By Paul Krueger and Kate Callen
Just one week after Bethany Bezak was named San Diego’s Chief Operating Officer, a devastating report by City Auditor Andy Hanau offered evidence that she is an exceptionally bad hire.
On October 26, Hanau and his staff delivered an audit of the city’s Streetlight Repair Program that contained troubling revelations about waste, fraud, and mismanagement.
Findings included unwarranted overtime paid to city electricians (overtime costs increased from $230,000 to $1.4 million) and blatant timecard cheating by employees, including two electricians who allegedly spent 198 hours – the equivalent of 25 days – sitting idly in their parked city trucks.
The audit “identified City vehicles with a total of 333 hours of extended stops where no worksites could be verified.” The review also found that “fifty-five percent of callback-related work orders involving multiple electricians did not identify all employees who claimed overtime for responding.”
Who was the Director of the Transportation Department overseeing the Streets Division and supervising streetlight repair in the crucial years leading up this audit?
Bethany Bezak.
And who, in her role as the city’s “Chief Performance and Logistics Officer,” signed off on city management’s defensive response and rebuttal to the auditor’s report?
Bethany Bezak.
Bezak’s recent appointment as the city’s Chief Operating Officer was a classic Todd Gloria decision: made abruptly inside his comfort zone with no apparent due diligence and plenty of chutzpah.
Hoping to quell an open revolt by council members who demanded that he stop trying (and failing) to run the city on his own, Gloria chose Bezak to oversee the city’s sprawling bureaucracy and rewarded her with $541,000 in annual salary and benefits.
She was a Gloria foot soldier, having climbed the management ladder during his six years as mayor. In announcing her selection, the mayor praised her integrity and work ethic.
“Bethany shares my administration’s vision and values and has a proven ability to turn priorities into results,” the mayor said. “She … demands accountability, and understands that San Diegans deserve responsive, dependable service from their city government.”
Gloria’s praise of Bezak was turned on its head by Hanau’s powerful report.
Among other findings, the audit discovered that city employees who allegedly bilked the treasury were also less productive: “Despite more money for repairs and more overtime, with no increase in needed repairs [emphasis added], the backlog increased.”
An administration that “demands accountability” would have responded to the audit by taking responsibility and apologizing to taxpayers. Instead, Gloria and Bezak doubled down.
The city argued that it had already instituted many of the audit’s suggested reforms, and claimed that Hanau’s audit team made unwarranted conclusions and refused to share information that could have led to faster bureaucratic reforms.
But Hanau had the last word in this exchange. While expressing his “appreciation for management’s cooperation,” he did state that Bezak’s response to the audit findings “appears to indicate that management does not fully recognize the magnitude of the operational challenges facing the Streetlight Repair Program.
“Specifically, we are concerned that Transportation’s response does not convey the level of urgency necessary to identify and address the underlying factors contributing to the Program’s increasing repair backlogs and declining service levels for residents.”
Time and again, malfeasance at City Hall is met with clumsy cover-ups and angry denials. Or the Mayor stands at a microphone, frowns, and says, “This is just unacceptable!” (Or, in the case of 101 Ash Street, “I was misled!”)
As for accountability, we’re still waiting for him to tell us how and why city staff overcharged 44,000 residents for trash pickup.
We can only hope our next mayor has some real-world business experience, understands what “accountability” means, and is willing to make tough decisions that benefit taxpayers, not just the political allies, campaign contributors, labor unions, and the “special interests” that put so many politicians in office and keep them there.
