The District’s inspector general’s office is investigating allegations of cronyism in the city’s multibillion-dollar property management agency, The Examiner has learned.
E-mails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show Office of Property Management employees alleged that unqualified people, some with ties to the mayor’s office, were foisted upon the agency.
On Wednesday, City Administrator Dan Tangherlini confirmed the investigation.
E-mails reveal, and sources familiar with the ongoing investigation said, that employees complained to one another and to the inspector general about:
» The hiring of Kelly Williams, who employees were told was the sister of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s sister-in-law.
» The hiring of Barry Margeson, a former colleague of Property Management Director Robin-Eve Jasper.
» Efforts to fire an underling in the assets section because he had clashed with Tangherlini a decade previously, when both men were at the D.C. police department.
On Wednesday, Tangherlini said the allegations were “crazy.”
“People are going to complain about one thing or another,” he said. “That’s why we have an inspector general.”
Tangherlini said he had not spoken to agents for the inspector general.
“But I don’t think they’ll find anything,” he said.
Margeson declined comment for this story. Jasper was asked about her hiring practices in a public hearing last year. She said she didn’t know whether Williams had a family tie to the mayor.
Tangherlini on Wednesday said he didn’t know whether Williams and Fenty had ties. Tangherlini was Cc’d on a Sept. 30 e-mail from outgoing property office lawyer Frederick Ruehr in which Ruehr said Williams was the sister of Fenty’s brother’s wife. In his e-mail, Ruehr claimed that Jasper became hostile to him after he fired Williams.
D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson, D-At Large, told The Examiner that he had “been very concerned about how that agency is running things.”
“That agency is a core agency in the operation of the budget, and I continue to see problems with the management of public safety facilities in particular,” he said.
The office manages public leases and city property worth billions.
Among its more vocal employees was former asset manager Kathleen Linebaugh, who in e-mails called hiring practices at the “dysfunctional” agency “unsettling.”
“I personally think this can all be fixed,” Linebaugh wrote in an April 9, 2008, e-mail. “However, it takes the commitment of [s]enior [m]anagement to be fair and equitable in its management and employment practices.”
Linebaugh was fired a month later.
