Board of Aldermen 05-28-2019 Page 15
He was a 20 hour a week guy and | was pretty motivated to do my job and he had a girlfriend in another
state so Friday at lunch he split and took on a road trip to the other state and rolled in Monday after
lunch when he left from that place and came back to work. Every week | would have to listen to the
details of what was happening in the shower between him and his girlfriend before he left and when he
came back. And then | had to carry the load, Thursday was 18 holes of golf in the afternoon and
Tuesday and Wednesdays were work outs at the gym.
| put up with it for about 8 months and then | was all set and | went in to management | said “I’m all set
with this, here’s what’s going on”. You know that was a very demoralizing situation for me in my career
because | worked and | had to deal with somebody who didn’t work. The gentleman left after a couple
months and moved closer to his girlfriend which was a good thing. Fast forward 5 years and | moved
my career into a new area, in a new department that had never had a woman in the department. | got
put on a very busy, classified project that was over budget and behind schedule. Management made it
very clear that there was no money for overtime and we all had to work overtime. | again get assigned
with an engineer who is probably 7 years or 8 years older than me and again wasn’t an overly motivated
person. Certainly not as bad as the first one, half-time work was pretty bad but could easily shave off 10
hours a week and never came in on a Saturday. Part-way into the project, the Project Manager, an
older gentleman ready to retire, wanted me to learn Project Management and said, “I’m going to start
sending you the budgets; | want you to look at the budgets and get familiar with them so you can step
into Project Management someday”.
When | got my first budget and | looked at it, the engineer that | was working with was being paid 60
hours of overtime a month. | was shocked, | was told there was no overtime, | was working overtime, |
never saw my constituents come in once on a Saturday and he was getting paid on a military contract. |
was floored, marched into the manager’s office and said “what’s this” you know “how is this happening’.
And the answer | got was his wife was having a baby and he was under a lot of stress and he was trying
to help him out by giving him a little extra pay. Needless to say, you know my personality now, it really
wasn't different back then and it didn’t fly with me at all. | went two layers up and | shut down that
overtime. That was very demoralizing for me. That's what a demoralizing work circumstance sounds
like to me and feels like to me.
When | look in the Assessing Office and | look at the front end of the office with the four clerical staff
women you have there; they work endlessly. They are tied to their computer screens pretty much all
day. And | think if you look at any one of their desks you are going to see just piles of paper around
them, they are just wrapped in paper. They have very set breaks; I’ve never seen an abuse of any
break time with them. | think it is pretty demoralizing when you have a Senior Assessor who leaves like
this Senior Assessor does and tells everyone “I’m heading out to the field” and signs out on the board,
“I’m going to check properties” and then you find out he’s in the park for 2 % hours or let me include that,
driving and in the park or in the Holiday Inn lot for 2, 2 % or 3 hours at a time.
President Wilshire
Ms. Ortolano, this Board does not have anything to do with personnel matters, so | would respectfully
ask that you keep your comments to what the Board has purview of. We don’t have purview of
personnel matters.
Ms. Ortolano Well that’s ok because what you do have purview of is performance issues? How do we
address performance? And that to me is reasonable. And | am addressing something that was
addressed by the Mayor at both Ward meeting; the demoralizing nature of this report. | am going to
submit to you tonight for the record, which you all received e-mails, the four reports that | gave you. I’d
like them to go in the minutes. They will be available for the public to see and read for themselves. | am
also concerned by the minimizing | think of the issue by the Mayor. And what | mean by that is | listen to
the comments at the Ward 7 Meeting where he mentioned that the investigation was only 2 weeks, that
there were only 2 data points above an hour that he was out.
