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Miami transit OT draining county budget

Jack Dolan, Larry Lebowitz and Scott Hiaasen of The Miami Herald analyzed local payroll data to find that “transit overtime pay — which is 1.5 times as high as regular hourly rates and cost taxpayers more than $129 million over the last five years — is a long-standing drain on county funds that has persisted despite decades of promises from county officials to bring it under control.” The paper found dozens of county bus and train operators who double their pay via overtime work.

Vulnerable live in Sacramento's flood zones

Phillip Reese of The Sacramento Bee used Census data and maps to report that “more than 150,000 of Sacramento County’s most vulnerable residents — the elderly, the poor and the disabled — live in areas prone to substantial flooding, and local officials acknowledge they don’t know whether they could quickly get them to safe ground.” Those individuals live in areas of the county that could see floods of at least two feet.

University leader serves on 10 boards

Eleanor Yang of the The San Diego Union-Tribune used calendar records obtained under the California Public Records Act to show that UC San Diego Chancellor, Marye Anne Fox, has served as a director for 10 corporations and nonprofit organizations, while running the university for the past year and a half. Fox spent more than 180 hours attending board meetings — many of them on the East Coast — in the past 12 months. "For all of her outside positions, Fox, 58, an organic chemist, receives compensation that rivals her university salary of $359,000. " In the past year, she received cash and stock worth at least $339,260 from her board memberships, according to corporate annual reports, proxy statements and tax returns from the nonprofit organizations.

Kinko's deal costly for Dallas schools

Kent Fischer, Pete Slover and Tawnell D. Hobbs of the The Dallas Morning News used district records to show that a plan by Dallas schools to outsource copying and printing to industry giant Kinko's, started to slash copying and printing expenses by 21 percent, has in fact quadrupled expenses. "Across the entire Dallas Independent School District, copying and printing costs more than doubled. In 2003, the district spent $5.87 million; by 2005 it was spending $12.82 million, according to records obtained by The Dallas Morning News. " The investigation also found the contract obliges schools to lease equipment from FedEx/Kinko's, so hundreds of printers the district already owned sit in warehouses, wrapped in plastic. Some school budgets are breaking under the cost of operating new equipment leased through the program.

Flawed criminal justice system

Fredric N. Tulsky, with staff writers Julie Patel and Mike Zapler, data analyst Griff Palmer and research librarian Leigh Poitinger, of the San Jose Mercury News , reviewed every criminal appeal originating out of Santa Clara County Superior Court for five years to show that the Santa Clara County's criminal justice system is systemically troubled by serious flaws that bias the system in prosecutors' favor and, in the worst cases, lead to outright miscarriages, in a five-day series that was three years in the making. The investigation found that a third of the 727 cases analyzed were marred by some form of questionable conduct on the part of prosecutors, defense attorneys or judges and that California's Sixth Appellate District routinely found prosecutorial and judicial error to be harmless to criminal defendants — in dozens of instances, resorting to factual distortions and flawed reasoning to reach their conclusions. "The examination identified nearly 100 instances of questionable behavior within the study period, and dozens in additional cases, involving more than two dozen prosecutors."
Also see: More about how the story was reported.

City pays millions for bottled water

Cecilia M. Vega of the San Francisco Chronicle used public records to show that San Francisco, owner of a pristine reservoir in the Sierra Nevada with a reputation for producing some of the country's best-tasting tap water, has spent more than $2 million of taxpayers' money in the past 4½ years on bottled water. According to the records, Public Health spent $139,926 on bottled water; the Municipal Railway spent $65,780; and San Francisco International Airport spent $65,670. "During the 2004-2005 fiscal year, which ended June 30, $499,275 went to bottled water and related expenses — a slight increase from the $495,974 that the city spent the previous year. " The Los Angeles mayor recently ordered city agencies to stop using public money to buy bottled water for employees following media reports that the city had spent $90,000 on bottled water while its water agency was spending $1 million on an ad campaign touting the virtues of tap water. In August, Julie Patel of the San Jose Mercury News reported that schools in that area are buying bottled water for teachers and administrators: "bottled water flows so plentifully in teachers lounges, school offices and meetings that there's enough to supply each teacher, administrator and student services employee with more than seven eight-ounce glasses of water each school day."

