The summary, abrupt and unexplained firing of Gloria Jeff as the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation two years ago was the seminal act by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that imbued a virtual across-the-board rejection by the city’s African-Americans of the heretofore popular mayor.

First of Two Parts

Everybody Black rushed to condemn Jeff’s firing: Black newspapers, politicians, community groups, civil rights organizations and city employees — especially employees of the Department of Transportation, who maintain that that department is the most racist in the city and had always been the most racist in the city until Jeff, the first African-American to head it, arrived and immediately set about addressing issues that made her Black workers feel like they were on a Dixieland antebellum plantation.

The city of Los Angeles wooed Jeff from a comfortable post in Michigan to come to Los Angeles and accept the job as head of the DOT. In a display of flashy, public relations bravado, Villaraigosa touted his appointment of Jeff and strutted her before the news cameras in March 2006 and 18 months later, he ordered her to leave.

Why? What happened in the DOT during Jeff’s 18 months on the job? I spoke with Jeff from her Washington, D.C., home, and she said: “I, literally, to this day, have no idea why the mayor fired me, other than that I was an at-will employee and he had that right. I have no idea where things broke down.” Everybody who is Black and connected in any way to the DOT have one singular idea of why Jeff was fired: Because she chose to combat racism in the department, and they pointed out that not only was Jeff fired, but Iris Ingram, her assistant manager, was fired and all the African-Americans in any senior level were removed.

The DOT employs a 2,200-member workforce that includes 700 traffic officers and 500 crossing guards. Most of the department’s Blacks work as traffic officers and crossing guards. The department also employs 236 engineers, of which only 10 are Black and all 10 occupy the bottom “associate” level of engineer positions. Most of those 10 Black associate engineers have been working in their entry-level positions for from 20 to 30 years. And therein lies the problem: The inability of Black transportation engineers to 1. get hired, 2. get promoted, and 3. obtain preferred job assignments.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been dealing with the problem, as has the engineers’ union, Engineers And  Architects Assn., and the Superior Court of the state of California, which is hearing lawsuits as we speak that were filed by several Black engineers against the DOT and the city of Los Angeles.

Rita Robinson, the present general manager of the DOT, (the one who fired Ingram, Jeff’s assistant) said she could not speak about the lawsuits, and other legal officials of the city said they could not discuss ongoing litigation either. In any case, I have all the briefs, depositions and sworn declarations regarding legal action against DOT/LA during the past two years. They are on the public record and I intend to quote liberally from them, as they are most enlightening and infuriating.

The African-American litigants are suing DOT/LA because they claim to be victims of institutionalized racism that denies them promotional opportunities through the manipulation of screening panel configuration, the altering of job interview scores, the collusion among higher-ups in agreements to promote friends, and the denial of job assignments that lead to upward mobility. All of which have caused Black engineers to wallow for 30 years in the entry-level depths of the DOT.

In her declaration admitted into court, Jeff said she was immediately bombarded by complaints about racist promotion policies when she went to work at the DOT and was informed that no Black engineer had ever been promoted above the top entry level of transportation engineering associate III (TEA III). “I researched this fact and found it to be true,” Jeff said. “There is only one TEA III within the DOT: Emmanuel Fablyi. Based on my discussions with the African-American engineers and my inquiries with management, it was my opinion that qualified African-American engineers were present within the ranks of the DOT.

“I then examined the various departments of the DOT. What I observed was that while the DOT touts that it is a diverse organization, most of the African-American diversity exists within one subunit: Parking Enforcement,” Jeff said. “Designing, acquiring equipment, traffic operations and field office assignments require engineering backgrounds, but there were few or no African-American engineers assigned in many of those areas.

“If Parking Enforcement is isolated and removed from the equation, it is readily apparent that DOT does not have a representative composition of African-Americans in management,” Jeff continued in her court declaration. “This fact is well known to the DOT. Statistics have been gathered within the Communications Office, broken down by race and gender. These statistics reflect that the overwhelming majority of management personnel are Caucasian.”

Jeff went on to say: “There has been no consistent or concerted effort to recruit African-American engineers in concentrated areas and African-American engineers have not been given assignments that provide them with opportunities to gain the experience and skills needed to be promoted. One prime example is the ATSAC Center, in which there are no African-American engineers.” (ATSAC is the Automatic Traffic Signal Actuation and Control, which is the city’s very expensive system of synchronizing traffic signals to monitor and improve traffic flow.)

“The ATSAC Center is one of the most technically sophisticated areas of the organization, but is operated in a manner to build the skills of those who work within it. No African-American engineer was rotated into this area during my tenure,” Jeff continued.

“African-American engineers appear to have been excluded from special projects, advanced transportation management systems, advanced transportation systems and research and inter agency coordination. These are all highly desirable assignments to which African-American engineers have not been assigned,” Jeff continued.

Jeff further stated in her court document: “I concluded that the subjectivity of the promotion process, and a limited perspective by internal raters on the potential of some, had worked to reduce the importance of merit within the promotion process. I actively attempted to change the dynamics which created bias in the promotion process.”

In this regard, Jeff said she initiated annual performance evaluations and required that they be done in a timely fashion for everyone, and established a rotational program for everyone, beginning with the engineering positions, to offer the opportunity for all to gain a diverse set of experiences and skills within the department. She also required that no fewer than two outside interviewers sit on DOT promotion panels to compliment the internal DOT raters in an attempt to instill fairness and objectivity into the interview process, and she increased the use of training courses by engineers so they could receive additional or new professional skills and knowledge.

Jeff was a virtual whirlwind as she went about changing things and making the workplace a fairer place for African-Americans. One indication of the entrenched nature of the DOT is the manner in which overtime is allotted. Jeff learned that only a select few individuals were given engineering overtime and that one longtime DOT employee controlled that selection and that one employee was permitted to handpick the engineers he would work with, based on whom he trusts and with whom he is comfortable. Jeff changed that.

Jeff also challenged DOT’s human resources director to explain why Black employees of more than 10 years were somehow not promotable, and had received few or no performance evaluations, but other employees with the same lack of evaluations were, in fact promoted faster. She said she received no meaningful response.

Then, in February 2007, Jeff did the unthinkable: She canceled the promotional examination for TEA III because she deemed it biased and unfair and was conducted contrary to the specific requirements she instituted to insure fairness!

Jeff concluded her declaration, thusly: “I, myself, am African-American. I was the first and only African-American engineer to hold a managerial position in the history of the DOT. As the general manager, it is not my role to act as an advocate for any one group. My role and objective was to assure that the promotion process was open and fair, so that all employees had an equal opportunity to promote. That said, I reached the conclusion that due to a promotion process in which merit was not the dominant consideration, the promotion process required changes.”

Jeff made the changes, and she told me the changes created hostilities. “Folks were accustomed to doing things the way they always had. It was problematic, but I said it was ridiculous not to have the best people in place for the jobs,” Jeff said.

After that, Jeff was summoned to the mayor’s office and given 21 hours to clean out her desk and get out of the city.

Next Week: The mayor’s game of “musical Negroes” and DOT admissions of improprieties.