Gloria Jeff, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, was fired around midday on a Friday and by that afternoon, the 10th floor of the state’s Caltrans Building, which houses the DOT, was rocking. According to the Black and Hispanic security guards on duty at the time, the Whites who run the DOT partied like you wouldn’t believe. And they had plenty to celebrate, as not only did Jeff’s removal stop all movement toward eradicating a long history of anti-Black racism in the department, but it also meant the department’s bureaucrats and bosses could return to their old ways of doing things, including working only four days a week. When Jeff came, she made everybody work five days a week, like regular people.

Second of three parts

Now the Wicked Witch was dead, and the Munchkins partied like it was 1999 and welcomed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s next appointee as DOT general manager: Rita Robinson, an African-American woman who had spent years and years as a city employee in various positions in sundry departments, the most recent being a four-year stint as director of the Bureau of Sanitation. As he did with Jeff, Villaraigosa hailed himself for appointing Robinson, while a local Black newspaper aptly characterized Robinson’s appointment as a mayoral game of “Musical Negroes” — removing one aggressive Black woman and replacing her with a more benign one who was not inclined to upset the status quo.

But the arrival of Robinson at the DOT did upset the status quo: It finally made people mad enough to talk openly about their plight, to hire lawyers and sue the city for racism, to force the union into drawing lines in the sand in support of Black engineers and to tell me, their Aunt Betty, all about it so I could relate to you the hell they’ve been going through.

The first thing Robinson did when she became general manager was to fire Iris Ingram, the DOT’s assistant general manager, after Ingram gave Robinson a detailed briefing on the state of race relations in the department. In a sworn declaration admitted into Superior Court in conjunction with the three lawsuits against the DOT, Ingram said: “It is my observation that the DOT was cliquish and that the engineers present were primarily comprised of Asians and Caucasians, and that these individuals in power sought to promote their friends and relatives.”

Ingram said she met with Robinson on Oct. 28, 2007, at 4 p.m. wherein she raised the issues that were upsetting the African-American engineers and made it clear to Robinson that “the claims of discrimination being asserted by the African-American engineers appeared to be substantiated, that there was no logical reason why African-American applicants for promotion to professional engineering positions had remained [in entry level positions] or why non-African-Americans with less experience were promoted more quickly than African-American engineers with longer length of employment with the city of Los Angeles, and why virtually all of the African-American engineers were excluded from the most desirable assignments in the DOT.”

Ingram’s declaration continued: “I did not find Ms. Robinson to be receptive to my report. I had been attempting to meet with Ms. Robinson to discuss various issues and had encountered difficulties in simply scheduling meetings with her. When I finally was able to reach her, Ms. Robinson limited our meeting to one hour and three agenda items. One of the items I raised for discussion was the complaint by the African-American engineers concerning the failure to promote based on race.

“During my conversation with Ms. Robinson, I discussed what I felt was a serious issue of potential liability for the city of Los Angeles,” Ingram continued. ”Immediately after I identified the group of African-American employees who had asserted the failure to promote claim, Ms. Robinson responded with the remark, ‘What are [the African-American engineers] whining about now?’ I asked Ms. Robinson if she wanted to meet with the African-American engineers and Ms. Robinson declined.”

Ingram said that shortly after this conversation, Robinson fired her. “I attribute my termination to the fact that I had taken the African-American engineers’ complaints seriously and had attempted to raise the issue of discrimination in promotion at the upper levels of management,” Ingram states in her declaration.

Robert G. Aquino, executive director of the engineers’ union, Engineers And Architects Assn., had been working with Ingram and Jeff in developing a job rotation plan and new promotion policies to correct the blatant racism of the DOT. But after both Jeff and Ingram were fired, Aquino had to start all over again with Robinson.

“Yes, after trying for a year, we finally got a meeting with her on Dec. 23, 2008, and finally had a chance to discuss with her the EAA’s concerns about the lack of advancement opportunities and overtime for the DOT’s African-American employees in the professional disciplines,” Aquino said. “She asked us what she should do about it; she asked us for recommendations to address the problem,” Aquino said.

The union leader sent Robinson a letter on Feb. 26, 2009, with a copy to Mayor Villaraigosa, entitled Personnel Practices Recommendations, in which he clearly detailed 10 specific actions and procedures Robinson should implement to correct the problem of racism in the DOT. These 10 recommendations were separate from the Jan. 13, 2009, letter the EAA sent Robinson that described the engineering rotation program they had been developing with Jeff and Ingram, which the union felt Robinson should implement. Robinson did not respond to either letter until Aug. 18, during which time people got mad, madder and maddest and starting filing lawsuits and talking to me.

