April 20 memo recounting a conversation with Assistant City Manager Karen Montgomery, Hodapp wrote that he reminded Montgomery that waivers are required.

“She said, well we have been talking about this. Isn’t that a waiver?”

Montgomery told him to use a previous letter from another official as the written waiver request, he wrote.

“At this time,” Hodapp added, “I was more concerned about keeping my job than trying to rebut her. She simply did not want to listen. She just wanted me to do what she wanted.”

About the ERP team raises, he wrote, “Now without any ACM [assistant city manager] oversight or approval Karen has forced through a huge salary increase for two of the ERP Team members. 32% for Shawnette Brown and 35% for Theresa Goolsby.”

Brown’s salary jumped from $51,000 to $68,000. Goolsby’s went from $49,000 to $66,000. (The new job title for the four getting raises is IT Business Planner/ERP.) Hodapp complained about Montgomery’s “tone of voice that she has used on me this week and the constant criticism of everything I have been doing.” That treatment, he writes, was designed “to force me into allowing HR actions done without any approvals or appropriate oversight.”

“Without a doubt, I feel like I was harassed and bullied into doing something I would never have done myself as a professional. It certainly was not ethical.”

Montgomery and Hodapp were not available for comment.

In another note, on April 13, Hodapp wrote Human Resources Director Karen Marshall that Fullenwider’s original proposal for across-the-board raises for her entire Law Department staff worried him. “It appears to be a gift to these employees. There were no salary increases approved by council for this year. The proposal is across the board, so it is a salary increase. There is no precedent. Will other departments be allowed to do the same. Will this create morale issues and hostility in other departments?”

The across-the-board increases never happened.

Fretting about proposed new job titles, Hodapp wrote, “Will this appear to be based on favoritism? … Will this create opportunities to file discrimination complaints based on age, sex or race?”

He concluded: “While much of the request is unorthodox based on the city’s rules and procedures, my feeling is that this will create several opportunities for discrimination complaints.”

What to call the new job titles took weeks of discussion. Eventually, five carrying the title of “Senior Assistant City Attorney” were promoted to “Senior Assistant City Attorney/Section Chief.” Four of the five received raises of 5 to 7 percent, bringing their salaries to between $100,000 and $118,000. (One didn’t get a raise because her salary was already $118,000.)

The Prosecuting Attorney was promoted to Chief Prosecutor with a 16 percent raise to $70,000. The Assistant City Attorney II became a Senior Assistant City Attorney/Section Chief with an 11 percent jump to $90,000.

At one point, Hodapp apologized for raising a fuss, writing that HR’s job is to make sure that everything is done correctly. He also confided in writing to a colleague that he feared the assistant city managers with whom he argued “will use me as the bad guy to blame for bringing up all these issues.”

Read Part Two here.

# # #

Dave Lieber shows Americans how to fight back against corporate deceptions in his wonderful book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong. Are you tired of losing time, money and aggravation to all the assaults on our wallets? Learn how to fight back with ease — and win. Get the book here.

Read The Watchdog Nation manifesto here!

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Watch Watchdog Nation on YouTube

Twitter @DaveLieber

Part II: When 100 City Hall workers out of 4,500 get raises, that’s patronage at its finest

Part II: In hard times, when everybody is supposed to sacrifice, somehow a lucky few get pay raises. When it happens at City Hall, it’s the people’s business. This story, first shared with readers of the Dave Lieber Watchdog column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, led to a morale crisis at City Hall. Patronage is alive and well in 21st century Texas, even in a city that prides itself on doing things “the Fort Worth way.”

For most of the nearly 4,000 non-Civil Service employees at Fort Worth City Hall, a salary freeze the past three years prevented annual pay raises. But records show that a select group of employees got to come in from the cold.

At least 106 got raises during this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, city records show.

Boss Tweed, or a satire of him here, served as leader of NY's patronage haven, Tammany Hall.

Of these, 76 saw their duties and titles altered — called “reclassifications” — and received raises. An additional 19 in various departments got rare merit raises. Eleven more received “market adjustment” raises, meaning that the city didn’t want them to leave for higher-paying jobs but that their duties stayed the same.

