Sex in a city office. Sex in a city parking garage. Steamy emails sent on city accounts. And finally, a city investigation into the sordid tale of two District employees who used a city office for both work and play, according to an Office of the Inspector General report released Wednesday. Investigators say an assistant program manager in the District Department of Transportation and a 311 operations manager in the Office of Unified Communications had sex on several occasions in the DDOT employee’s Reeves Center office — and once in a car parked in the Reeves Center’s garage — in September and October of 2010.
But the employees’ relationship wasn’t confined to office space. Investigators found hundreds of personal, sometimes sexually explicit messages on the work email accounts of both employees, according to the report.
And as it turns out, the DDOT employee’s husband — the chief information officer in the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs — had beaten investigators to the chase. According to the report, he accessed his wife’s city account on her smartphone, found emails between his wife and her lover, and forwarded them to his own account in October 2010. He told investigators he’d found his wife’s BlackBerry in the bathroom and noticed an email from the OUC employee. “I love you,” it read, according to the report.
Later, in January, the report says, the man used his wife’s District ID and keys to enter her office and remove items from her desk.
When investigators interviewed the employees in March, the woman’s lover denied having sex in her DDOT office — even though the DDOT employee had admitted to having sex there on several occasions.
The DDOT employee’s husband also denied that he’d accessed his wife’s emails without her knowledge — the two had exchanged email passwords, he said — and added that he had only removed personal items from his wife’s desk when he entered her office in January.
All three city employees, investigators concluded, violated the District’s personnel policy. Investigators advised the employees’ respective departments to take “appropriate administrative action” against them.
DDOT and Unified Communications officials said they couldn’t comment, but a Unified Commmunications spokeswoman said the employee referenced in the report no longer works for her office. She couldn’t say why he had left or whether his departure was a result of the investigation.