“She just blew us off,” Aquino said of Robinson’s response to the union’s personnel practices recommendations she asked for. Indeed, basically, what she told them was, in effect, “these are our employee selection activities and if you don’t like them, do something about it.” Aquino scoffs at Robinson’s rebuttal concept of a rotation program. “Her thing is totally unacceptable,” Aquino said. “We want a real rotation program. One with teeth in it, not one subject to the whims of management. That’s what’s wrong now, management does whatever it wants.

“What you have over here at the DOT is exactly what it looks like — racism,” Aquino continued. “They don’t want Black engineers. They don’t recruit Black engineers because they don’t want them. They have hired just two Black engineers in 15 years and they’ve hired hundreds of engineers of other races.

“They have a whole level of mid-management personnel who do not want to promote Blacks, so they keep them in positions below the non-Blacks,” Aquino continued. “That’s not OK with us and the EAA is not going to walk away from this. It is what it is and it’s racism — pure and simple,” Aquino reiterated.

To be more specific about the kind of racism Aquino is talking about, let me describe what one Black engineer has been going through since 1986. This man has been working in an entry level engineering position at DOT for 30 years. In 1986, this man was one of 25 candidates interviewed for promotion. The man did so well in the interview that he was ranked No. 4 on the list of 25. Everybody on the list was promoted except him and the person ranked on the bottom at No. 25.

In 2005, his supervisor, a White woman, told him to his face that she would not promote him because she wanted someone she was comfortable with; someone she could pal around with and go to lunch and stuff. She promoted a White person instead. Then he transferred to the Hollywood Division of DOT and the senior engineer there told him, flat out: “No, I’m not promoting you!” And he didn’t.
Then the man was interviewed for a promotion to transportation supervisor planner. He did well on the interview and received a high score. But the promotion was given to a White woman who had far fewer years of experience than he and whose name did not appear on the list of persons interviewed. After he questioned how she managed to get the promotion, he was told by DOT personnel officials that “she had been interviewed some place else and was on a different interview list.” Wait, I’m not done, in fact, I’m just beginning.

Last year the man was interviewed for a promotion to transportation supervisor planner. A couple of days later, Jim Lefton, the chief of transit, called the man and told him he had gotten the job. His colleagues were so happy for him that they threw him a party for him to celebrate. A week or so went by and nobody from personnel contacted him about the new position, causing him some concern.
Then Lefton sent him a e-mail telling him that there had been a “misunderstanding,” that he had not gotten the job and the promotion had gone to someone else.

Other things happened to this man, including the day his supervisor goaded him to come outside and physically fight him over a professional disagreement (potential physical abuse), and the fact that the man’s scores had been altered at a subsequent interview. The man is suing the city.

A key factor in another Black engineer’s lawsuit against the city is DOT’s flagrant habit of boldly going where no employer has gone before — to actually manipulating the interview scores of promotion candidates so the people they want to hire get the highest scores and, consequently, the jobs. Sworn depositions of witnesses in this lawsuit show that DOT officials collude and determine in advance who will get the jobs by fixing the interview outcomes. It’s like fixing the Kentucky Derby! It’s like fixing the Super Bowl! And it’s business as usual at DOT.

This particular engineer has worked as an entry-level associate for 29 years and his lawsuit claims he is a victim of the DOT practice of changing interview scores and fixing the promotion game. His case is burning up the court right now — I mean yesterday, today and tomorrow — as city attorneys are vigorously fighting to withhold from the court the documents that prove this practice.

In the longest deposition I’ve ever read in my life, a DOT official who regularly sits on job interview panels describes, in detail, how Blacks are denied jobs and promotion opportunities through a process the department calls “score normalization.” According to him, DOT uses a mixture of two kinds of interviewers: some who work for DOT, called “inside raters,” and some who work for other departments, called “outside raters.”

These people sit together and interview the candidates and rate their performances on score sheets, which are collected by personnel people when completed. Then, according to the deposed witness, the score sheets of the outside raters are changed, behind their backs, so they more closely reflect the scores given by the colluding inside raters. The witness said this is called “normalizing the scores” and he admitted that the outside raters score sheets in this particular plaintive’s case included some high-scoring Blacks, but the inside raters score sheets did not.

Attorney J. Bernard Alexander, who filed suit in behalf of this engineer in 2007, said he has been seeking those score sheets for two years. “The city of Los Angeles refused to give them up,” Alexander said. “They maintained it’s a privacy issue; we maintained it’s a bunch of crock.”

Alexander recently received a court order to compel the city to turn over those sheets identifying the race and the scores of the 15 interviewed candidates involved in this case, but not their names. “We don’t care about the candidates’ name. This is a race issue and all we ever wanted were their races and their scores,” Alexander said.

“We have a trial date set for January on this case and that is the third trial date that has been set,” Alexander added. “The trial has been postponed twice because the city has been coming up with all kinds of reasons why it could not turn over the score sheets. I signed agreements with the City Attorney’s Office Wednesday pursuant to the receipt of these sheets, and I expect to have them Friday,” the attorney said.

Next week: The DOT and the black community.