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Raises for these 11 — all are either department directors or assistant directors — will likely cause the most head-shaking in City Hall. Of the 11, five got raises of 10 percent or higher. But not all directors and assistant directors got raises, and not all departments were so lucky.

When these raises were given, the general mood among the rest of the employees was that a salary freeze meant shared sacrifice by everybody, top to bottom, during hard times. But that concept took an unpaid furlough (something City Hall employees actually had to do).

City Hall officials are not happy that this information is public, they acknowledge, although they quickly released the information to The Watchdog in response to an open-records request.

Interim City Manager Tom Higgins said in an interview Friday, “I think this is going to come as a surprise to some of our employees.”

Higgins, who says he knew about some but not all of the 11 leadership raises, worries about morale.

“If somebody got a raise out there for doing the same job, that’s what the employees are concerned about.”

Speaking of his city employees, he said, “I know to the guys out there who are working, and it’s snowing and 20 degrees, and they’re down in the ditch and fixing a water pipe, and they see this — I know they’re disappointed.

“As city manager now, this is troubling to me,” he said, looking over the long list of employees who received raises. (Higgins took over as interim manager this year. Some of the raises didn’t occur on his watch.)

Under City Hall’s structure, raises are not approved by the City Council but by city staffers. For directors and assistant directors, the raises were recommended by assistant city managers responsible for the particular department. They report to the city manager, but the city manager doesn’t have to sign off on the raises, Higgins said. He supports assistants who made the recommendations because, he said, “I’m confident that each one was done right and for the right reasons.”

The Watchdog reported two weeks ago that 10 employees received annual raises in the spring when their jobs were reclassified. Turns out that was the tip of the iceberg. These raises occurred in an environment of fiscal challenges: The city faced an estimated $31 million deficit for the coming year. Departments were consolidated, and about 165 jobs were eliminated.

In alphabetical order, here are the 11 managers who received raises, listed with title and percentage increase:

Brandon Bennett, code compliance director, 7 percent

Feleshia Cochran, assistant public facilities/events director, 10 percent

Wayne Corum, equipment services director, 2 percent

Sebastian Fichera, assistant water director, 3 percent

David Hall, assistant planning and development director, 10 percent

Richard Neuhaus, assistant fire director, 4.5 percent

Walter Peoples, assistant finance director, 2 percent

Horatio Porter, city budget officer, (two raises), 12.5 percent

Betty Tanner, assistant public facilities/events director, 10 percent

William Welstead, airport manager, 15 percent

Sandra Youngblood, assistant parks and community services director, 3.7 percent

Departments where top leaders did not get a raise include Library, Housing and Economic Development, Human Resources and Transportation and Public Works.

“The story is painful and something that will have an effect on our employees, and I take this seriously,” Higgins said.

He added, “We wish during this time we had a more normal pay environment, but given our fiscal challenges, we weren’t able to recommend pay increases for all of our employees.”

There is some happy news. Last week, the city announced a new budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. The city staff is proposing 3 percent raises for everyone.

Read Part One here.

# # #

Dave Lieber shows Americans how to fight back against corporate deceptions in his wonderful book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong. Are you tired of losing time, money and aggravation to all the assaults on our wallets? Learn how to fight back with ease — and win. Get the book here.

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Fort Worth Official resigns after boss finds backlog of open-records requests

Before he was forced to resign from his Fort Worth City Hall job for failing to properly handle open-records requests, Assistant City Attorney C. Patrick Phillips made a full confession to his superiors.

His boss, Deputy City Attorney Peter Vaky, had learned that my request was not the only one Phillips botched. Since 2008, Phillips had not properly handled 327 requests, the city reported later. For the vast majority of those, Phillips had either missed the deadline for asking the Texas attorney general to exempt the information or failed to release information as the AG’s office had ordered.

Vaky wrote to Phillips on April 1, “Patrick, if all the information I have received and set forth here is true, it is unacceptable.”

Phillips asked for a couple of days to collect his thoughts. Then, according to copies of e-mails I received last week through an open-records request, he wrote back April 4:

“They are my errors, and I take responsibility for them. … I apologize for my actions reflecting poorly on this department and this leadership.”

