Two former employees of the Atlanta Department of Watershed Management have filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against the city, saying they were wrongly fired after reporting incidents of fraud and mismanagement.
The lawsuit was filed last week in Fulton County Superior Court and comes one year after Gwendolyn Winston and Loren Yarbrough were terminated. The workers were among about a dozen who lost their jobs following an investigation into wrongdoing inside the troubled department.
But they say they were fired after reporting complaints concerning safety and fraud.
“They think they were retaliated against for doing the right thing,” said attorney Edward Buckley, who with Pamela Palmer represents Winston and Yarbrough.
The goal of the lawsuit is to “shine a public light not only on the problems inside the department, but what happens in the City of Atlanta when employees have the temerity to file complains of fraud, waste and abuse,” Buckley said.
Anne Torres, a spokeswoman for Mayor Kasim Reed, said city attorneys have reviewed the complaint “in which plaintiffs assert meritless claims under the state whistle-blower statute. The city will defend this matter vigorously and expects to prevail.”
According to the suit, Winston believes she was eliminated because she reported to her superiors myriad concerns over “health violations, safety hazards, compliance issues and fraud” inside the department.
Winston accused Watershed of operating an illegal landfill, failing to prevent injuries, improperly storing chemicals and failing to maintain fences at a work site, among other issues, according to the lawsuit. The suit states that a supervisor instructed Winston not to report those concerns by email as it would then be subject to open records laws.
Winston was employed by Watershed for less than four months as a safety manager at the time of her firing. What’s more, the lawsuit states she received accolades from Watershed Commissioner Jo Ann Macrina just days before she was terminated.
Yarbrough, a 17-year employee who worked as an assistant Watershed manager at the time of his firing, believes he was ousted after reporting allegations of safety violations and missing equipment, including more than a dozen vehicles that could not be located, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit states that Yarbrough was told by a director, who has since also been fired, to stop conducting inventories of the equipment and filing reports.
Winston and Yarbrough seek compensation, legal fees and the right to be reinstated at Watershed, according to the suit.
Watershed has been under fire in recent years since city leaders discovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in missing or stolen equipment. The items include 28 industrial water meters weighing 700 pounds and worth $5,210 apiece, copper, pipes and more, according to police reports. City officials also have yet to find a missing backhoe worth $80,000.
Yarbrough, Winston and 11 others were fired in August 2014, though none has been charged with wrongdoing. At least six other employees have been arrested at Watershed this year and many face theft charges.
City Auditor Leslie Ward released a scathing report of the department’s inventory management practices last fall, an audit that found Watershed couldn’t account for more than 10,000 missing water meters. Ward’s office also found lax security at several Watershed facilities, including keys left in locks.
Macrina has said the bulk of the missing meters went unaccounted for between 2006 and 2009, long before Reed took office.
The department has worked to turn around its image by tightening its security measures, now requiring manager sign-off on equipment check-out; limiting who can order, receive and distribute equipment; and monitoring security-camera feeds from a central location. Watershed is also implementing a bar-code system to track its equipment, worth a total of about $20 million.
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