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City's Reign of Terror Continues
perception: "Let the firings begin"
- John Patten, 08/15/02 jpatten@veniceflorida.com

"Fuck you"

"You suck"

"You are a dead man"

Those are three e-mail headers, the first two generated by the keyboard of Shane Saputo, the last one from the fingers of his brother John, supervisors in the Venice Utilities Department. All were aimed at co-workers and underlings in the Venice Utilities Department. Short, not-so-sweet and to the point. And those are some of the nicer ones.

Shane and his brother John Saputo, along with fellow supervisors Pat Wilson and John Brennan, have all been the subject of a massive investigation into verbal and physical abuse of employees that they are supervising. It's an investigation that has torn our community apart.

Some of the events described: an employee had a potato roll thrown at him, hard enough to cause a bruise in his eye. Another employee was screamed and yelled at for over an hour (yes, over an hour) behind closed doors while other employees stood outside and listened. Doctored photos e-mailed, printed up and distributed: -- one shows a swastika carved into the forehead of  an employee, another showed a male employee with a vagina superimposed onto him. And on and on and on and on.

Over and over there are comments about fear of retribution for telling the truth about abuses and performance failings within the department.

There are oblique mentions of doctored EPA documents, allegations of unreported spills, both areas of concern that the investigative team steered away from as soon as they were mentioned in the report. Whoa!

The end result of the investigative teams findings? That abuses existed in numbers, according to the investigative team. Massive abuses.

And then?

After all that, after a long series of "confidential" interviews with employees, after the long standoff between the city and the media, after a high-powered showdown between the supervisors in question, their attorney, city attorney Bob Anderson and the ever capable city manager...

...nothing.

Well, not nothing, but about as close to zilch as one can get without leasing an electron microsope from the University of South Florida's Physics Department.

Utilities Director John Lane, who by all accounts never abused anyone, takes a hit for badly supervising the supervisors, the rest are given 'letters of conscience.'

Letters of conscience? What the....?

Mayor Dean Calamaras stated publicly that he encourages employees who see or are subject to abuses to come forward and use the proper channels. That's good advice in a sane and rational workplace, but the gross mishandling of this whole affair doesn't come anywhere close to being either sane or rational. City Councilman Rick Tacy found the e-mails to be offensive, but that they weren't meant to be offensive. Councilman David Farley wondered aloud if the union might have failed the city. City Manager George Hunt shrugged and tossed it all off: "I think it was just a matter of fate."

Fate? What the....?

Fate? FATE??????

What planet is this guy on?

Even John Saputo, one of the accused who eventually received sanctuary at the hands of John Lane and George Hunt, commented in writing to Personnel Director Rollie Reynolds that he thought Hunt's hamster cage was minus a running wheel in what is clearly the most bizarre document to come out of the whole mess (memo to Rollie Reynolds from John Saputo, 7/17/02 -- page 1 -- page 2). 

In his ever predictable Marie Antoinette style destined to earn a local nomination for the Enron Humanitarian Award, Hunt was quoted in the papers as stating that the city needs to focus on the bottom line in this affair: the product (water) and the service to the citizens. Unspoken: you work for me? Screw you!

In the aftermath, recently fired Lauderdale Lakes City Manager Stanley Hawthorne was hired and thrown into the mix. Hawthorne is purportedly a short-timer, he's still sending out resumes for a city manager's job in other municipalities. He's just going to help smooth things over in the utilities department.

That smoothing process is yet a new form of terror for a number of number of city employees. Hawthorne is perceived to be a hatchet man, brought in to swing his scythe low to mow down unbelievers, infidels, complainers and whiners. Speculation runs rampant about Hawthorne's assigned role. Maybe Hunt brought him in to replace Asst. City Manager Marty Black in retribution for heading up the investigative team and not doing what should have been done -- fire the disgruntled employees and make the problem all go away. The general belief, though, seems to be that Hawthorne will be swinging low into the labor pool.

And if that's true, woe unto the employees who were dumb enough to actually talk to the investigative team about any abuses that they had seen or endured.

During the investigative process, interviewees were told that their responses would be confidential, that it was a fact-finding mission and that their names would not be tied to their statements once they left the room. It was an atmosphere of confidentiality. The investigators themselves, Asst. City Manager Marty Black, Fire Dept. Chief Mike Johnson and Risk Manager Jane O'Connor, were purportedly told that their notes would never become part of the public record.

Andrew Froman, attorney for the four supervisors had requested copies of the investigative team notes and was denied, a decision he learned to live with. 

After the investigation was over and the decision was made to chastise Lane and Lane alone, Hunt threw confidentiality out the window and into the public record in a betrayal of Shakespearean proportions worthy of Othello's nemesis, Iago. The same George Hunt then brought in Stanley Hawthorne to smooth things over.

So now that Brennan, Wilson and the Saputo brothers (all punished with a letter of conscience, whatever that is) are able to pore over the investigative notes, reading every tidbit of what their underlings said about them under the guise of complete confidentiality, what is to stop Hunt's hand-picked man from cleaning house? Not much.

The union has filed appeals. According to news reports, once the appeal is filed, it can sit 10 days in the Personnel Department, then another 30 in Hunt's office. Hunt is reported to have said that he'll use the full 30 days. That's 40 days right there, plenty of time for Hawthorne to take care of whatever work Hunt has hired him to do.

I hope and pray I'm wrong when I write the next line:

Let the firings begin.