Consultants and City Inspectors

 

One commissioner, Tom Volgy, gave me a letter he had received from a newcomer, a university educated, new homeowner, who handwrote this letter on both sides of the paper. I wish I had kept that letter. I made two columns and in one column, I copied all the demeaning, personal, negative things - adjectives and verbs - he used to describe me. The column was a page long. In the other column, I copied the good qualities which he attributed to himself, this column was a quarter page long. Rule #13, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Never mind if lies are told in the process.

The comments about me were all bad, all negative personal attributes, none of them true, nothing on issues, while his were all good. As if by making me look bad, he looked good. It was childish, nothing but character vilification with no substance substantiated. I was tempted to print the two columns and distribute it throughout the neighborhood, so people could make their own judgement, but I gave up the idea as a self-serving effort, also childish and not worth it. I don’t think he had the I.Q. to read Alinsky, but his wife did.

The women’s movement has done much to bring national awareness to gender inequalities which are abundant in this country. While many men grew up being taught that the female is the weaker sex and to respect them and treat them kindly, it should also be recognized that women can do as much damage as men. Despite making much progress in raising awareness of gender equality, a good thing in many respects, the women’s movement has done little to curtail their own negative propensities.

I had been educated to believe that the woman was the gentle gender, and just as qualified, but no one taught me that their greed for wealth and power exists equally as qualified in both sexes, even if it’s manifested differently. Similarities are found in how racism is equal in majorities and in minorities, just as corruption is equal in democracies as in dictatorships. 

The chivalry of King Arthur and the Round Table was commendable, but it was equally balanced by criminality and terrorism. To glorify goodness and pretend that evil does not exist is to promote a lack of reality in which to take advantage of others. If someone personally attacks another one when discussing business or politics, they are being underhanded, unless they are fighting back fire with fire. All of this leads me to the belief that besides fighting enemies, we must clean our own houses as well.

So far, I have identified ten people in Neighborhood United, I am not saying these were all bad people, but their self-interest overshadowed the larger picture. For them to win, someone else had to lose. Assumptions on my part: each of them had their own trauma to hide. The two individuals selling cocaine, didn’t want their illegal activity exposed. The Williams wanted control and power. Juanito and wife wanted money. The starving artist had a warped view of life. As said before, an effective way to unify a group is to find a common enemy, and some of them tried to make me their common enemy. Fortunately, they were not very good at it, and not every newcomer approved of their methods. I was told that they spent most of their meetings talking about how to get rid of me. They had recruited a volunteer lawyer to find some usable dirt. He was a bad lawyer since he didn’t find any dirt, poor guy!

By about that time, the Department was getting desperate to stop the TBA. Our track record was improving by the day. The consultant firm from New York, hired by Dan Benitez to study sub-recipients using CDBG funds, had left a very detrimental report, negatively painting sub-recipients as top heavy, inexperienced, ineffective, and that monies were better spent by the professional crew of a City Department by hiring contractors to do the work.

Not only was 50% of the report false, but they also did not mention the incompetence of the contractors the City used, nor successes of sub-recipients in the area indirectly attributed to CDBG support, nor local jobs. Since I was away when the previous TBA Director was terminated or didn’t know how other sub-recipients had fared, I could not argue well against a report I didn’t have. My only recourse was to contradict by performance, and that is exactly what we were doing. You’ll see it in a chart four chapters ahead. Thus, the rush of the Department to stop us before we could prove inaccuracies in the report.

One important argument they used was that we were not really doing a complete job on each house, and the City would be doing less houses in numbers, but a more complete job on each. True. An educated choice. Having helped 120 homeowners versus the ten they would have done, in preventing their homes from deterioration by providing the necessary weather and climate protection, so they could handle the rest, or we could come back later when refunded, was more important to us than only doing a few, while ignoring and letting the remaining 110 homes continue to deteriorate from weather abuse. Statistics can be misleading, and in addition, they could report we only did minor repairs of less than $2,000, never including that several of them were done in the same house towards complete rehab. Besides, they never listened to the neighborhood, nor brought jobs into the neighborhood. The City ignored and hid that the residents preferred our way rather than the City’s way of doing things. The City Department found cooperation from a few of the new and dissatisfied residents in the neighborhood, but the rest of the community was not cooperating with them.

The City Department’s mount up assaults organized by Dan Benitez began in earnest one morning when a staff member of the office of the Department of Finance came to our office for a surprise audit. We set him comfortably and supplied him with all the proper documents and reports. He sat frowning in silence looking closely at the paperwork, and now and then looking up as members of the working crews kept popping in and out of the office to relay a message, or ask for a requisition form, or supply a receipt from a material purchased. At the end of the day, he said he was done. He was a man of few words, but he did say, “They told me you had many infractions, but all you have done is good.” And he left smiling.

