Is it OK to close a government office when an employee dies?

A woman visited a local courthouse office to renew her car license plates. But the tax assessor-collector’s office was closed.

A note on the front door stated: “We are saddened by the loss of our fellow employee, Allison Davis, who suddenly passed away on the 28th. We regret the inconvenience, but we will be closed for Allison’s memorial service this day.”

The notice referred visitors to other locations — there are seven other offices in the county — and the office’s Web site, which accepts payments for everything but vehicle title transfers.

Frustrated, the woman tried to get in touch with Tarrant County, Texas Tax Assessor-Collector Betsy Price, finally reaching her on the phone after five tries. Price said she closed the office so Davis’ co-workers could attend the funeral.

The woman was not satisfied.

“Who is your boss?” she asked Price.

“You are. If you live in Tarrant County, you are,” Price replied.

That day, the woman wrote to The Watchdog, “As a taxpayer, I am concerned about the use of our tax money in closing for a day.”

When I called, she said: “We can’t just shut an office. In a school, even if a principal or a teacher dies, they don’t close the school.”

I called Price. As first told in the Dec. 6, 2009 Dave Lieber Watchdog column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. here’s the rest of the story:

Davis, 38, was a 10-year employee of Tarrant County known for her wonderful customer service skills. “She loved people,” Price said. And “everybody loved Allison.”

On Oct. 27, Davis told her supervisor that she felt sick. She was pale and sweaty. The supervisor called Davis’ husband, Matt, and asked him to pick her up.

Matt Davis thought she had the flu. But the next morning, her lips were blue. He rushed her to the doctor, who sent her to an emergency room. From there, she took a CareFlite helicopter ride to Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth, where she was born. She was placed in intensive care.

But 23 hours after she first complained to her boss, Allison Davis was dead.

Matt Davis told me that he is awaiting autopsy results but that doctors think his wife died of blood poisoning.

The weekend before, his wife threw a surprise birthday party for her mother. On her last night, Matt Davis said, they were going to celebrate Halloween, a few nights away, with a “scary movie and takeout food” — a date night, he called it.

“That was my best friend,” Matt Davis said. “We were still honeymooning.” They were married for nine years.

He said he admired her devotion to her job. “She went above and beyond,” he said. She used to take government forms to people who needed them rather than have them come to the office to pick up the forms.

“She always had a bright smile,” he said. “She was not your typical civil servant. Allison would greet you: ‘Hey, darling. How are you doing? I haven’t seen you. Come up here.’?”

She handled vehicle title transfers, renewals and property tax collection.

“She was a sweet and funny lady,” one woman wrote in Davis’ memorial book linked to her star-telegram.com obituary. Then the ultimate compliment: “She made it worth waiting in line.”

The day after Davis died, Price brought a chaplain to the office to talk to employees. “It’s a very tight office,” Price said.

Under civil service rules, county employees may use four hours of emergency time to attend a funeral. They can take off the rest of the day as vacation time.

The employees in Price’s office spent the morning together before the funeral; they took vacation time, Price said.

“We’ve never had a death of an employee,” Price said of her 10 years in office. She decided to let the Granbury Road office staff and one or two senior people from each of the seven other offices attend the funeral. As an elected county official, Price runs her department as she sees fit. While she follows civil service guidelines for employee rules, any decisions about office operations are up to her.

“It was a tough decision,” Price said. “I had never closed an office before. But this was one of those rare exceptions.”

Agreed. In extraordinary circumstances, especially those involving life and death, public officials deserve a break.

What do you think?

Note: The author of this report, Dave Lieber, is The Watchdog columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. His new book — Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation — won two national book awards for social change in 2009.

Abuse of air medical ambulances — helicopters — goes on every day in this country. Many ambulance services are for-profit businesses. They take a patient when called by paramedics. But the injured party can later get a bill of $15,000 or more. And insurance companies, more than ever, are loathe to pay these bills, especially when they find that the trips were unnecessary. That happened to Dana Strittmatter. Here’s her story.

She was boiling water in her kitchen when it spilled on her leg. After paramedics arrived, they called for a medical helicopter from PHI Air Medical, a for-profit company that operates in Dallas-Fort Worth and elsewhere.

PHI Air Medical flew her to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. She was treated and released in an hour, according to her husband, Larry. She had second-degree burns.

But at the hospital, a doctor and others were angry that she had been transported by helicopter, Larry Strittmatter said.

One doctor told him that abuse of medical helicopters is a growing problem. The hospital expected her to arrive by ambulance.

