Have More Documents Disappeared at the Hands of a Couple Administrative Employees ?
Speaking of former directors. What about the investigation on the former utilities director. Is it being whitewashed. Why did the state attorney turn the investigation over to POPD. No case? It is common knowledge throughout the utilities department that documents in the case disappeared at the hands of a couple administrative employees.
The interim director has knowledge of this and heard them admit to it in front of witnesses. Maybe they will get a raise or a promotion. The major problems in the city has been and still is management and council does not help, they just keep making the same mistakes. Nothing has changed for the better it has just got worse. Talk to the employees if you want the truth.
Utilities administration is a joke. It is staffed with unqualified personnel. Yes men and lackeys, except for the office assistants. When the city hires managers and directors they should do a better job of checking their employment backgrounds. A couple of easy internet searches and you would find some interesting things like I and others have found. You’ll be sorry or should I say we will all be sorry.
Concerned Citizen Rant
You hit the nail right on the head. I commend you for your courage for bringing this up, and I am sure upper management will target you for your audaciousness. What is interesting about this current information is that it has stalled. This is probably because there is information to be acted upon and individuals to be called in that will affirm what you have just said. It is obvious that the scope of this investigation was specifically tailored to contain the payroll fraud with Roger Smith even though the auditors expressed that he had to have coconspirators. Who are the coconspirators? Are there any more top administrators involved? Are there any witnesses that are willing to come forth and testify that they have proof of a conspiracy? Does anyone from the city manager’s office possesses knowledge of or witnessed this? Did the city manager’s office and the finance department provide the PD investigator with all of the evidence including the Excel spreadsheet and the Outlook calendar or is this whole investigation contrived?
I am sure Roger Smith and his attorney would love to get their hands on a copy of the manuscripts of this investigation at its conclusion. The city better not try to whitewash this no matter how far up the administrative ladder the collusion may take them or Mr. Smith may become a very rich man.
Interestingly, the city may have been willing to sacrifice innocent individuals and damage their reputation and feed the auditor information to supply a pound of flesh to the council and close the door on something that is probably much more pervasive. It would seem that the city would have looked into the city’s email server and backup servers to find out who was out of the office yet being paid as if they were here. Select key word searches like “vacation”, “sick”, or “I will be out of the office from” on all exempt employees throughout the city over the past 12 years would render all of the data needed to composite a spreadsheet that could be compared and correlated with the archived payroll records for those individuals. This would show if the server said they were away on sick time & vacation while the payroll indicated that they were being paid for being here. Then you could compare that information with their current accrued leave balances and all the times they sold time back during their career. This may reveal that there is millions of dollars of administrative leave that has been issued systemically. Then they can ask Ken Parker if he approved this or was he unaware that all of his staff was away on leave that he approved. It is surprising that Ted Noftall has not connected these dots yet.
With the I.T. Director retiring recently under what many have speculated as duress one might wonder what the state of the city servers are like. There has appeared to be a lot of work and down time on these servers in the past year and hopefully all archived city records have been preserved and there is nothing underhanded going on. It is apparent to many employees that historical information access on the servers has been reduced in the past year and hopefully all of that information has been preserved on backup servers. The bottom line is if the city council does not want the perception of a whitewash to prevail they need to ensure that all of these things are looked into immediately.
As much as I like this website unfortunately the average Port Orange citizen is not reading what is on here. This is a bedroom community of 57,000 people that do not obsess about city politics. When they get home from work or golfing or whatever they watch Dancing with Stars or the Discovery Channel. They do not watch POG TV or read the political blogs. If they did, they would be sick with all of this nonsense. The only ones that obsess about this stuff are a handful of political activists that repeatedly appear on POG TV pursuing their own special political interests and falsely representing that they actually have a constituency among the citizens of Port Orange. Someone from Channel nine news needs to do an investigative report on this. Maybe the FEDS need to get involved under the RICO Act and clean this stuff out. Then maybe the citizens of Port Orange will have an honest city administration and the employees of the city will have a good team atmosphere to do their work and serve the citizens from instead of a hostile work environment perpetuated by this current administration. I am fully convinced that the problem is at the highest administrative level in the city and complacency from city officials.