By Eliot Kleinberg
The Palm Beach Post
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Disgraced former West Palm Beach fire marshal Derrick Daniels won’t face sanctions from the Palm Beach County Commission on Ethics for shaking down residents, after the panel decided Thursday his 2015 criminal conviction was enough.
Daniels, who rose through the ranks during his two-decade career to become a battalion chief, was convicted in November of six charges of grand theft and one charge of unlawful compensation by a public official. Prosecutors said he went out on nights and weekends to check that groups holding special events were complying with fire-safety codes and pocketed some $3,000 over 10 months in 2012 and 2013.
Daniels faced a prison term of nearly three years. Instead, in December, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Dina Keever sentenced him to the 30 days he had served in jail, placed him on six months of house arrest and ordered five years of probation and 100 hours of community service.
On Thursday, after a closed-door executive session of more than 1½ hours on this and an unrelated case, the ethics commission voted that “the public interest has already been served by the extensive sanctions levied by a criminal court.”
In the second case, Delray Beach police officer Steven Swanson agreed to a “letter of instruction” to settle an ethics charge that he improperly entered into a contract with the city for his wife’s signs and graphics firm.
Delray Beach City Manager Donald Cooper had contacted the commission after an audit showed the city did business totaling $3,125 in 2014 with a firm solely owned by Swanson’s wife. Documents show the police department approached Swanson, an officer since 2000, for business, and he passed that on to his wife. The documents said, “the violation was unintentional.”
The Swanson case was the second resulting from Cooper’s audit. In July, Desiree Lancaster, a Delray Beach Fire-Rescue ambulance billing contract supervisor agreed to a similar “letter of instruction” after she admitted steering about $12,000 in work to a pressure-cleaning firm she and her husband own. In that case as well, it was a supervisor who approached her, and the ethics commission concluded her violation was unintentional.
Delray manager Cooper said Thursday the two cases were among a half dozen uncovered by his audit, and all employees “were not aware that they were doing anything wrong.” He said the cases “have all been addressed.”
Copyright 2016 The Palm Beach Post