I had filed a request in November for e-mails from a Fort Worth police supervisor. The city asked for guidance from the attorney general. That action can delay a request for two or three months.

On Feb. 7, the attorney general’s office ordered the records released, saying in a letter that Phillips had missed a deadline to provide samples of e-mails the city wanted to keep secret. Then Phillips missed a second deadline: He never followed the attorney general’s order.

I complained to the attorney general, and seven weeks after being told to release the documents, Phillips sent them to me on a Saturday night. He also apologized.

That weekend, Phillips was writing the e-mail confession that he would send to Vaky the next Monday.

In his note, Phillips described how the backlog of 300-plus cases was a result of, in his words, miscommunication, conflicting priorities, computer difficulties and an increased workload.

“My errors were good-faith mistakes in time allocation, but they were mistakes nonetheless,” he wrote.

He suffered from “a level of stress, of which I believe you are all aware. In this environment the AG rulings became the piece that fell out because they do not carry specific statutory deadlines. I now realize that over time, I became desensitized to the problem of delaying rulings. … I fell into bad habits and the backlog grew.”

Fort Worth seeks more attorney general rulings than any Texas city of comparable size, a Star-Telegram study found last year. Critics cite the requests as a tactic to delay release of public information. The city says it needs to make sure it complies with the law.

The city told me that of 22,000 open-records requests received since October 2007, 3,300 were sent to the attorney general to see whether some could be kept secret. (Keep in mind that many such requests are for routine information such as traffic accident reports.)

A former assistant attorney general recalls Fort Worth’s reliance on rulings. Chris Schulz, now a Round Rock lawyer, said in an interview that Fort Worth’s constant reliance on rulings from Austin “seems like a waste of time.”

“There are much more efficient ways to work things out between governmental entities and requesters,” he said, adding, “Maybe the attorney general’s office shouldn’t be their first line of defense.”

If that philosophy had been followed, perhaps Phillips wouldn’t have fallen so far behind.

The attorney general’s office referred me to its open-records decision No. 684, dated Dec. 14, 2009, which offers a guide to governments about when they should seek its rulings.

The decision explains that it “is intended to encourage the prompt release of requested public information and increase the efficiency of the PIA [Public Information Act] review process by clearly identifying certain types of information that governmental bodies may withhold without the delay of requesting an attorney general decision.”

The city attorney’s office declined to comment on Phillips and his backlog. Phillips has also declined to comment.

A review of his personnel record shows he got good marks in annual job reviews, including a second-highest rating, superior, in October by then-City Attorney David Yett, who has retired.

Phillips wanted to keep his job. In his e-mail to Vaky, he came up with a strategy to eliminate the backlog: “I propose to process the rulings at a pace of at least 25 rulings per week.” At that rate, he could eliminate his backlog going back to 2008 by the end of June, he wrote.

Vaky and his boss, City Attorney Sarah Fullenwider, did not want to wait that long. Phillips was put on administrative leave the day Vaky received his e-mail explanation. The next day, Phillips wrote to Vaky, “I will take the opportunity to resign.”

The city notified the attorney general’s office of its backlog. Other city attorneys were assigned to clear Phillips’ cases as quickly as possible.

In a statement, the city told me it will do better in the future with “greater checks and balances between the City Attorney’s Office and the Records Management Office, including potential software upgrades, to ensure that multiple individuals have responsibility for tracking future public information requests.”

That, and proper supervision, should help the city follow the law.

The Watchdog column appears Fridays and Sundays.

Dave Lieber, 817-390-7043

Twitter @DaveLieber

Fort Worth City Hall lawyer loses job over open records failure

Fort Worth has a reputation for being difficult to deal with when it comes to public records requests. A Star-Telegram examination last year showed that the city delays requests by going to the state attorney general far more than other Texas cities of its size.

I decided to test the system with a request. The results are worse than I expected. The city’s grade is an easy F, with no room for appeal.

Here’s what happened: On Nov. 11, I asked to see the e-mails and personnel record of a city police sergeant. On Nov. 29, the city asked the Texas attorney general whether it had to release the records, with a city attorney saying he believed that the records could be kept secret.

