(28) Mr. Gardner verified by telephone that he worked for
Mr. Randall as an independent contractor for Petra Software. He advised that
he has been friends with the Respondent for approximately 15 years, having
attended the same church. Mr. Randall, Mr. Gardner said, approached him in
July or August 2000 and asked if he would be willing to work for Petra to
design a web site for the City of Venice. Mr. Gardner related that he never
had performed any professional web page design work prior to this time, but he
accepted the Respondent's offer and began to work on the City's developmental
web site. He reported that he worked on the design of the web site at his home
approximately two to three hours per night, three to five nights per week and
approximately four hours on Saturdays. This activity, Mr. Gardner continued,
occurred for six to eight weeks and ended some time in September 2000 when the
Respondent assigned him to the installation of personal computers at various
City buildings. Mr. Gardner note that he worked on the design of approximately
ten to fifteen of the web pages relative to the City's developmental web site
and that the Respondent worked on the design of the remaining web pages for
the site. He does not know when or where the Respondent performed these
duties. Mr. Gardner stated that the developmental web site was posted to a
Christian web hosting company, but he was not involved in this process and
does not recall the name of the hosting company, the price for hosting the
site, or when the company began hosting the web site.
How much would you pay for all this? But wait, there's
more -- from
an article in the 03/22/05 edition of the Herald-Trib:
In addition to allegations that Randall contracted city
business with his private consulting firm, the FCE report said that Randall
also may have failed to ensure that other contracts adhered to city policy,
and that he charged the city for work never performed.
Which is not true. Here, the Herald-Trib has confused two different
investigations -- the city is performing their own in-house investigation into
other contracts. Marty Black wrote in a letter to Randall that other contracts
may not have adhered to city policy and that those contracts are under current
investigation by the city. The FCE did not touch on anything other than
Randall's contracted work with his own company, Petra Software. Nowhere in the
Report of Investigation does the FCE stray from the Petra Software affair from
2000 and 2001.
While it might seem a small thing, Gardner's participation
in the Petra Software saga is crucial to the entire story -- it's the core. By
misreporting Gardner's involvement, the Herald-Trib hollowed out the story and
created a massive fiction that reduces the case to nothing.
This isn't the first time a Herald-Trib reporter has
struggled with highly important official documents and ended up fictionalizing a
major municipal event in Venice due to a near-total lack of discernment. The
paper's coverage of the contents of the FAA
shade meetings last year was an equally abysmal hack job.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it
think
I contacted the Herald-Trib. Their reporter, Lauren Glenn,
responded by e-mail
that no errors had been made
and so no correction would be made. In fact, Glenn insisted
that I had the story wrong:
I would suggest you re-read the report, which states, and I
quote: "Mr. Gardner, who according to respondent, was
the only one who actually performed the services ...
does not recall having provided the city with any
technical or application support listed on the invoices."
Second, I spoke to a woman with the FCE who coordinates the investigation
of ethics complaints. She specifically told me that the FCE has no
control over whether a city fires someone, etc.
I would suggest you call the FCE. There is no correction, because there is
nothing to correct.
I'm not at all sure why Glenn is telling me that the FCE
cannot fire someone, I already knew that but had written nothing about it either
on the web or in my e-mail to her.
The text Glenn is quoting comes from Item 29 in the
Report of Investigation, which in
full reads:
(29) Mr. Gardner recalled that around Labor Day 2000 the
Respondent instructed him to help City staff with
the installation of over 100 personal computers throughout all of the various
departments of the City government. He said the installation of the
personal computers took a few weeks and was
completed near the end of October 2000 and that his work for Petra
Software ended around this period of time. Mr. Gardner does not recall
having provided the City with any technical or
application support as listed on the invoices that were submitted to the City
by the Respondent on behalf of Petra Software, other
than occasionally fielding telephone calls from Mr.
Randall to answer various questions about computer hardware configuration. He
estimated that he spent a total of no more than five hours
engaged in this activity. Furthermore, Mr. Gardener does not recall
that he provided network
support or router configuration and setup, as noted on the invoices, although
he stated that on one occasion he spent
approximately two hours running computer cables for the City's
computers. He added that he does not recall having worked on the City's
Client Express Access system.
So the quoted text both before and after
Glenn's excised sentence acknowledges that Gardner did indeed state that he
performed work for the city through Petra Software, yet Glenn, in her e-mail,
ripped a single part of that text out and then tossed it totally out of context
to change the meaning to the exact opposite of the original intended meaning.
My internal
Lewis
Black at this point went "bluuuuuhhhhheeeerrrrrrggggghhhh -- WTF?"
In a later e-mail, Glenn
chastised me for my bad attitude towards the Trib.
My response stated that I didn't have a bad attitude towards the Herald-Trib as
such (alright, so that's not entirely true, it was admittedly a transparently
feeble attempt at diplomacy), but that I had a very bad attitude towards bad
reporting:
Believe it or not, I'm not trying to slam
you and I don't have anything against you. I'm just really tired of the bad
reporting that has come out of the Trib over the last few years and I'm trying
to goad you into being a better digger and a better reporter. You will hate me,
no doubt, but you will be a better writer because of this, knowing that I'll be
dogging your paper on governmental issues.
I fully expect you to take me to task and hold me to the same bar.
It all apparently went straight over Glenn's head and she
had no intention of looking up to see what flew by.
The Herald-Trib is also
not-so-curiously not mentioning that it was this web site that brought
all of the Petra Software allegations back into the light in
2002 and publicly set the record straight for the first time. This was after both the Herald-Trib and the Gondo bought George
Hunt's official (but entirely fictional) explanations that the city got more than it paid for in the
Petra Software case.
In the alternate universe of the Herald-Trib, it must have been their crack
reporters who broke the story.
John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He
can also be incredibly rude at times.
