Venice on the web
A semi-regular column

Dial M for Moron; police department gets Randallized; city workers ratify union contract (sort of)
Levine uncovers expensive abuse of cell phone privileges by wastewater supervisors; police losing more and more communications abilities; new union contract is a done deal, has dissenters crying foul
-- John Patten, 08/06/03
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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Dial M for Moron
Free cell phone! Free long distance! All you can call!

That's what at least two of the wastewater supervisors thought when handed cell phones paid for by the city, according to Herb Levine, president of the Venice Taxpayers League. At Monday's VTL meeting, Levine announced that he had gone through cell phone bills of several of the supervisors and found major discrepancies including a number of high-dollar personal calls made after hours.

Here's just one, according to Levine: "A $20 call to Ohio made at 11:00 at night by someone whose family, by pure coincidence, lives in the same town." Levine has promised to dig deeper and do number checks. He is guessing at this point that the alleged abuse may go into the thousands of dollars over the last several years.

Vice-Mayor Rick Tacy was at the same VTL meeting when Levine broke the news. After the meeting, I asked Tacy if the city considered this theft, and if so would it be turned over to law enforcement. Tacy responded that the information is "...currently being investigated by staff."

"So why isn't it being turned over to law enforcement? Aren't they the proper investigative arm of the city?"

"It's being handled by staff," Tacy responded.

"Who is staff?"

In a slick move that would make some skateboarders envious, Tacy abruptly hit the joystick on his wheelchair, did a neat 180 and sped down the hall away from me.

Was it something I said?

Needless to say, it won't be turned over to law enforcement. City Manager George Hunt will make sure that any city cop who even thinks about asking to see any of the bills will be retired early or be in civilian threads passing out resumes. No way is this going to be allowed to be properly investigated, especially not when it involves wastewater supervisors, a legally immune and protected class within the city's borders. It was silly of me to ask. Hunt is renowned for his forgiving ways, especially when it comes to thievery among loyalists, a fact that should have been abundantly clear to all after last year's computer department scandal.

Meanwhile, Levine has promised he will provide copies of some of the more outrageous phone bills to Venice Florida! dot com. If true, we'll scan 'em, publish 'em and Google 'em (try this for grins -- go to Google and put in your own area code and phone number in the search bar; don't use hyphens -- scary ain't it?).

When the info does get published, it won't really matter. Hunt's pets are a protected class that are above the law, but it'll keep me busy for an afternoon or two. Bring on the brick wall, my head has just about healed up from the last round.

Early noise from Hunt's corner indicates the following spin may be forthcoming: that Nextel has made some huge billing errors on the cell phones and/or that a lot of the calls were free credits that Nextel gives out, credits that would be lost at the end of each month if not used. Levine is already checking that angle, his preliminary look into that spinario led him to muse that maybe fish really do live in trees.

System of a down - police department gets Randallized
Due to an internal war between retired Chief Joe Slapp and the Venice Police Department, police laptops were disabled about a year ago. The official reason was that humidity had simultaneously damaged every single laptop in a 24 hour period. The real reason was that Slapp had been caught after ordering the installation of a single-license piece of software into every cruiser laptop; he was royally ticked off that someone had leaked the info. Ever since then, officers have been unable to write field reports on computer screens. Instead they have reverted to 1970's style handwritten reports.

At least they still have the county's computers, aka Mobile Data Terminals (MDTs). With these, they can run license plates, wants and warrants, etc., all on the fly.

At least they could, anyway.

Now the screens are blank as the county has pulled Venice's access to the county's stream of the FDLE database.

Reason?

In March of this year, the FDLE notified all law enforcement agencies that all MDT transmissions had to be encrypted no later than September, 2003. In turn, the Sheriff's department set an encryption deadline of August 1 for all law enforcement agencies within the county who are dependent on their feed of the FDLE database. Venice is in non-compliance, and according to Media Liaison Chuck Lesaltato of the Sarasota Sheriff's Office, the city has given no indication to the county of when they will be in compliance. Unofficial figures told to Venice Florida! dot com have indicated that it may take up to $80,000 to bring the city into compliance, something that the department has reportedly not yet budgeted. NBSI, which makes the required software, would not confirm the price, and officials at the police department would not return my inquiry calls.

In the meantime, the department has been going through internal computer woes. Back in January, their Compaq server was hit with Slammer in the worm's first few days of existence, something that could have been avoided if the server had been kept up to date with Microsoft security patches that had been available for months before Slammer was unleashed. Viral attacks within city computers have gained legendary status and their own jargon -- a computer isn't infected, it has been Randallized, a reference to the city's top geek, Steve Randall. Slammer was the last straw for the PD's server.