Brake plant workers suffer serious work-related health effects

Randy Ludlow of the The Columbus Dispatch reports that nearly five years after more than a quarter of TRW brake plant's 400 workers contracted respiratory illnesses, dozens remain disabled and out of work. Federal investigators concluded the outbreak was workplace-related but did not determine the exact cause. Ludlow reveals that TRW Automotive, a $10 billion conglomerate with headquarters in Livonia, Mich., couldn't have violated Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards because there aren't any. "Disregarding alarms sounded by its own advisory committee and the occupational arm of the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Department of Labor has declined for years to regulate worker exposure to metalworking fluids. " Ludlow also tells the story of an ill worker who took his own life (Editor's note: For other workplace stories, IRE and NICAR offer data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, detailing inspection results, worker accidents, hazardous substance injuries and workplace violations.)

Loopholes put school bus drivers with violations on roads

Brad Branan of the Tucson Citizen used court records to show that Arizona school bus drivers with criminal records or multiple moving violations are escaping state regulatory enforcement and putting children and other motorists at risk. The investigation found that drivers with criminal records or multiple traffic violations are among the most accident prone at Tucson-area school districts. "A Vail Unified School District driver — one of two school bus drivers to transport students while under the influence of drugs or alcohol last school year — was state certified despite numerous traffic violations and a license suspension." The investigation found a number of loopholes in the state system for licensing and certifying school bus drivers including that a school bus driver has to commit two DUIs or other major traffic offenses in a personal vehicle to automatically lose his bus license and that the Arizona Department of Public Safety doesn't check for criminal backgrounds after a driver is certified.

Hurricane shutter company failed to deliver

Mc Nelly Torres of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reviewed bankruptcy records, county licensing records and complaints filed with the local consumer affairs division to show that Palms West Shutter & Screen Inc., a company supplying hurricane shutters, had taken about $1.5 million in deposits from 672 Palm Beach residents before it sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October & mdash; the same month Hurricane Wilma hit the area. "Residents gave their money to the company — licensed to install screened closures in Broward since 1978 — in many cases more than 20 percent — expecting hurricane shutters and screen enclosures for their homes that have yet to be completed." Bankruptcy records show that the company also owes money to vendors, suppliers, the Internal Revenue Service and other businesses. The high demand for and shortage of shutters, screen enclosures and materials have caused problems and backlogs for many local shutter companies.

Judge violates federal law

Will Evans of the Center for Investigative Reporting, writing for Salon.com, reviewed court and financial records and found that a judge nominated by President Bush to one of the highest courts in the nation has apparently violated federal law repeatedly while serving on the federal bench. Judge James H. Payne, a Bush-appointed chief judge in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, New Mexico and Oklahoma, took action and issued more than 100 orders in at least 20 cases that involved companies in which he or his wife owned stock. "Federal law and the official Code of Conduct for U.S. judges explicitly prohibit judges from sitting on cases involving companies in which they own stock — no matter how small their holdings — in order to uphold the integrity of the judicial system." Some plaintiffs in Payne's cases, when told of his conflicts, assumed the judge had been swayed by his stock holdings.

Federal list of safe structures flawed

Richard Whitt of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the Holiday Inn & Suites, where a fire killed a South Carolina man on Sunday, improperly made the U.S. Fire Administration's "National Master List" of structures deemed safe for federal employees while on government business. To get on the list, a hotel or motel owner has to certify that the building has smoke detectors and, if it's over three stories tall, sprinklers. The Marietta hotel was deleted from the list this week after a fire and fire investigators revealed that the seven-story structure had no sprinkler system in the rooms. "The cause of what fire officials are calling the worst hotel fire in Marietta history, which also injured 20 others, remains under investigation." The investigation found that, according to FEMA records, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid to house Hurricane Katrina evacuees there for one night in the past few months.

City's weekly dam reports fabricated

Greg Bruno and Jessica Gardner of The Times Herald-Record reviewed documents to show that inspection reports designed to prevent catastrophic failings at two New York City-owned dams in the Catskills were repeatedly fabricated, even as water officials publicly proclaimed the structures' safety. "Since September 2002, about 70 percent of the city's weekly inspections for the Neversink Dam in Sullivan County and the Merriman Dam on the Rondout Reservoir in Ulster County have been photocopies of previous reports. Not only are the inspector's observations unchanged from week to week — citing evidence like cracks, seepage and other structural woes — but the handwriting on each questionable form is identical. The photocopies suggest that observations made during weekly dam visits were put on forms before the inspections were conducted — if they were conducted at all." (Editor's note: The National Inventory of Dams, a database including dam location, condition, maintenance, and inspection reports, is available to journalists from IRE and NICAR. Other resources for covering dams are available on our Web site.)

