Letters to the Editor:

Corruption Continues DC 37

To the Editor:

A letter by former District Council 37 Local 768 Treasurer Willie Crump in your Feb. 3 issue was titled, "The High Cost of Democracy." A better title may have been, "The High Cost of Corruption."

In the letter, Brother Crump is angry about the fact that a candidate for office in DC 37 can request a recount of votes. And he specifically charges that I requested a recount in 2002 which he says cost the union $40,000, and he says that I am doing the same this time around. Neither assertion is true.

In 2002, I lost an election for president of 768 to Darryl Ramsey by 35 votes, but my team's then-candidate for the second highest office, executive vice president, Chris Stella, won by only five votes. I therefore did not request a recount. I don't know where Brother Crump gets this claim, or his assertion that a recount was actually done and that it cost the union $40,000. I challenge him to produce any records which prove this.

If he claims that $40,000 was spent - and there was no recount - then, as the former treasurer, he must answer for how it went missing.

But recounts cost very little: there is no mailing cost or ballot preparation costs. That is especially true now, when ballots are scanned by machine, and a recount just involves feeding the ballots in once again in the presence of the election committee members and the candidates' observers.

In the current election, Darryl is leading by two votes, but most of my team won office, and now holds a majority of the seats on the union's executive board. Again, this year, I am not requesting a recount - just that the local's election committee count ten ballots which have been left unopened, and that the committee also count all votes tallied on the last 11 ballots which were counted. These votes, which were not tallied, could decide the run-off candidates for the final executive board position, which is still unresolved.

Brother Crump complains about the cost of elections, which I interpret to mean the involvement of the American Arbitration Association. It's true that this costs most of DC 37's 56 local unions thousands of dollars every three years. But this is necessary today because of the corruption in the union back in the 1990s.

After over 30 top Council leaders were indicted for theft of union funds and for fixing the 1995 contract vote in December of 1995 and January of 1996, AFSCME sent Brother Lee Saunders to take over DC 37 under an administratorship. It was Saunders who decreed that the DC 37 building could not be trusted to secure election ballots, and that the mechanics of mailing and counting ballots be farmed out to the Triple-A. It's the corruption back then that is costing our members dearly now.

And the corruption still continues at DC 37, with tens of thousands of my coworkers still not allowed to vote because DC 37 claims that they are "agency fee payers" even though they pay full union dues every two weeks, and see no difference whatsoever in the quality of the representation or benefits they receive as compared to other dues-payers.

Yet DC 37 makes no attempt to have them again sign the green membership cards, denying them the vote. This creates fertile ground for vote manipulation because there is a ready supply of ballots which "legally" may or may not be counted, depending on the interests of those in power.

Local 768's voting is now over, although I am challenging the many violations of election rules which marked the counting of the ballots. Since Darryl Ramsey was sworn in, he has done nothing to lead the union into his second term. By contrast, if I would have been elected, I would have held at least two board meetings and a general membership meeting by now, and I would be well on the way to putting up a union Web site, investigating members' grievances, and calling for chapter elections at all of our far-flung work locations.

Darryl and Willie Crump should turn over all the books to the current treasurer, Bernadino Del la Cruz, and Secretary Sue Lee-Louis, something they have thus far refused to do, in violation of the AFSCME and the local constitutions. Are they hiding something?

FITZ REID, Associate Public Health Sanitarian