The attorney general’s office ruled Feb. 7 that the records should be released because the city failed to meet a legal deadline. The AG’s letter to the city states: “You have not submitted to this office comments explaining why the stated exceptions apply, nor have you submitted a copy or representative sample of the information requested. “Therefore, we have no choice but to order the city to release the information.”

Then I waited some more. Nothing.

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So on Feb. 28, I filed a complaint with the attorney general. A month later, the office notified Fort Worth of the complaint. Then on Saturday, April 2, at 7:16 p.m., the city attorney responsible for my request, C. Patrick Phillips, finally responded. He provided about 80 of the sergeant’s e-mails and other records, fulfilling my request.

“As for the delay in release of these records, I offer you my personal apology,” Phillips wrote in an e-mail. “Please trust that such delays are contrary to the intentions of the City Attorney’s Office, the Police Department, and the City of Fort Worth.”

Four days later, on April 6, Phillips’ employment with the city ended. One of his supervisors won’t say why.

“I can’t talk about the details of a personnel case, but he’s no longer with the city,” Deputy City Attorney Peter Vaky said. Vaky has been placed in charge of open-records management. He says he and new City Attorney Sarah Fullenwider are “taking steps to make sure that will never happen again.”

He declined to talk about what happened in my case, but he said there is no current backlog of requests in the open-records office.

Reached Friday, Phillips said he couldn’t comment. “Dealing with anything having to do remotely with a former client is not anything I can talk about,” he said. Phillips, 33, had worked in the city attorney’s office for four years.

Critics have said that the city relies on attorney general opinions on some requests to delay releasing the information. The city denies that.

In my test case, I requested information that had caused the city trouble once before. A Fort Worth police officer had sought the e-mails of the same police sergeant and couldn’t get them.

A year ago, when I interviewed Phillips about the matter, he told me that the officer had received all the available information. He explained that the e-mails probably no longer existed. “We just don’t have it,” Phillips told me last year.

Fetching the e-mails from a backup server would be difficult and unnecessary, the attorney general’s office had ruled. But the 80 e-mails that I received included ones that Phillips said the city didn’t have.

I checked last week with the officer who requested those records more than two years ago, and he still hasn’t received them.

Vaky declined to comment, saying he wasn’t familiar with what Phillips had done or said or why the e-mails had suddenly become available.

Last year, Phillips told me, “We know the process is ugly. … We would like it to get better.”

My test case shows that didn’t happen. But the city says it is now on top of it. We’ll see.

# # #

Thanks to TexasWatchdog.org for picking up this story here.

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is available in hardcover, as a CD audio book, ebook and hey, what else do you need. Visit our store. Now revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

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A short video of the Texas Recycling Police

If you live in a cash-strapped city as I do then you know that municipalities are hurting for every dollar. In my city, employees have faced  unpaid furloughs, extensive layoffs and city reorganization designed to save tax dollars.

Except here’s one agency that isn’t feeling the effects of cutbacks.

The Recycling Police!

That’s why Watchdog Nation finds it interesting that in our home city, Fort Worth, Texas, it takes three — count ’em 3 — city employees to check your recycling bin to make sure it doesn’t have trash in it.

We watched as three members of the Recycling Police went through our neighborhood today.

One was the driver, and the other two hit both sides of the street.

When I asked why, they said someone in the neighborhood had contaminated the stream, meaning somebody along the route was ruining the recycling collected by putting in ILLEGAL GARBAGE. OMG.

Here in this video is what it looks like if the Recycling Police come to your house and check your bin and, lucky for you, you pass this most intrusive inspection.

Watch video here.

# # #

Are you tired of fighting the bank, the credit card company, the electric company and the phone company? They can be worse than scammers the way they treat customers. A popular book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, shows you how to fight back — and win! The book is available at WatchdogNation.com as a hardcover, CD audio book, e-book and hey, what else do you need? The author is The Watchdog columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Visit our store. Now revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

Dave Lieber book that won two national awards for social change.

AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER, ON ITUNES (AUDIO), KINDLE AND IPAD