A human rights crisis exists within San Francisco government.
ABC Television San Francisco affiliate KGO's May 12, 2011 report on San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Parking Control Supervisor Elias Georgopolous stated that the City Attorney is representing him as a defendant in three concurrent legal cases. These include two civil court lawsuits charging physical assault and a federal equal employment opportunity sexual harassment complaint. KGO-TV's report featured a number of City and County parking officers who have filed complaints for years about Georgopolous' antisocial on-duty behavior. KGO's investigative "I-Team" even unearthed a San Francisco Superior Court judge’s 2000 written complaint about Georgopolous’ “rogue” employee conduct.
San Francisco government is using excessive administrative resources to defend an out-of-control parking officer.
KGO’s report on the weight of Georgopolous’ legal problems was added to by the showing of a City and County Whistleblower complaint about him. SFMTA Parking Control Supervisor Vidalina “Bebe” Pubill filed that complaint in 2008. Pubill was one of four San Francisco employees featured in a May 25 investigative report about San Francisco’s broken employee misconduct Whistleblower program.
In the May 25 report, Pubill says that a Whistleblower program employee followed up with her after she had filed her complaint in 2008, but broke off communication with her in mid-2009. The Whistleblower Program lists Pubill’s Georgopolous complaint as “Closed: Resolved by the Department or Agency.”
If San Francisco government has ever taken disciplinary action against Georgopolous, it is not apparent in his continuing hostile conduct. In April of this year, another parking officer corroborated Pubill’s account that Georgopolous flashed his vehicle’s lights upon her as she approached her own vehicle in a DPT parking lot. Pubill reported that Georgopolous also revved his engine in a threatening manner.
On May 19, 2011, parking officer Brian Tanabe called the San Francisco Police Department to respond to his report that Georgopolous, Tanabe's supervisor, was in violation of a restraining order. Tanabe secured the order after Georgopolous attacked him outside of Parking and Traffic’s main enforcement facility. Georgopolous targeted Tanabe after his subordinate learned that he and his wife, another parking control officer, were using a state disabled parking placard.
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KGO’s May 12 report about Georgopolous ended with a reporter asking SFMTA Executive Director Nathaniel Ford “Is any employee untouchable?”
“No, not at all,” Ford responded. “What you’ve presented is disturbing and we will get to the bottom of it.”
Ford’s MTA has taken action: By the time KGO's May 25 San Francisco Whistleblower Program had finished airing, whistleblower Vidalina Pubill was fired.
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The history of administrative misconduct shown by San Francisco government and its Department of Parking and Traffic dates back to the 1997 operational start date of the Department. Now that DPT is overseen by SFMTA, its administrative offices have also become corrupted by their failure to enforce and maintain a truly civil civil service. Such a decade-plus long hostile work environment is a crime against not just innocent San Francisco employees' work rights, but against their human rights as well.
In 2006, a Parking and Traffic employee died of a heart attack at her desk. Three male employees in front of the Department’s main enforcement facility harassed her shortly before she died. Two of the three DPT employees who followed her to a nearby garage were identified at the time to SFMTA Management. Both remain on the job.
A human rights crisis exists within San Francisco government.
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