NYC police avoid reporting grand larceny

Paul Moses of The Village Voice reports that New York City's falling crime rate may not entirely credible. "The number of lost-property reports filed with police jumped by 44 percent from 1997 to 2004, according to a document the NYPD released to The Village Voice in response to a freedom-of-information request. Nearly half of that increase occurred in the last two years of that period. And 2005 was on pace, as of Nov. 1, to beat out the previous year. " The investigation found police are taking complaints that once would have been treated as grand larceny or another property crime and reporting them as "lost property." Grand larceny is one of the closely watched seven major "index" crimes monitored in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and it makes up nearly 60 percent of the reported index offenses, so police commanders know that if they are going to get their numbers down, they have to report fewer thefts. (Editor's note: For other reporters interested in evaluating crime rates, IRE offers Understanding Crime Statistics: A Reporter's Guide.)

Aide might have violated ethics rules

Thomas Peele of the Contra Costa Times used congressional financial disclosure statements, state and federal campaign finance reports, IRS records, congressional committee and staff disbursement records and other documents to show that Rep. Richard Pombo's top aide, Steven Ding, might have violated congressional ethics rules by not correctly reporting all of his outside political work and making too much money from California campaigns and consultants. "Steven Ding regularly worked for candidates and organizations with close ties to Pombo, a Tracy Republican who is chairman of the House Resources Committee." Despite being chief of staff to the Washington-based Resources Committee, and being paid more than $150,000 a year from the committee's budget, Ding worked primarily from California and commuted to Capitol Hill at taxpayers' expense when the committee was in session.

Foreclosures growing burden on low-income communities

Lisa Hammersly Munn, Binyamin Appelbaum and Ted Mellnik of The Charlotte Observer used county records in a three-part series that looks into the rapidly rising numbers of home foreclosres, and the effects on neighborhoods where failed home loans have concentrated since the advent of easy credit by government and lenders. "Home loan failures have more than quadrupled in Mecklenburg County, NC since 1999. More foreclosures are filed here, per person, than any other county in the state."The neighborhoods are often new subdivisions priced for first-time buyers. But instead of building wealth through ownership, the buyers often lost their homes and badly damage their credit. Neighbors who pay their mortgages on time get hurt, too, because concentrated foreclosures can depress home values. Also see how this story was investigated.

Nation's mine rescue system falling short

Ken Ward Jr. reports in the Charleston, W.Va., Sunday Gazette-Mail "the nation's miners face a mounting risk because of a rescue system that is growing ever short on personnel and is in major need of reforms." From 2000 to 2002, the number of safety teams approved by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration dropped by 10 percent. A team of reporters, including Tara Tuckwiller, Scott Finn, Eric Eyre and Dave Gustafson, have contributed to the series of stories. Other stories include a history of the safety violations at the Sago Mine, an analysis of data that indicates lightning strikes may have played a role in the accident, and a story questioning whether the mine had adequate state environmental permits.

College boosters wield powerful influence

Mike Fish of ESPN.com examines the role of the college booster, finding "It's a love-hate relationship that binds a college and its boosters. They are often the first ones pointed to when recruiting violations surface. And the first ones called upon when facilities need an upgrade. With their money comes their two cents. Some call it influence. Others say it's meddling." The series looks at Phil Knight's relationship with University of Oregon; Oklahoma State University benefactor T. Boone Pickens; Joe Malugen's support of Troy University's football team; Tulane's athletes as ambassadors for the storm-ravaged university; and mandatory donations tied to college ticket sales.

UFW strays far from Chavez's legacy

Miriam Pawel of the Los Angeles Times examines the current state of United Farm Workers to find that Cesar "Chavez's heirs run a web of tax-exempt organizations that exploit his legacy and invoke the harsh lives of farmworkers to raise millions of dollars in public and private money." Pawel's reporting finds there is little to link the UFW with the impoverished farmworkers for whom Chavez crusaded. "The UFW is the linchpin of the Farm Worker Movement, a network of a dozen tax-exempt organizations that do business with one another, enrich friends and family, and focus on projects far from the fields: They build affordable housing in San Francisco and Albuquerque, own a top-ranked radio station in Phoenix, run a political campaign in support of an Indian casino and lobby for gay marriage."