Next week came an inspector from some other Department about workmen compensation. His concern was overtime payments, or the lack of them. However, since I had to keep such detailed track of the workers hours, so as not to exceed the 200-hour limit, our books were accurate, and no worker was unaccounted for overtime. A question came up on a kid making up for a day he had taken off to attend to family funeral, but we had a well-documented report on his absence. 

Less than a week later another officer from the Labor Department knocked on our office door. He was told we were doing work without a license and could be infringing on labor laws. We set him up at the same table. He would look up every time one of the workers would come in and out. When Tiny showed up, the officer got up and asked Tiny a few questions. Tiny was a big, happy man, but you didn’t want to mess with him. I don’t know what they spoke about, but the attitude of the official changed. He was now more relaxed and accepted the soda pop he had declined earlier. At the end of the workday, a group of twelve kids, sweaty and wood chip dusty, trailed through the office to turn in their timecards. He asked to see the timecards. We had increased their salaries every few weeks or so, but with added responsibilities, they were still within the market range for the work they were performing. It pays to be law-abiding.

At the end of his working day, he closed all the books and stood up. He came straight up to me, and in front of everyone else who was there at the time he said with a smile, “You have a very good operation going on, but please be careful. In one case, you had to pay one worker two dollars more over the limit allowed for working in one dwelling, and in another you went over the limit by fifteen cents, but don’t let it worry you, keep up the good work.” Then he left.

Finally, it was visible what no one had pointed out, the crew leaders at work in their Barrio rehab were making more money than the Executive Director who was employing them.

The next visit was by the City Procurement and Contracts. I believe it was the City accountant himself. He spent two days and left without finding a complaint. This is the man who once returned my mileage report back due to a $1.75 mistake in my addition, which included speedometer reading, date, hour, purpose, for each work-related trip, no matter how small. He was a good man. He made a phone call from our office phone where he was alone for a while, and in hanging up he pushed the wrong button and instead, tape-recorded one and a half hours of his solitary presence in the office. A lot of walking around, coughing, and sighs, but no dialogue. We did listen to the full tape just in case, but nothing out of place occurred. He was a good man.

By then we knew what was going on, so we had set a small side table next to the conference table where we put all the books and reports, to save time and effort, as we knew the City Department would keep sending inspectors. We had a total of eight inspections by different agencies, nothing improper was ever found, and four of them congratulated us for the good work we were doing.

The final one was a visit from the FBI. Two agents in business suits. I saw that our artist friend Rodriguez had flipped and offered Dan Benitez the same suggestion he had made to me about him. Apparently, Dan Benitez took him up on it. Rodriguez’s contact with his friends at the FBI must have been serious, but at the beginning of the second day, one of them said to me, “You have to show us all your books.”

“Those are all of them.”

“Don’t you have other projects, and other activities?” They also had seen workers coming in and out, and mentions of Tool Library, the Adobero Yard, and fertilizer for the Parquesito. “We were told you had millions and millions in your federal grant.”

“We have given you the books on all our projects in addition to the CDBG Funds, which is the only active Federal Project we have now. Here is the FY for the three years we have been funded, it is all there. Until now, not yet not even $400,000 of the CDBG funds since the start.” The Tool Library was a private fund. The Adobero Yard was a separate grant. The Self-Help Housing is with a private Bank.

“This is tiny, we are wasting our time here.”

I wanted to say “Yes, I know, they fed you misinformation.” But silence is golden. No one likes to know they were taken for fools.  However, I offered them a tour of the Barrio to show them our rehab work, the Family Group self-help houses, the warehouse with lumber and the Tool Library and told them houses where drugs were being sold, including the two neighbors of Rodriguez. They eagerly accepted my invitation. I told them that I had not seen those two in the act of selling, but their neighbor had, and he had told me. I was tempted to tell them that that neighbor was their contact, the man who got them involved in this inspection, but refrained from it. I think they knew what I was doing. But maybe not. They shook hands and left.

A day and a half with the FBI! Three months later I called the state office of the governor and spoke with Betsy Bolding asking what had resulted from the FBI investigation. She called me a few days later and said that they had not even opened a file on this issue. There was no case.

Like the intent the Williams had to cultivate an article in the paper putting suspicion on me even if the Board didn’t act on it, to cloud the name, so was the City staff doing at the time. They made a point to bring it up to a local newspaper and at a City Council meeting that the TBA was being investigated by the FBI. Word reached me that the City attorney was also looking at our records and me to see what they could find wrong. Only rumors. There are parallels between what takes place in this narrative and what takes place at the national level in many countries. Only the names change. Alinsky’s Rule #13, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." But it doesn’t work forever.