“They were shocked when the helicopter pilot radioed in announcing his arrival,” he said.

The final bill was $17,500.

The couple’s insurance company, UniCare, paid $3,500, saying the situation did not warrant a helicopter ride because the injury was not life-threatening, Larry Strittmatter said.

PHI Air Medical sent them a bill for $14,000 with a cheerful “Thank you for allowing us to be of service!”

“A tough pill to swallow,” Larry Strittmatter said.

As I first reported in the Dec. 4, 2009 Dave Lieber Watchdog column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, on my suggestion, he complained to the Texas Department of Insurance, but that wasn’t right. The agency doesn’t regulate pricing. Nor does any other part of state government — or the federal government, either.

There are no rules about when a helicopter should be dispatched and which service should get the call. There’s no regional dispatch system, either.

With three competing services — PHI, CareFlite and Air Evac Lifeteam — the region has more medical helicopters than most cities.

Yet abuse of medical helicopters “goes on every day in this country,” said Dr. Bryan Bledsoe, an emergency room physician in Midlothian and a vocal critic of the air ambulance industry.

Recently, Bledsoe said, a patient was brought by helicopter to his emergency room with a sore throat.

“The doctor thought it was an abscess, but it wasn’t,” he said. “We treated the patient and sent her home.”

Without regulation, the only hope for the Strittmatters is that PHI won’t aggressively collect the entire amount.

“Some operators are very aggressive about filing lawsuits and using liens to collect payments,” Bledsoe said.

The air ambulance companies court the paramedics who make the decisions about whether to use a helicopter. Some companies, he said, offer paramedics small gifts such as pizza dinners, baseball caps or coffee mugs.

But some patients are getting wise, Bledsoe said.

“We’re hearing more stories about people refusing helicopter service,” he said.

It’s one more piece of the health insurance puzzle that people should pay attention to, according to the Texas Department of Insurance.

Larry Strittmatter said he doesn’t recall being asked to give consent for the helicopter ride. His wife, he said, “was drugged and could not have answered coherently.”

A spokeswoman for UniCare, the insurance company that would pay only part of the cost, told me: “You’re doing a good story because we see cases like this quite a bit.”

An executive with PHI Air Medical, based in Phoenix, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, told me: “It’s easy to look at the case after the fact. The reality is the paramedic is on the scene and must make a split-second decision. They’re driven by what’s in the patient’s best interest.”

Here’s the background on this: Dr. Roy Yamada is the North Texas medical director for PHI Air Medical. At the same time, he has served as medical director for several North Texas cities amd also Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.

In 2007, Danny Robbins, then an investigative reporter at my newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, reported that many cities where Yamada trained the EMS crews also called PHI Air Medical for emergency transports.

The newspaper also reported that, in 2007, a man was flown by PHI Air Medical to Parkland, even though PHI was not the closest air ambulance.

The PHI Air Medical executive said Yamada had nothing to do with the Strittmatter case and has no relationship with Benbrook.

When I called Yamada, he said: “I’m over here at one of the fire departments now giving an exam. So I won’t be able to talk to you. Call corporate on that.”

The PHI executive told me that the Strittmatters can still seek a negotiated settlement with the company.

“PHI is more than willing to talk directly with the patient,” he told me.

Larry Strittmatter sent a certified letter to the company last month asking for help.

Note: The author of this report, Dave Lieber, is The Watchdog columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. His new book — Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation — won two national book awards for social change in 2009.

How large organizations communicate and provide customer service both internally and externally is always of interest to Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation.

Inefficient systems, especially those funded by taxpayers, waste scarce dollars.

When the education of children is involved, efficiency is doubly important.

I want to show you the new communications flow chart being used by the school district to which I pay taxes each year.

Click here for a closer look.

This is obviously the mother of all Rube Goldberg contraptions for e-mail and verbal communications.

If you are a teacher in the Keller, Texas school district, you can no longer go directly to the administrator with the answer to your question or problem. Instead, the teacher must notify the principal, who then must notify the director of education at the administration building. That director is then supposed to notify the actual administrator in charge for an answer or solution.

This involves everything from missing textbooks to questions about field trips. Really, it involves everything in the school district.

Instead of the ding-ding (problem holder to problem solver) of normal communication, communication bounces like a pinball: ding  > ding  > ding > ding.

Superintendent James Veiteinheimer explained in my Nov. 22, 2009 Star-Telegram Dave Lieber column that he wants to collect data so he can anticipate problems before they grow widespread.

