Monroe Underground

In a not so stunning turn of events for the City of Monroe, the Louisiana legislative auditor has released an incriminating report concerning the Engineering Department.

It seems that Mr. Ricardo Nance was hired as the Survey Party Chief in May of 2009, despite the fact that he was severely unqualified. According to the report, he had only worked as a rodman on a survey team 10 YEARS AGO.

Mr. Hailey stated that before Mr. Nance’s hiring as SPC, Ms. Morrison and Mr. Nance
approached him because Mr. Nance wanted to do survey work again. Although he could not
remember Mr. Nance’s name, he recalled that Mr. Nance worked for him approximately 10 years
ago as a rodman, the lowest position on the survey crew. His duties included holding the rod,
digging up property markers, and carrying equipment.

When Ms. Morrison approached him, Mr. Hailey agreed to accept Mr. Nance on the survey crew and assumed Ms. Morrison hired him as a rodman. According to Mr. Hailey, he was unaware that Mr. Nance had been promoted to the position of SPC when he agreed to train Mr. Nance. Mr. Hailey stated that he attempted to train Mr. Nance from May 2009 to March 2011, but Mr. Nance was difficult to train. He added that Mr. Nance often rested in the city truck on job sites while Mr. Joe Gix, CAD Draftsman, performed the calculations. He further stated that Mr. Nance would often take the survey truck during the work day and disappear for several hours. Mr. Gix, who was terminated in April 2010, stated that when he tried to apply for the SPC position, it was already filled by Mr. Nance;
however, he had to assist in training Mr. Nance to do survey work. Mr. Gix further stated that
neither he nor Mr. Nance was knowledgeable about survey work.

In addition to his salary of $53,814 per year, he was also paid for 147 hours of undocumented overtime.

That’s right.

Un-fucking-documented.

To the city’s credit, he was paid for some documented overtime, too. He was paid 28.5 hours of overtime for working at the front desk for the department of Engineering. Really? Really, Mr. Mayo? You couldn’t find anyone else to answer the phone so you had your survey chief do it?

Nance was also paid 156.5 hours of overtime for working on the South Third Street project, during which he, received overtime pay related to this project for watching the poured concrete dry to ensure no one vandalized the concrete.”

OK, let’s do some math, shall we? Let’s see, according to the document, Mr. Nance “received $3,343 for 156.5 overtime hours related to the South Third Street project during the period December 2009 to July 2010.”  So, basically, this asshole got paid $21.36  per hour to watch concrete dry for 156.5 hours.

And then there’s this:

According to overtime sheets, 81 of the 156.5 hours Mr. Nance was paid to work on this
project were performed before the March 1, 2010, project start date or after the May 24, 2010,
project end date. Of the remaining 75.5 hours, City records indicate Mr. Nance worked 58.5
overtime hours on days when the contractor did not pour concrete. Contractor invoices show
concrete was poured seven days in March and eight days in April. However, Mr. Nance was
paid overtime 18 days in March, no days in April, 17 days in June, and four days in July
including a day that he received eight hours of sick leave.

Jesus.

This report is 28 pages filled with the bullshit that is Jamie Mayo. You can read the entire thing for yourself by clicking here.

You may be wondering what Mayor Mayo’s response was. Well, here are the highlights:

However, because of the implied preferential treatment by Ms. Morrison toward an employee, I
feel it incumbent to point out that Mr. Nance was not originally hired by Ms. Morrison. In fact,
Mr. Nance was initially hired in the public works department. He later transferred to the traffic
engineering department because a position had become available and the union contract in place
with City employees gives current employees an opportunity to advance from within before an
outside person is hired. These facts have been given little attention but seem relevant to me
because of the tenor of the media reports in this matter.

The questions in your report are serious and I intend to look further into each and every aspect of
the payroll and personnel issues for future reference because the issues are often difficult to give
an answer to without case specific information, for instance, if employees subject to “call out”
were given a set amount of pay on each pay check for ease of consistency with the payroll, but it
was not their week to be “on call” and they performed another non-related to “call out” job after
hours, are they entitled to overtime? This is just one of the intertwined scenarios that heretofore
has not been questioned or answered.

Seriously? That shit doesn’t even make any sense.

BTW, you may be wondering if anyone has lost their job over this whole affair. Obviously, Mayo is still secure in his position as mayor and will probably be re-elected. City Engineer Sinyale Morrison is still in her current position. Mr. Nance was eventually fired after he threatened to kill former human resource director Mike Rhymes.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Mr. Nance is a convicted fucking felon?

As far as Mr. Mike Rhymes, former City of Monroe human resource director who started the whole initial investigation into the city engineering department, he was fired for “misconduct” on Friday, September 9th…the weekend before the 10th anniversary of 9/11…in the hopes that the media would be so focused on the upcoming anniversary  that they would overlook an ethical, intelligent city employee being fired investigating “internal affairs.”

Way to go, Jamie Mayo. Way to go.

 

Tags: city of monroe, engineering daprtment, investigation, jamie mayo, louisiana, mayor mayo, mike rhymes, ricardo nance, sinyale morrison