How SA's Office of Municipal Integrity lost its bite

Virginia Quinn still recalls the videotape she was handed by San Antonio’s chief of inspections when she took over the Office of Municipal Integrity in February 1999.

It was a copy of a 1985 KENS-5 investigative report which caught San Antonio’s Office of Inspections investigators taking kickbacks on camera, in exchange for approved building permits which overlooked faulty wiring and various other structural defects.

“It was one nasty stink bomb after another, spread out over five nights during a sweeps week,” Quinn recalls of the TV sting. “That opened the floodgates. Not only were they taking bribes, but they were punishing people who refused to participate.

“When I got the job, I went around to meet all of the directors, and said, ‘What can I do for you?’ [The chief of inspections] said, ‘Make sure nothing like this ever happens to me again.’”

San Antonio created the Office of Municipal Integrity in direct response to that 1985 scandal, with the idea that it would fill a gaping hole in the City’s oversight process, by providing the City with an outlet for whistleblowers, a team that could investigate allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse, and expose corruption.

Real oversight requires autonomy, however, and no one could credibly argue that the 2009 model of OMI is an autonomous entity. Over the last decade the office has moved from reporting to the Office of Internal Audit — a natural fit for an internal-investigations unit designed to expose bad behavior in city government — to being under the auspices of the City Manager’s office, ultimately finding itself puppet-mastered by a committee created and overseen by City Manager Sheryl Sculley.

During her time at OMI, Quinn, a retired captain in the Harris County Sheriff’s office, oversaw two civil investigators, a San Antonio Police officer, and a staff secretary. She recalls that OMI investigations, which generally hovered between 50 and 60 a year when she got the job, quickly jumped to 150 annually, and steadily climbed during her first few years.

At that time, the City’s process for handling allegations of impropriety in local government was similar to the approach currently taken by Austin, with an Integrity Unit working in the City Auditor’s office.

“This group should be under the City Auditor and be independent as well, to investigate any fraud, waste, or abuse — including investigating the City Manager and her staff,” says Pete Gonzales, who served as San Antonio’s City Auditor from May 2007 to June 2008, when he was fired. A subsequent
Express-News investigation revealed that Gonzales was let go after he confronted City staff about overdue inspections and repairs at public playgrounds. The director of Parks and Recreation resigned as a result of the scandal.

“Other city managers will tell you that they don’t even touch that, because that’s a conflict of interest,” he adds. “That’s the reason why [Sculley] looks so great, because she suppresses everything through investigations.”

Critics of the City’s current handling of municipal integrity cases point to three sharp changes instituted during the Sculley era that have incrementally neutered OMI.

In fairness to Sculley, by the time she came to San Antonio in 2005, OMI had already become an instrument of the City Manager’s office. In 2001, at Mayor Ed Garza’s urging, the City replaced its Office of Internal Audit with a city-auditor position and made the city auditor accountable to the mayor and City Council. As a result of that shakeup, Quinn, who previously reported to Internal Audit, began to submit OMI reports directly to City Manager Terry Brechtel. Upon receiving the ethics reports, Brechtel generally convened the heads of the implicated departments to decide what, if any, disciplinary action should be taken. This approach hardly made for an independent OMI, but Quinn says it functioned effectively.

Quinn says that after Sculley took over, the City Manager’s office began to drop OMI’s reports down to the lower reaches of the municipal food chain. “First of all, we reported to a deputy city manager, then it went to the director of Innovation, and then it was relegated to the Human Resources director. It was never told to me why. All I knew was the reporting structure changed.”


Source

Wheaton mom gets first visit with baby she's accused of abandoning

In a tearful meeting, the Wheaton woman who is accused of abandoning her newborn son after his birth cradled her child Tuesday for the first time.

Authorities allowed Nunu Sung to have a brief supervised visit behind closed doors on the day of a civil hearing regarding the baby's custody.

The shelter care hearing before DuPage Associate Judge C. Stanley Austin was continued to Sept. 15. Meanwhile, the child named Joshua remains in state protective custody in foster care.

Sung, a 24-year-old Myanmar native, faces up to three years in prison if she is convicted of obstructing justice and misdemeanor endangering the life of a child. She does not have a prior documented criminal history.

She was set free July 16 after supporters helped her family raise the required 10 percent of a $50,000 bond. Sung, though, is required to wear an electronic ankle bracelet.

Prosecutors said Sung abandoned the infant early June 12 after she gave birth behind a garage outside her cousin's apartment on Crescent Street in Wheaton. A neighbor called 911 after he and his dog discovered the nude baby, his umbilical cord still attached, covered in dirt under a bush.

Authorities said Sung became pregnant while living in Texas. They said the father has not responded to their attempts for contact. He and Sung were not married. She does not have other kids.

Prosecutors said Sung did not receive prenatal care during her pregnancy, which she hid from relatives after moving to Wheaton from Texas in February. Sung later said she felt no emotional connection to the infant and wished they both had died during his delivery, according to court records.

Prosecutors said she told police she "wasn't thinking straight," adding, "She stated that she thought about going back to check on the child, but she didn't."

But, in several court appearances, a tearful Sung publicly asked about the baby's health and her attorney said she desperately wanted to see him.


Source