If there’s a textbook shortage or continued questions about field trips, he wants to know so his deputies can streamline the answer process.

“We’re trying to create the processes that get the answers back faster, more accurate and more consistent in a system that has doubled in size,” Veitenheimer says.

His goal is to collect data on problems “before something really dramatic happens.”

Like what?

“Before the system implodes on a person or a department or something like that. All of a sudden the phone is ringing off the hook and you can never get through because everybody’s calling.”

He says the system is working. Calls are being handled within 24 hours of the request to a principal.

I wonder if that’s true. I’m no fan of anonymous comments, but ConcernedTeacher posted this on the Star-Telegram.com Web site after my original report appeared.

“We get a response within 24 hours?! NOT! I know of teachers that have sent an e-mail with their question to the principal (which is what we were told to do in our building) days ago and still have no response!!!! They were then told to wait 24 hours and send another one if there was no response. If no response, wait 24 hours and then send another one,etc. REALLY!!!!! How many times are we to do this when BEFORE all we needed to do was make ONE phone call!!!! Principals don’t have time to take care of all of those questions!!!! It is just crazy!!!!!”

Spend a little time examining the communications flow chart. It’s fascinating. And get this: The district never released the plan with a detailed memo. The chart was shared with top administrators who then filtered it verbally to their underlings.

It caused a lot of confusion.

United Educators Association rep Larry West says, “”Effective communication doesn’t really filter well through layers. These are human beings, not machines. Machines are linear.”

Cara Jacocks, an instructor in organizational communication at Texas Christian University, says of the Keller plan: “They’ve bureaucratized communication.”

She adds, “In a large school system like this, it might be more beneficial to give the teachers more decision-making power as opposed to ‘I can’t make a decision now. I have to talk to this person and this person has to talk to that person.’ “

Please post comments about effective communication techniques that work for your school or place of business.

Let’s communicate about communicating!

Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. His book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, won two national book awards in 2009 for social change.

Have you gotten a traffic ticket in the mail from a red-light camera yet?

At first, you go into denial.

How could it be? I don’t do that!

Then the letter gives you a Web site to visit where you can watch the video of your vehicle rolling through the intersection.

That’s $75 bucks, pal.

Some call this the latest municipal racket.

What bothers Watchdog Nation is that this is the latest government responsibility outsourced to private companies. If you have a problem with your ticket, such as a billing issue, and you call your city, often enough you get directed to the private company.

Maybe your credit card was charged twice because you pushed the payment button twice on the company’s Web site. Or in several cases, as I’ve found, the camera company’s Web site doesn’t record your payment correctly.

As first reported in the Dave Lieber column in the Oct. 18, 2009 Fort Worth Star-Telegram, that’s what happened to Thom Lake and Kristin Engels.

Both admit their guilt. How could they not? Video taken by the camera proves it beyond a reasonable doubt. The issue here is what came next.

Lake paid the fine along with a $4 service charge. When he found out he had been double-charged, he called the city and was told to print and send in a refund form from the city Web site. He did, and he got his $75 back. So far, so good.

But there was a second $4 service charge. He wanted that refunded, too. He called the city but was told to call the vendor, American Traffic Solutions, in Arizona. He left three voice mail messages before he heard back.

The rep wouldn’t budge on a refund until Lake threatened to protest at a City Council meeting.

Almost two months after paying online, he received his $4 refund from ATS in a FedEx envelope. His city, Fort Worth, Texas, “didn’t make too much of an effort to help me out,” Lake says. “I’m the one that had to make the long-distance calls to chase it down. Nobody was rude, but nobody made the effort.

“I had to push it. A lot of people would just blow it off, and that’s where they would generate more money because of people that don’t have time to pursue this.”

Fort Worth city traffic engineer Randy Burkett says: “Sometimes when a person makes a payment, they hit the payment twice. We’re trying to work with our vendor to make it more user-friendly so that we can reduce these additional costs to everyone.”

Karen Edwards-Fisher, traffic enforcement coordinator, says she can mail a refund a week after she receives the refund form. But only the vendor can refund service charges.

Josh Weiss, spokesman for American Traffic Solutions, says the problem occurs when the payment Web site “may take a little bit to refresh and get confirmation.”

“Starting this summer, they have a new screen that pops up in Fort Worth,” he said. “It cautions against somebody accidentally doing that kind of double payment.”

The new screen alerts a user that a payment was recently made and asks whether the user wants to continue.

Weiss says the best way to get the $4 refund is to dispute the charge with the credit card company. During the investigation, ATS will see the double payment and agree to a quick adjustment.

