In 2006, one of Yearby's successors, interim director Jim Nimmer, wrote a resignation letter in which he accused his own replacement, Don Cordova, of "numerous scurrilous acts of dishonor" toward him.
"It's almost jinxed, the CSA director position," says a city official.
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The Career Service Authority "is a high-risk department because of the dollars involved," notes Denis Berckefeldt, director of communications for the Denver Auditor's Office. At a time when the city is struggling with a budget shortfall, the CSA oversees more than half a billion dollars in payroll and benefits.
Jeff Dolan, who became CSA director in 2007, is no stranger to controversy, either. Not long after he started, local media reported that he was still under investigation for an incident at his previous job as human-resources director for the city of Davenport, Iowa: An administrative assistant there had accused him of doing little in response to her claims that she was the victim of sexual harassment by a city official. While that claim was eventually settled, with Dolan and the Davenport official admitting no wrongdoing, a few months later Dolan was the subject of scrutiny here in Denver, when a staff reorganization he'd planned to centralize human resources and payroll departments threatened to result in ten layoffs, all of them minority employees.
Layoffs at the CSA weren't the only source of controversy. In the summer of 2009, the Denver Auditor's Office decided to look into the CSA's recruiting practices. "We noticed it was taking a long time to get people recruited and hired," says Berckefeldt. But supervisors in the Recruiting Section told employees not to cooperate with the audit. "We were told we were being audited, but nobody was supposed to speak to the investigators," says the woman who felt targeted by Bettinger. "Only once the auditors forced the issue were we given free access."
At that point, she and several of her colleagues shared their concerns about the CSA (though not their specific complaints about Bettinger) with the auditor's investigators. "A number of us talked to the auditors, and we told the truth about ineffective leadership of recruiting supervisors and about systemic issues within CSA operations," says Brown.
"A lot of us saw it as an opportunity to make things better," says the female employee.
But when an audit was released in August 2009 that criticized the recruiting process, the CSA's director didn't appreciate their input. "Jeff Dolan had a meeting with us and said, 'You'd better not get sideways with me. I am working very hard to rebuild my reputation,'" the woman remembers. "We all left the meeting and said, 'What the hell was that?'"
A week later, she received the results of the investigation into the complaints that she and a colleague had made about Bettinger. Former CSA boardmember Kilroy found that Bettinger "is almost universally perceived by the staff as 'weird,' 'strange' and 'odd,'" and that he "has made a couple of inappropriate comments in the workplace," some of which "could be interpreted to contain sexual innuendo." Kilroy concluded, however, that "Mr. Bettinger's conduct, while inappropriate and uncomfortable, has not been hostile or intimidating."
Kilroy went on to suggest that the female employees' complaints about Bettinger might have been due to their resistance to changes in the division, noting that both "have engaged in behavior towards the leadership that is accurately described as hostile and defiant."
While reading through the report, the employee who felt targeted by Bettinger was struck by the fact that two of the Recruiting Section colleagues whom Kilroy called "fair witnesses who have a genuine concern about what is going on in the division" had been unexpectedly assigned to a new CSA division just two weeks earlier. At the time, she and her colleagues had been surprised that two junior-level employees had been transferred without the sort of competitive application process usually required by the CSA.
On September 15, 2009, the reason for the reassignment became clear, she says. That was the day that she, along with the other woman who'd filed a complaint against Bettinger and three of their Recruitment Section colleagues, received notices that their positions had been eliminated. The move was explained as part of citywide layoffs due to the budget crunch — but these were the only five jobs eliminated in the CSA at the time.
Westword spoke with three of the five impacted by the layoffs; they say that at least four of the five had voiced concerns about the CSA to both the auditor's investigators and Kilroy.
"It appeared that the people who were the most outspoken were the ones laid off," says Brown, who was among the five. "You look at the people who were retained; they didn't say anything particularly damaging because they wanted to keep their job. It looked like the management — in particular, Jeff Dolan — wanted people who were 'yes' people rather than people who were willing to share ideas and make the organization better."
Under CSA seniority rules, the two Recruiting Section employees who'd been praised by Kilroy should have lost their jobs before several of the others. But because the two had just been reassigned to a new division, their jobs were spared. "You can see how on so many levels this is wrong," says another one of the employees who lost their jobs. "I really felt like for these folks to be the leading authority on human resources for the largest employers in all of Denver — for them to conduct themselves like this is really abhorrent."
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