Paul Bass Photo
Brooks, James, Poindexter, Librandi, Nemerson at Monday’s three-and-a-half-hour hearing.
A day after organizing a second annual city food truck festival, city small-business chief Jackie James found herself in a conference room answering charges that could cost her her job.
James serves as deputy director of the city’s Department of Economic Development. She oversees small business development, in which capacity she got the food truck festival going last year. The second iteration of the festival, complete with a Dragon Boat regatta, took place Sunday.
Monday she was summoned to a “formal hearing” on the third floor of City Hall to answer charges of insubordination from her boss, Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson.
She was accompanied by two union officials who represent her, Cherlyn Poindexter and Harold Brooks of AFSCME Local 3144. Poindexter said upon arriving at the meeting that she assumed that this was a labor relations hearing about possible discipline, since the meeting took place in a conference room in the suite of the labor relations director’s office. (The position of city labor relations director is currently vacant. Mayor Toni Harp fired the previous occupant of the position on April 25.)
City human resources chief Stephen Librandi, who was present in the room along with Nemerson, responded that in fact it was a “Loudermill” hearing. That means a preliminary due-process hearing that gives an employee an opportunity to respond to charges that can lead to her disimssal.
Nemerson listed those charges in a June 3 letter summoning James to the meeting. Those charges include:
• “Your actions deliberately testifyng at a Board of Alders meeting on March 30, 2015 against the Mayor’s decisions concerning the appropriate staffing of your program as Deputy Director of Economic Development after being requested to support her decisions;
• “Your actions following March 30, 2016 to cause funds to be transferred by the Board of Alders from one CDBG line item to another with the intent of securing funds to hire additional staff for your department after being requested to not take actions;
• “Your actions following a meeting with me and John Ward when you were ordered to request of the Alders to have the CDBG transferred funds (mentioned above) returned to their original liine item;
• “Your failing to issue Request for Proposals (RFPs) for NGO groups to apply for two line items of $30,000 to your department’s FY 2016 CDBG funds in a timely fashion despite requests that you do so;
• “Your failing to attend a half day Economic Development Administration retreat on February 20, 2016 without any explanation before or after, and not attending despite having said you would.”
James, office staff, and union officials head to Monday’s City Hall hearing from her 200 Orange St. office.
Before the meeting, James repeated statements made in a previous Independent interview that she feels she did nothing wrong and should not be disciplined.
“I wasn’t testifying against the budget. I was advocating for my budget,” she said on the elevator ride up to the third-floor meeting.
Reporters were barred from the hearing once it began.
The dispute stems from this season’s city budget hearings before the Board of Alders, as detailed in this article and this article.
James and another mayoral appointee, policy and grant writing chief Mendi Blue, had asked for new administrative support positions that the Harp administration ended up not including in its formal budget request before the alders, who have to give final approval. Both Blue and James criticized the administration’s request, James in remarks before the alders, Blue in a follow-up memo requested by the alders. Harp said she had specifically instructed her appointees to keep internal disagreements in-house during the budget process, then to publicly support the final version of the administration’s proposed budget. She fired Blue for violating that policy, she said; Blue claimed she did nothing wrong.
James, unlike Blue, is represented by a municipal union. She can’t be fired at will. The administraiton has to make a formal case and proceed through hearings like the one held on Tuesday.
Also, James filed a harassment complaint with the city against Nemerson. She said she has since sought to withdraw the complaint, as an internal review proceeds into complaints several female employees have made against Nemerson.
Alders responded to James’ plea to fund a new administrative position by moving money around in Harps’ requested budget to fill it. Nemerson, at a meeting with Ward, an attorney in his department, ordered James to contact alders to undo that move. Nemerson said that mayoral appointees are expected to follow the mayor’s decisions rather than undercut them.
James said that she felt the order to contact the alders made no sense — she said she hadn’t been privy to the transfer of funds to support a position she wanted preserved, and that there was no official alder in charge to contact about the transfer.
The meeting lasted three and a half hours. Nemerson declined comment afterwards. “The point of the meeting was to make sure that the decision-makers have all the information,” Librandi said. “We have a lot of information. We’ll digest it, and we’ll decide what we want to do.”
A big problem is that, by her own admission, she doesn't understand what it means to work for the mayor. She says "I wasn't testifying against the budget. I was advocating for my budget." The whole point is that she doesn't have her "own budget". There is one city budget and tough choices have to be made, across department lines, as to where the money goes. If individual department heads are allowed to go in and argue for "their budgets" then we have no effective city administration. Imagine if every city head went in and said "I am in favor of the overall budget, just give me more money and take it from somebody else."
I would feel a lot better if her approach was "OK, I didn't quite understand the rules, but I will in the future respect the mayor's budget." Instead, she is defending her conduct, which is indefensible. In that case, I think she has to go. She is basically saying she doesn't want to work for the mayor.