Fort Worth reports that it collected $1.2 million in fines last year. After expenses, $220,000 went to the state. The city used a similar amount to pay for repairs of traffic devices and the installation of temporary sidewalks to schools.

In a nearby city, North Richland Hills, Texas, Kristin Engels struggled with the Web site for Redflex Traffic Systems, also based in Arizona. The site, her husband Robert said, “would error out without giving any confirmation information. This was done a total of five times before she was able to get a confirmation number.”

When the family called North Richland Hills for four refunds totaling $300, they were told to call Redflex.

Redflex gave three refunds, but the fourth took a month longer.

“Redflex kept insisting that I provide evidence that I overpaid,” Robert Engel says. “It seemed odd. They didn’t have a record, but I had a record. I had to keep nagging them to follow up. It was annoying to me. I would call them almost on a daily basis. It took me pestering them quite a bit to get it resolved.”

Redflex spokeswoman Shoba Vaitheeswaran says: “We apologize if that’s the case. We try our best. …There’s a high volume of calls that come in.”

Forth Worth is about ten times larger than its neighbor North Richland Hills, but the latter, which has red-light cameras at many intersections along one of its major north-south arteries, reports that $1 million was collected in the past 12 months. That’s the same amount collected by its neighbor, Fort Worth, the 17^th largest city in the nation.

In Texas, after the vendor is paid its cut, half of the remainder goes to the state and the rest can be used for city traffic improvements.

Do you have a red-light camera horror story?

Please use the comments to let me know.

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Watchdog tip:  The best way to avoid a red-light camera on a right-turn-on-red, which is the way most people get them, is to come to a complete stop before turning. And make sure the front of your vehicle is behind the white cross bar at the intersection.

If the camera photographs and videotapes your vehicle in the intersection, a police officer who reviews the data before approving citations will see that you stopped. You shouldn’t get a ticket.

And of course, when paying online, hit the enter key just once.

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Last laugh: While researching this, the funniest thing that I found is this blog post about how American Traffic Solutions CEO James Tuton was booed by his fellow citizens at an awards banquet when they figured out who he was.

Did you know that some U.S. savings bonds are paying ZERO interest?

A lot of folks are surprised to hear that. You don’t expect something like that. That’s not what the show-pride-in-America campaigns that fueled bonds sales since World War II promised.

But here we are. Watchdog Nation learned about this from Stansel Harvey, a retired hospital chief executive. Watchdog Nation also heard from a dozen other I Bond holders who didn’t know about this. I Bonds have a combination fixed rate and variable rate. Learn more here.

Part of being your own watchdog is, of course, watching your money. But savings bonds, well, they are almost created to be forgotten. They aren’t like stocks that go up and down every day in a mini-drama perfect for TV. (The drama of the closing bell!) No, bonds are boring, but then again, they’re supposed to be. That’s why people invest in them. Bonds get left in a bank safe deposit box and promptly forgotten.

Harvey says he feels burned by U.S. savings bonds he bought a decade ago. He takes it personally because when the government began issuing Series I bonds, he was a member of a committee that traveled the region promoting them. He recalls marketing the new bonds as a way to beat inflation.

Inflation, yeah. Deflation, no.

Who would think that if inflation ever dropped to less than zero, it would reduce the bond’s earning rate to less than its fixed rate?

Last year, when energy prices collapsed with the economy and the consumer price index dropped below zero, I bonds dropped to zero for the first time since they were issued in 1998.

Harvey is so teed off that he accuses the federal government of “a deceptive trade practice.” He adds, “In fact, if a bank marketed a bond the way they marketed these bonds, they would be called into question.”

The government, of course, vehemently disagrees. But since the government decides who is guilty of deceptive trade practices, what do you think will come of this?

Joyce Harris of the Bureau of Public Debt told me that the lack of inflation “sort of wipes out that fixed rate.” She explained that the lack of inflation pulled down both rates on the bonds to zero.

She denied any government deception.

“It’s quite transparent,” she said. “It’s just a matter of understanding what you’re buying in any investment… I can honestly tell you that we’re not trying to be deceptive. We’re trying to be transparent in all of our Treasury securities.”

I did a much more detailed study of this in the Oct. 16, 2009 Fort Worth Star-Telegram by Dave Lieber. Check it out here.

This is a fine example of what Watchdog Nation is all about. Knowing what you are doing. Keeping track. Remembering to check the status of your holdings.

If you don’t look out for yourself, nobody else will.