While last week’s headlines concerned City Manager David Cooke jetting off to who knows where with the billionaire Bass family, there is a more severe legal battle facing the city, and the issue is tied to the 2019 termination of Fort Worth’s former police chief. In his lawsuit against the city, Joel Fitzgerald maintains that he was wrongfully fired for uncovering city corruption.
Fitzgerald’s case is tied to another whistleblower, former head of public events Kirk Slaughter, and both defendants are represented by Kennedy Law. In a recent public statement, a Kennedy spokesperson claimed former “Assistant City Manager Susan Alanis steered a lucrative contract to specific companies, thereby avoiding the competitive bidding process.”
The contract in question allows the Trail Drive Management Corporation to manage the Will Roger Memorial Center parking lot that serves nearby Dickies Arena, Ed Bass’ $500 million project half-paid for by taxpayers (“ Worth Questioning?” Oct. 2014). State law mandates public contracts like this to be publicly bid. In his complaint, Slaughter alleges he was pressured by city power brokers to award the contract to Trail Drive, the nonprofit that heads Dickies Arena. The city investigated the allegations but did not release its findings to the public.
Based on Kennedy Law’s public statements, we requested documents from the city tied to the whistleblower complaint. The city attorney’s office has asked the State Attorney General’s office to be able to deny our open records requests for copies of emails by Cooke and Alanis containing certain keywords and a list of competitive bids for the parking contract. While we’ve come to expect these types of legal maneuverings to protect special interests, a letter from one contractor tied to the parking lot management agreement reveals that city attorneys are totally OK with ratting us out to private interests.
In an Oct. 7 letter to the AG, an attorney for ABM, a large facility cleaning service, states that assistant city attorney Jessika Williams alerted him that our magazine was investigating contracts between the city and any company associated with Trail Drive, like ABM.
Mark Thompson, the ABM attorney, asks the AG to allow his company to review any documents currently before the state. “We would appreciate it if those documents could be provided to ABM and that [we] be given the opportunity to review them and respond with appropriate disclosure objections, if any,” Thompson writes.
It is not without irony that, in a lawsuit that alleges conflicting loyalties on the part of city staffers, the city attorney’s office appears to be placing the interests of private contractors above those of the public. The last time we checked, city lawyers work for the city, not ABM or any other private interest. If Williams, possibly under a directive from Cooke, alerted a private company to our media inquiries, those communications would constitute a breach of the public’s trust.
The city attorney’s office routinely blocks requests by area residents and reporters seeking Fort Worth police disciplinary records or anything that would be considered evidence of police misconduct. Before the AG right now is a request by the city to withhold an hour-long audio recording that details verbal threats made by one police captain to one of our reporters in 2020.
In 2019, Fort Worth City Council voted to gut its own Ethics Review Commission, meaning there is no independent oversight group to whom locals can file complaints about unethical actions by city leaders and employees (“ Ethics Review? What Ethics Review?” Nov. 2019). The lack of any meaningful oversight makes it all the more important that we journalists be allowed to investigate city dealings without our work being actively undermined by city employees.
Fort Worth taxpayers do not care about protecting the interests of private companies that allegedly use personal connections to profiteer off city contracts. What we do care about is an end to Cooke’s and his legal team’s pandering to private companies at the expense of open and transparent city government dealings.
This story is part of City in Crisis, an ongoing series of reports on unethical behavior and worse by local public leaders, featuring original reporting.
This column reflects the opinions of the editorial board and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. Submissions will be gently edited for factuality, concision, and clarity.