Vehicle planned for Marines said to be 'dangerous'

Joseph Neff of The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer reports that a vehicle the Marines plan to use for transport of troops and mortars may be inadequate. The vehicles, called Growlers, look "a lot like a Vietnam-era jeep. But this model, a modified dune buggy, costs $127,000 each and doesn't have armor. Some experts worry that it is vulnerable to attack, too slow and too prone to rolling over, making it dangerous in combat." The Growlers would be carried on the V-22 Osprey, a tilt-rotor aircraft that can fly as both helicopter and airplane and has had its own share of problems.

Ga. hotel bill for Katrina evacuees tops $19 million

Yolanda Rodriguez of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with assistance from Craig Schneider, Leon Stafford and database editor David A. Milliron, used a FOIA request to show that “Georgia hotels have billed taxpayers more than $19 million to house evacuees who fled after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast last year.” The agency has paid for rooms in 650 Georgia hotels, ranging from Atlanta’s Ritz-Carlton to lower-priced hotels. A map shows the location of the hotels.

Congressmen tried to stop investigation

Richard A. Serrano and Stephen Braun of the Los Angeles Times used documents to report that “Reps. John T. Doolittle and Richard W. Pombo joined forces with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas to oppose an investigation by federal banking regulators into the affairs of Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz.” The lawmakers inserted regulatory agency investigation files into the Congressional Record, giving Hurwitz’s attorneys access to them. “Soon afterward, in 2002, the FDIC dropped its case against Hurwitz, who had owned a controlling interest in the United Savings Assn. of Texas. United Savings’ failure was one of the worst of the S&L debacles in the 1980s.”

Analysis of high court shows just 29 abortion rulings

Keith Epstein and Doug Stanley of the Tampa Tribune analyzed Supreme Court voting data archived by Michigan State University political science Professor Harold J. Spaeth, finding that “since 1953, the Supreme Court has formally ruled on abortion, a privacy issue, only 29 times. Abortion-related cases account for only 0.5 percent of all rulings handed down by the court since then.” The paper’s analysis suggests that senators interested in probing nominee Samuel Alito’s views would do better to ask about topics such as “search and seizure, on which the court ruled 244 times, corporate liability (187 times), federal taxation (162 times) and antitrust cases (161 times).”

Probe into meth epidemic wins top Meyer award

Major investigative reports on the nation's methamphetamine epidemic, systemic failures in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the loss of Florida's wetlands are winners of the first Philip Meyer Awards.
* First Place: The Oregonian for "Unnecessary Epidemic"
* Second Place: The Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau for "Discharged and Dishonored"
* Third Place: The St. Petersburg Times, for "Vanishing Wetlands"
Read more about the winners.

Alito takes hard line on crime, immigration

Amy Goldstein and Sarah Cohen of The Washington Post, with a team of reporters and researchers, categorized Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito’s rulings and compared them to other federal appeals court judges, finding that “Alito has taken a harder line on criminal and immigration cases than most federal appellate judges nationwide, including those who, like him, were selected by Republican presidents.” The analysis used data from the Appeals Court Database Project; a methodology is available. The full list of Alito’s cases used in the analysis is published on the Post’s Web site.

Ga. voter registration system unreliable

Alan Judd, with data help from David A. Milliron, of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution compared a statewide voter registration database with a list of more than 100 commercial mailbox outlets in metro Atlanta, as well as voter registrations in the downtown business district and at government facilities, to identify flaws in the state's voter registration system. "Georgia relies on an honor system that assumes voters live at the addresses they submit when they register. These addresses determine voters' precinct assignments and, consequently, the elections in which they may cast ballots." The paper's analysis found many people whose listed addresses correspond to rented mailboxes, a high school's tennis court , homeless shelters and even the newspaper's headquarters. Such inaccuracies would be more than enough to make a differerence in November's city council election where five votes separated the two candidates.

Some Colo. mines incur more violations than Sago

Katy Human and Jeff Roberts of The Denver Post examined mine safety records for Colorado and found that its "eight underground coal mines paid fines totaling almost $500,000 for hundreds of safety violations in the past two years." One mine was cited 350 times last year for a total of nearly $50,000. In comparision, the Sago Mine in West Virginia, a more productive mine, was cited 208 times and fined about $24,000 during the same time. The report does say that Colorado's mines are "safer than the national average for several years when measured in terms of injuries, according to federal figures."

