By Steve Patterson
The Florida Times-Union
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Businesses with outdated fire extinguishers and other equipment issues were wrongly listed by a Jacksonville fire inspector as having no problems, records obtained by the Times-Union show.
The inspector told store managers when he found fire-code violations, but told a state investigator he didn’t mention those in city records so he wouldn’t have to make follow-up inspections, according to a 2012 report by the state Fire Marshal’s Office.
The inspector, Marcel White, said that chiefs in the city’s Fire Prevention Division “had emphasized new inspections, as they resulted in revenue for the city,” said the report, released in response to a public records request. “White advised re-inspections did not result in any additional revenue and had been given a low priority by previous chiefs.”
That’s just not how the fire department operates, an agency spokesman said.
“Florida state statutes indicate that violations MUST be written up,” the spokesman, Tom Francis, said by email. He said the idea that inspectors could skip reporting problems “would be an erroneous assessment and completely incongruous with the tenets of our Fire Prevention Bureau.”
The fire department collects about $1.4 million in inspection fees yearly for close to 20,000 routine inspections.
Inspectors from the state Fire Marshal’s Office and the city jointly re-examined a long list of businesses White had inspected after the captain overseeing inspections, Kevin Jones, wrote up White for violating department rules.
That write-up led to White suing the city in federal court this year, saying he had been the target of on-the-job retaliation and racial discrimination. Both White and Jones are African-American.
White declined to talk to a reporter this week, but said in his suit that Jones had made “improper and baseless allegations” that damaged his career. Jones became chief of the Fire Prevention Division last year.
White reported code violations in very few of the places he examined — just 10 out of 1,670 properties he examined in the year before Jones raised concerns, wrote Robert Jenkins, an investigator for the state Fire Marshal’s Office.
Inspectors who rechecked White’s work most commonly found fire extinguishers whose inspection tags were expired, but also found White was telling store managers what was wrong and that they had to correct it.
A furniture store manager told Jenkins that White found the fire alarm system at his business hadn’t been inspected recently and needed to be checked by someone certified to maintain it. White left his business card and told the manager to call him once the alarm system was serviced.
“None reported anything untoward during the inspection,” Jenkins wrote after visiting a list of places White had examined, adding that people questioned about the visits “opined that White conducted himself in a completely professional manner.”
State officials first recommended checking a sampling of 27 businesses, but Francis said a task force of state and city employees eventually worked back through all the inspections White logged in the previous year.
White’s suit argues he was “singled out for disciplinary write-ups for conduct that was normal” among inspectors.
In a memo to Jenkins in August 2012, Jones wrote he had found cases where White wrote “no violations” in his records for inspections of a church and a Westside machine shop when inspection tags at those sites showed sprinkler and fire alarm systems that were overdue for inspection.
Jones wrote that White’s reports listed inaccurate dates for the last times those inspections were performed.
White “had engaged in numerous activities of this nature and the magnitude of these activities was beyond belief and clearly qualified as an act of gross misconduct in violation of state and local laws,” Jones wrote.
The report by Jenkins said information about violations not being recorded was forwarded to the State Attorney’s Office, but prosecutors decided against filing charges.
White had been transferred from the prevention division to the fire department’s Tactical Support Division after being written up, but returned to the prevention division in January 2013.
White was already part of a 2011 class-action discrimination suit over firefighter promotions, and filed a separate lawsuit in May over the department’s reaction to the charges Jones made.
A city attorney, Adina Teodorescu, answered last week with 17 defenses that challenged the basis of White’s complaint. Among them, Teodorescu said that White “has not established a claim of race discrimination as he has failed to even allege that the city treated similarly situated employees [who aren’t African-American] ... more favorably.”
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(c)2014 The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, Fla.)
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