"Anonymous" posted this comment earlier under another posting on the blog:
Guys, let's not argue with each other over minutia. As I had suggested to Kevin in an earlier post, I recommend to all interested parties that you request an org chart for each city dept and the Bd of Ed. Org chart should include name of position/title, name of employee occupying title, salary, and a brief description of the each dept and each div within the dept. Unless I am off, I believe you will see much duplication and overlap within depts and between depts. In most municipalities, Human Relations is a division of Human Resources, not a separate dept with its own hightly paid administration. Check out the assessor's files. It would appear that Eddie's campaign headquarters were housed in property owned by his Director of Human Relations, Lillian Ruiz, who actually resides in Bloomfield. Doesn't the city charter specify that dept heads live in the city??? Maybe she used her investment property as her residential address; not sure why Santiago Malave's cracker jack staff didn't notice. Okay, here's some more duplication/overlap: Why does the city have a Dept. of Health & Human Services, an Office of Young Children AND an Office for Youth Services as three separate stand alone depts??? Yeah, a rhetorical question, but here's the answer, Eddie wanted to give more of his peeps high paid administrative/director jobs. In other cities, there would NOT be three separate depts. Wait, there's more. The city has a Grants Administrator in both the Management & Budget Dept and in the Development Services Dept. Wait, there's more. The Development Services Dept has numerous divisions all headed by either directors and/or Administrative Operations Managers; in other cities the functions of planning, economic development, housing, and community development are in one division, not four as in Hartford. Are you seeing a pattern here??? Yeah, three of Eddie's boyzzz head up three of the Dev Services divisions. You wanna see some creative writing, FOIA their respective job applications and compare them to the actual job postings. I believe the investigator and state's atty in Eddie's corruption case also examined this patterned issue. Santiago's crew is very lenient in its interpretation (pun definitely intended) of the boilerplate language found on most if not all city job postings ("Wherever possible, appropriate equivalents will be considered.") I'd like to see their definition of "appropriate". I bet Cotto knows.
In theory this is a good idea, but the letter below from Hartford's Corporation Counsel John Rose shows what happens when someone has the "audacity" to request public documents.
Steve Goode at courant.com/cityline, originally posted about this. You can read Steve's posting here. Apparently the Yankee Institute has set up a website that lists all state employees and their respective salaries and state pensions at sunlight.org.
It seems as though they were trying to expand the site to also cover municipalities. They made the mistake of requesting public documents from a public agency in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act and were chastised by Rosie.
Hopefully the information you requested can be gathered and is probably available from the Council as a response to a budget question about salaries. I'll try to post it here when available. The other issue is that FOI is only for documents that exist, it doesn't require an agency to produce a "new" document or do research other than to find and provide a document that is requested. If an organizational chart doesn't exist, the city doesn't have to make one. The information would have to be culled from other documents obtained or requested.
Below is Rose's response to the Yankee Institutes FOIA request. As a side note, Rosie makes it a point to point out a misspelling in the original letter. How many mistakes can you find in Rosie's letter, start with the date, since when does March have 285 days?
John Rose Yankee Institute Letter
7 comments:
Rosie is a lost cause.
Kevin:
This is off the specific topic, but relates to the general one; i.e. a city out of control. Going back to the mayor's "exceptional service increments" issue from last year. I wonder if council or Rose might be aware of the provision in the constitution that would appear to make such payments illegal. "ARTICLE ELEVENTH. SEC. 2. Neither the general assembly nor any county, city, borough, town or school district shall have power to pay or grant any extra compensation to any public officer, employee, agent or servant, or increase the compensation of any public officer or employee, to take effect during the continuance in office of any person whose salary might be increased thereby, or increase the pay or compensation of any public contractor above the amount specified in the contract."
When there is a new Mayor, Rose should be the first to go..and second to go would be almost all of the Mayor's political appointed aides...he has more then Governor Rell.Mayor Mike and Mayor Perry got aong just fine with 5 aides and Perez has close to 30..any wonder why Hartford is in dire financial shape?
FYI. Most city depts and divisions actually already have org charts. Don't let them tell you otherwise. Those of us who work in city depts have actually participated in drafting the org charts, which are then "massaged" by the administration. I thought you all were interested in making cuts to the budget w/o cutting services. Consolidating like dept and divisions would do so and would actually streamline services.
If the city lies and says it has no org charts, these are other docs you may want to request: MUNIS payroll reports sorted by dept; human resources transaction reports; all forms A and forms B for each employee/position; all position analysis forms for each budgeted position. If you ask for these documents I suspect they would just as soon as cough up the org charts or "like". If I'm not mistaken I belive Jeff Cohen, while at the Courant, had requested payroll reports. Last year during budget season I believe City Council had asked for a list of all employees, their job title, their salary and their town of residence. I believe Cohen had also posted that document on City Line.
Are you all new here? Patronage has been around since the beginning of time. It's just more blatant in Eddie's case. He got carte blanche to go hog wild with it when he became a "strong" mayor with the charter change. Check out this new job posting in his office that's posted on the Human Resources website (wonder who it was tailor written for and why the individual will not be in Eric Crash Jackson's MHIS dept or in the Dept of Public Works): http://www.hartford.gov/personnel/jobs/BUILDING_AUTOMATION_SYSTEM_MGR_3-18-10.pdf
Do you know what MHIS stands for? No, not Metro Hartford Information Services, but "More of His Idiotic Shenanagins".
Yeah, I too heard that the State's Atty looked into Eddie's hiring of his cronies behind political campaign contributions, but couldn't make it stick. Must have been cash contributions, no proof. Showing that his cronies are not the most qualified job applicants is also very subjective because of that lovely caveat regarding "equivalents" that is written into all job postings. Oh well, let's hope the next administration is not as blatant as this one. I think it's Eddie's flagrant audacity that is most infuriating.
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