Mine agency more lenient since 2001

Seth Borenstein, Linda J. Johnson and Lee Mueller of Knight Ridder Newspapers used federal data to find that “since the Bush administration took office in 2001, it has been more lenient toward mining companies facing serious safety violations, issuing fewer and smaller major fines and collecting less than half of the money that violators owed.” The Mine Safety and Health Administration has a smaller budget and has won fewer convictions or guilty pleas.

Ill. mine fined more than $500,000 last year

Jeffrey Tomich, with contributions from Jaimi Dowdell, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch used federal data to show that “Illinois’ largest coal mine was fined almost as much for safety violations last year as the rest of the state’s mines combined.” The Galatia mine, owned by the American Coal Co., was fined more than $500,000 by the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Mercury in seafood at unsafe levels

Sam Roe and Michael Hawthorne of the Chicago Tribune published a three-part series on the presence of mercury in fish sold in supermarkets. “In one of the nation’s most comprehensive studies of mercury in commercial fish, testing by the newspaper showed that a variety of popular seafood was so tainted that federal regulators could confiscate the fish for violating food safety rules. The testing also showed that mercury is more pervasive in fish than what the government has told the public, making it difficult for consumers to avoid the problem, no matter where they shop.” In addition to conducting its own tests, the paper relied on documents and interviews for the series.

Proposal would push sex offenders out of half of Calif. urban areas

Jim Miller of The (Riverside, Calif.) Press-Enterprise used geographic information system (GIS) software to study the impact of a proposal by Gov. Schwarzenegger and others to prohibit registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school in California. The analysis shows that "At least half of California's urban areas would become off-limits to registered sex offenders" and they "could be confined to scattered urban islands or to lightly populated rural areas."

System's weaknesses lead to problems in sheriff's office

Eric Nalder, Lewis Kamb, Phuong Cat Le and Paul Shukovsky of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer continue their investigation into abuse, misconduct and disciplinary lapses in the King County Sheriff's Department. The most recent stories examine the reasons for these failures in oversight — and reveal more cases of abuse, favoritism and retaliation against whistleblowers. The investigation, based on thousands of pages of documents received through public disclosure requests and interviews with dozens of present and former deputies and others, shows "An internal discipline system that often protects wrongdoing and punishes those who report it; A pervasive insider network that selectively rewards and protects its own, creating what critics call a culture of cronyism; And a union that has literally designed the department for its own control, successfully lobbying for an elected sheriff, and repeatedly protecting the jobs of problem officers."

Corps ignored reports about levee problems

Bob Marshall of The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reports the Army Corps of Engineers knew about "engineering mistakes that led to the canal levee failures that flooded most of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina" but dismissed them. "Documents, obtained by The Times-Picayune and provided to forensic engineers studying the levee breaches, show project engineers made a critical mistake in assessing soil strengths on the 17th Avenue Canal project, said Robert Bea, a University of California-Berkeley professor who is a member of the National Science Foundation team."

Water department pays for bottled water

Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times reports the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which supplies and promotes tap water to the city, spent $31,160 for bottled water. Citywide, city officials spent $88,900 on bottled water, "despite a 1995 directive by former Mayor Richard Riordan that said: The city's tap water satisfies most needs, and bottled water should not be provided ordinarily at city expense.'" The city controller, who said she was stunned, "compiled the bills in response to a Public Records Act request from the Times." The department spends about $500,000 a year on for a report on the quality of its water — "The latest report brags that DWP water 'meets or surpasses all water quality standards.'"

OC residents donate nearly $2 billion to charity

John Gittelsohn and Michele Himmelberg of The Orange County Register used IRS data to show that “Orange County taxpayers donated $1.8 billion to charity in 2002, the most recent tax year available. That’s 2.61 percent of their adjusted gross income, which sounds meager to some, but it’s above the state and national average. In fact, Orange County tied Los Angeles for third in its donation rate among California’s 58 counties, behind only Santa Barbara and Marin.”

Jails fail to meet standards

Mark Scolforo of The Associated Press has a four-part series on Pennsylvania’s county prisons, finding that “many local jails are struggling to meet even minimum standards for safety, housing, food quality and medical care.” The AP obtained state inspection reports under Pennsylvania’s public records law; the jails “are not required to make public their annual state inspections or the reports they file on unusual occurrences, from inmate beatings to suicides and murders.”