Venice on the web
A semi-regular column

Slapp? A control freak? Nah........
In a web exclusive, Venice Florida! dot com shows two memos from Joe Slapp that reveal how much of a control freak he really was
-- John Patten, 030/06/04
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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Superfreak, superfreak, I'm superfreakin' you
Micromanagement. Being a control freak. It's destructive to an organization and it can be devastating on a personal basis to people who feel that their every move is watched by their superiors. It can be equally destructive on those who micromanage their subordinates as it leads to loss of productivity, insubordination and sometimes to outright insurrection.

Just ask Jimmy Carter: he was mercilessly hounded in the press while he was President after some of his micromanagement fetishes surfaced. One particularly memorable debacle involved the White House tennis courts. Sick of bickering staffers trying to get more court time, Carter himself spent a day working out tennis schedules. The incident became symbolic for Carter's total control nature.

Here in Venice, former police chief Joe Slapp is accusing his successor, Jim Hanks, of incompetence. Hanks is countering that he was never allowed to be police chief until both Slapp and former city manager George Hunt left office. Hanks states that Slapp in particular micromanaged the police department when Slapp was Emergency Services Director. Slapp denies the charge.

Yet here in two memos from Joe Slapp, readers can see how much of a micromanager Slapp really was.

Slapp moved over to city hall from the cop shop in April of 2001. He wasted no time in asserting his authority. In this memo of April 20 (PDF file), Slapp bypasses newly appointed Chief Hanks by writing to two administrative aides, Helen Smith and Cheryl O'Shaughnessy. The memo seems innocuous enough on first read. Slapp grumbles a bit about his own promotion and how it is not really a promotion. Then he quickly moves on to the meat: Slapp will be determining all personnel policies, training requirements, etc. He further states that he will be making all final decisions on appointments, promotions, dismissals and discipline in the department, something that had been relegated to the office of the Chief of Police in the past. He then requests copies of all future official police communications. All of them.

Slapp would later criticize Hanks for the handling of the Billy Masters incident, yet the above-referenced memo, which came out before the incident happened clearly shows that whatever disciplinary actions would be taken would come straight from Slapp. Hanks would have no leeway or autonomy in such matters. It is thus an outright fabrication on Slapp's part when he blames even part of the debacle on Hanks. In the public eye, Hanks took credit for making the decisions as Slapp didn't want to appear to be a puppetmaster, but Venice Florida! dot com has learned from a highly placed reliable source that this was all Slapp's baby, 100%.

Later that same year comes another gem, this memo from October, in which Slapp instructs Chief Jim Hanks to file proposals to both Slapp and then-City Manager George Hunt in order to get their approvals for any future modifications to police department work schedules. Slapp cutens it up by stating that changing the work schedule is a modification of union contracts (which is only true if the scheduled work exceeds the union agreement), but even that is largely a load of horse droppings.  This was obsessive controlling on Slapp's part, pure and simple. Hanks endured far more overlording than any normal municipal department chief ever has to put up with.

Given all this, it's hard to see how Hanks could have screwed up the police department the way Slapp has been stating recently. If you just go with what authority Hanks had left after these two memos, it would appear that Hanks couldn't have made any decisions that would have had any impact on the department, positive or negative.

In truth, Hanks spent a lot of his time doing damage control and trying to act as a buffer between the troops and Slapp, often unsuccessfully.

Sorry Joe, but you can't have it both ways: if you are going to call all of the shots, you don't get to place the blame elsewhere. It doesn't work that way.

If the department was as screwed up as Slapp states, there is clearly one person to blame, and these documents prove the point ----> Joe Slapp.