After the Compaq's crash and burn job, Randall decided to go techno retro with an overpriced IBM AS400, the only server that Randall and crew can figure out how to turn on. The 'new' server runs on proprietary IBM-flavored Unix code, which means there's a heck of a lot of programs that can't run on it. This isn't normal Unix, which would be OK, this is IBM's highly proprietary version of Unix known as AIX, an operating system that may have to be abandoned in the near future due to pending lawsuits against IBM by Microsoft and SCO over allegations of theft of code, but that's another story.

Expensive and testy, the IBM server has taxed the IS department's resources to the limit to keep nominal systems going within the police department. As such, nobody had the time or money to worry about the squad car encryption software. The clock kind of ticked away unnoticed until the screens went blank at 12:01 AM, August 1.

According to one informed source, Hunt has reportedly promised the funding for the software once he gets his hands on the proposed $10 million bond that will be going before voters. I've been unable to confirm that with either Hunt or Venice's top cop, Jim Hanks.

Presently, officers have to radio in license plates and driver's license info by voice over police radio waves, which has inundated police dispatch with additional duties.

Now if all of that wasn't enough to deal with, those wonderful radios that Slapp spent a fortune on aren't getting glowing reviews from the field. One officer confided to me that he can be sitting in a squad car parked next to another officer, he can see the officer talking on the radio with dispatch, and yet he can't hear a word of the conversation on his own radio.

That's dangerous. That's very dangerous.

That kind of lack of communication has the potential of getting a cop killed.

And that is inexcusable.

City workers union ratifies contract
Doozy of a union meeting I sat through last night. The local AFSCME finally hammered out an agreement with the city, a two year contract that expires in October of 2004. Among other things, it allows for a total of a 7% increase in the first year (retroactive to October of 2002) and another 7% increase in the second year. Or at least that's what union members were being told. Several members angrily noted that the second 7% wasn't actually in the proposed contract despite promises from union officials Dennis Rodriguez and Mike Temple.

After much haranguing, the vote was called for on the contract, subject to clarification of the second 7% bump (which was really a second 3.5% and a fourth 3.5% and somewhere in all that I got lost in the numbers). The final vote resulted in the ratification of the contract subject to the stipulated corrections. For reasons that I don't fully understand, I'm not supposed to write the actual vote tally -- it is considered proprietary information owned by the union(?). It was a private meeting not open to the press and I'm the only one who was invited (although unofficially), so I figure I owe them that much, especially if I ever want to get invited again. So, again, the contract was approved in the vote, pending a few corrections.

That said, there is some dissent in the ranks. On the missing 7%, several members were incensed that the contract was even up for a vote. "It had better be in writing or you can be darned sure [personnel manager Rollie] Reynolds ain't gonna give it to us," one union member shouted to union officials during the discussion prior to the vote. Another angrily decried the new wording in the lengthy contract: "Everything that has been changed has been watered down to deliberately confuse the average worker from understanding what the contract means."

Among the notable changes is the anti-discrimination clause. Prior wording included the usual protections for race, creed, religion, etc, as well as protection for union affiliation. The new wording eliminates all of that and instead states that anti-discrimination practices will adhere to current state and Federal guidelines. Notably missing is any protection against discrimination based on sexual preference. "We asked for that, but we were told by the negotiation team that there was no way that city council would approve it," Temple stated. The city's negotiation team consisted of Assistant City Manager Marty Black, City Attorney Bob Anderson and Administrative Services Director Jane O'Connor. In fairness to the trio, I was unable to contact them due to the late hour of the meeting.

While most seemed satisfied with the final results, there were more than a few union members who felt sold out. Some members privately accused union officials of not standing up to the city on a number of issues, including the way managers can potentially yank overtime from the workers and claim it for themselves through a coercive process.

Others accused the wastewater division of active union busting through promotion: "You have twelve supervisors and only eight operators under the supervisors, plus a few other workers. Why so many supervisors? Cuz if you promote an operator to a supervisor, he can't be in the union anymore. Hell, they'd all be supervisors if [pollution control supervisor Pat] Wilson had her way; we wouldn't have a single worker, just a lot of supervisors."

As weird as it sounds, that explanation for the disparity in numbers between supervisors and supervised makes a lot of sense. I couldn't believe I hadn't figured it out for myself before someone had to spell it out for me.