CITY HALL WHISTLEBLOWER: Documents "retaliation"

WeitkemperFinal part of an exclusive Heart Beat 7-part series

 

COLUMBIA, 11/19/09 (Beat Bytes) --  When long-time City of Columbia public works supervisor Bill Weitkemper discovered in March 2006 that City Hall wasn't billing thousands of sewer utility users, he blew the whistle. 

 

Like so many whistleblowers before him, he feared retaliation -- fears that later proved justified, as his fellow supervisors quietly banished him to "pariah" hall.

 

"Writing this is certainly difficult," Weitkemper told city manager Bill Watkins in a Dec. 2007 email obtained by the Columbia Heart Beat through a Freedom of Information Act request.   "I am still not sure if I should be contacting you.  I am concerned with retaliation, both from those who failed to correctly apply the ordinances as well as those who have thus far not done much to correct the situation."

 

"The situation" had Weitkemper -- with the city since 1976 -- insisting that certain facts about what he'd uncovered were irrefutable, only to have those facts re-written in the public record or entirely ignored.

 

The city is losing $1.2 million per year in underbilling for sewer use at the University of Missouri alone, Weitkemper insisted.  But instead of collecting the $100,000.00/month in additional payments required to make up that annual loss, public works director John Glasscock settled with MU, asking for $5,000.00/month and gradually ramping up to  $600,000.00 annually -- half of today's loss -- in 10 years. 

 

In a Nov. 2007 six-page report entitled Billing Error Costing Sewer Utility Millions, Weitkemper made his case line by line.  Boone Hospital and Columbia Regional Hospital were together underpaying $26,608/year.  Columbia's hotels and motels were underpaying $193,620/year; the Columbia Housing Authority, $19,362/year; nursing and retirement homes, $34,900 per year;  mobile homes, duplexes, and apartments, $161,000/year; the Columbia Mall, $6,859/year.   

 

Add it all up, and Weitkemper said he had discovered over $1.6 million in city revenue lost to some of the area's biggest players, all at a time when a mantra of "tight budgets" and "no money" rules virtually every discussion at City Hall -- except when it comes to salary increases for department heads. 

 

The best way to ignore the lessons of history may be to rewrite history, and that's exactly what Weitkemper would later claim his bosses tried to do. 

 

"The August 2008 edition of City Insider" -- a monthly newsletter for city employees -- "stated that I was recognized and presented a $3,000 bonus because I noticed a discrepancy in sewer billing," Weitkemper emailed Watkins in September 2008.    That discrepancy "resulted in increased annual city revenue of" -- not $1.6 million. Not $600,000.  Not even $200,000. 

 

No, Weitkemper's superiors decided he had found a mere $130,000 in annually underbilled sewer charges.  Calling that information "incorrect and misleading," Weitkemper told the city manager, "There is just a little more to the story than that." 

 

This story concludes about where it began:  Inertia, stasis, whatever you want to call it at City Hall.  It may be nice to think of government as some sort of great equalizer, but there are lots of big thumbs that squat all over this community without so much as a peep from government -- or by directly colluding with government.   As a result, people like Bill Weitkemper are more likely to be squashed than recognized.  

 

"I should not have been harassed, intimidated, and subjected to a hostile work environment because of my persistence," he wrote to Bill Watkins.  "I should not have been retaliated against by being denied the salary increase I earned."