KAM Part 9-Code Enforcement, Wharton, & Media Manipulation

During the Olympics I kept seeing ads for an investigative piece by Andy Wise on City Code Enforcement officers not doing their jobs. I find this a laughable investigative piece of journalism. I’ll get to that shortly. What I am really interested in though is media manipulation by the Wharton Administration. The administration has known something was seriously wrong with Code Enforcement for three years but didn’t look further into it or want to do anything about it until recently because of a couple competing self-interests. The first interest was not upsetting too many apple-carts prior to the 2011 election. Wharton understands that the black community is not his political base, but he wanted to win as much black voter support as possible. He won a majority in most black precincts yet a sizeable number he didn’t. Yet in white precincts he won 90+% in most. Going after complex corruption and cleaning up an out of control department would have resulted in a lot of black city employees getting fired. Not something a mayoral candidate wants prior to an election. Plus, once you open the Pandora’s Box of a corruption investigation, you never know how far up it will stop.

The second interest was not showing you are unable to fix it. Politicians can stand being seen as indifferent to other’s opinions, big spenders, or even corrupt. No politician can stand being seen as incompetent. You could be all those other things and still get stuff done. An incompetent can’t. The Administration has known Code Enforcement was seriously screwed up and doing harm to the city, yet it didn’t want to take a hard look and try to repair it. The only thing worse for a politician than not trying, is trying and failing. Like the old saying goes (with a slight modification) “They’d rather stand in shit than be seen not able to work a shovel.” Here are simple questions for the Administration related to Andy Wise’s Code Enforcement story. 1) Why is the media doing what management should have been doing all along? 2) Why has the department used senior inspectors as managers? 3) Why aren’t there actually managers? Code Enforcement is an important and dangerous job. Officers get threatened a lot. They have to deal with everything from lunatic property owners to dangerous criminals. Remember, that County Code Enforcement officer a few years ago was murdered. Yet Code Enforcement is a department that can be easily corrupted to a systematic level. It generates a ton of data that feeds into the universal three pillars of municipal corruption; patronage, contracting, and property. This is where the laughable piece of Andy Wise’s investigative reporting intersects with media manipulation. Months and months ago local journalistic organizations knew about the familial patronage throughout the inspector ranks at Code Enforcement. They also knew how the contracting system was corrupted and how kickbacks were distributed. Finally, it was known how Senior Code Enforcement officials, having data on property ownership and vacancy, could snatch up houses to be resold or stripped of building materials. It is pretty bad when the agency in charge of remediating blight is actually contributing to it and the leaders profiting from it. Why wasn’t this reported when all of this was known? You would have to ask the local journalistic organizations. So here was the choice the Wharton Administration was faced with. A) Come to terms with the fact that there is a systematically corrupted agency responsible for protecting the property values and health of neighborhoods and the city’s tax base, which the administration does not have the competence or fortitude to fix, especially prior to an election. Or B) Make the worst culprits disappear after the election, months later give a much smaller story to a TV news reporter focusing on Code Enforcement officers screwing off. This minimizes the political fallout of the soon to be implemented policy of laying off all the Code Enforcement officers and making them reapply for their jobs when the department is moved under Public Works. When looked at it from that perspective, Option B doesn’t seem so bad. Well played Wharton, well played. Unfortunately, real life damage and crimes were done to neighborhoods all across the city while our journalistic organizations and Wharton Administration thread the political scandal needle.