April 1, 2004
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Former Arcata-Eureka Airport
employee Frank Fritz stands outside the gate of the airport.
Photo by Bob Doran.
by KEITH
EASTHOUSE
FRANK
FRITZ STARTED WORKING FOR HUMBOLDT COUNTY IN FEBRUARY 1973, when
he was just 19. His first job was as a night watchman at what
was then and still is the only facility in the county capable
of handling large commercial airliners: The Arcata-Eureka Airport
in McKinleyville.
Employees came and went but
Fritz stayed and his responsibilities grew. Possessed of a mechanical
turn of mind, the energetic young man was soon doing maintenance
work of various sorts; after a few years he was showing other
people what to do. "As new people were hired I started training
them because I'd been there the longest," Fritz explained
recently.
In 1985, when he was 31, Fritz
was named airport operations supervisor, which meant it was his
responsibility to keep the airport safely running. Make that
airports, actually, for Fritz was also responsible for the five
municipal airfields in Humboldt County: Murray Field, Rohnerville,
Garberville, Kneeland and Dinsmore.
The job was not for the squeamish
or for those who dislike multi-tasking. Fire suppression equipment
had to be constantly maintained, as did fueling systems. Work
crews had to be trained repeatedly in all aspects of airport
operations, from security to passenger rescue. All pavement areas
-- runways, taxiways, ramps -- had to be kept free of obstructions,
and runway edge lights and taxiway lights had to be in working
order. Deer that had wandered onto airport property had to be
repeatedly hunted and shot lest they have a meeting with an arriving
airplane. Giving the job a special sense of urgency, of course,
was the reality that lives hung in the balance every time a plane
took off or landed. But also driving things was the Federal Aviation
Administration, which could shut down Humboldt County's only
commercial airport if it felt anything was amiss.
This was also not a job for
clock-punchers or for people who don't like to drive. County
airports operate from 5 a.m. to midnight, and, since things can
go wrong at any time, whoever's in charge of airport safety is
pretty much on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And since
Humboldt's airports are far-flung, travel is part of the bargain.
None of that bothered Fritz much. In fact, it suited him. An
independent type with a brusque style, he's the antithesis of
a dutiful bureaucrat waiting for his orders. He's a man of action,
a guy who likes variety, a guy focused less on process and more
on results.
"I came and went all hours
of the day and night. I got there [at the airport in McKinleyville]
at 3 o'clock in the morning sometimes, or at night at the other
airports, because of problems with deer or because there were
cattle on a runway. A multitude of things came up, and I handled
all of those.
"My supervisor would call
me and say, `We're having trouble with a gate getting left open
up at Kneeland.' So I'd take off and go up there." Another
time, Fritz recalled, vandals dumped a case of clay pigeons on
one of the runways at the McKinleyville airport. His "morning
man" called him and Fritz went out there in the dawn's early
light to clean things up.
"If I'd already worked
an eight-hour day, I'd mark down a couple of hours of overtime
or whatever. I checked with my bosses every day and they knew
what I was doing. They knew I was always putting in more than
40 hours. They knew I was putting in the time. That's how I got
the things done that I needed to get done."
During his 18 years as airport
operations supervisor, not once was the airport in McKinleyville
shut down after an inspection, according to Fritz. Nor were there
any fatalities from crashes, he said. Not surprisingly, Fritz
enjoyed a string of good to glowing performance evaluations in
this period.
Under surveillance
It
was Ray Beninga, for years the county's airport manager, who
chose Fritz for the airport operations supervisor position. "He
asked me if I had any problems working on weekends or at night
and I said no," Fritz recalled. "So he went to [then
County Public Works Director Guy Kulstead] and had it OK'd. He
[Beninga] said it was for a nominal 40-hour week -- so if all
the work was done I didn't have to work 40 hours. But I never
did that. It was always more than 40 hours."
The issue of Fritz's work schedule
is critical to understanding what has happened to him over the
past year. It was a key issue in the termination letter sent
to him on March 17, 2003, by the current public works director,
Allen Campbell, who justified his firing of Fritz by saying he
had repeatedly falsified his time cards to inflate his work hours.
It was also the single most important factor in a pair of hearings
last fall in Eureka before an administrative law judge with the
California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, a judge who
rebuffed the county's attempt to deprive Fritz of unemployment
benefits, saying that there was no evidence for the county's
claim that Fritz had, in effect, stolen money from the county
and was therefore ineligible for unemployment. Finally, it forms
the heart of a lawsuit filed on Fritz's behalf on March 16 in
Humboldt County Superior Court charging Campbell with wrongful
termination and defamation of character, a lawsuit that could
cost taxpayers $75,000 to $100,000 and possibly more.
But perhaps most bizarrely,
his work schedule was the driving force behind the decision of
Campbell and County General Services Director Kim Kerr to hire
a Redding detective firm, North Valley Investigations, to secretly
tail and videotape Fritz as he went about his daily rounds. For
13 days in late 2002 and early 2003, Fritz was under surveillance,
always on weekdays and for the most part during daylight hours.
Detectives would arrive at his house first thing in the morning,
and follow him for several hours, taping him whenever the opportunity
presented itself. The 52-page report that resulted from the surveillance
makes for spectacularly boring reading. The following is a representative
example of the report's contents:
"On Monday, Nov. 4, 2002,
Investigator Lee Wolfe arrived at the Fritz residence [in McKinleyville]
at 6:40 a.m. and noted two vehicles were at the location. There
was no activity until 10:30 a.m., when the [subject] drove the
county vehicle from his residence to the airport. About two hours
later, he left the airport, drove to the Sequoia Auto Supply
store and went inside for nearly half an hour. He was lost in
traffic and found back at the airport. He left the airport at
3:45 p.m. and drove home via Dow's Prairie Road. Surveillance
was discontinued at 4:05 p.m."
The
spy operation stemmed from an anonymous letter Campbell received
in late 2002 which claimed that Fritz was visiting the Moose
Lodge in McKinleyville, about three miles away from his airport
office, during daytime hours when he should have been at work.
According to the written decision by the administrative law judge,
Alison Colgan, Campbell personally went down to the lodge one
afternoon, observed Fritz leaving the lodge and not long afterward
requested that Kerr authorize surveillance, which she did. The
spying began soon afterward.
The Redding firm makes clear
in its report that one thing they were asked to look for was
whether Fritz was drinking on the job. "We were specifically
to note if he drank alcoholic beverages during work hours,"
the report said. That directive explains why many of the daily
reports of the surveillance operation describe attempts to determine
if Fritz was boozing it up on county time. On several occasions
detectives actually followed Fritz into Luzmilla's restaurant
in the Valley West area of Arcata, a favorite lunch spot of Fritz's.
On Nov. 5, 2002, for example, a private eye went into the restaurant
but, for unclear reasons, couldn't find Fritz. A couple of weeks
later, in the same restaurant, investigator Lee Wolfe walked
right by Fritz's table. "Investigator Wolfe located [Fritz]
in the restaurant and noted he was drinking water with his meal,"
reads the daily report from that particular day, Nov. 26, 2002.
Fritz himself claims he never drank on county time and the tailing
operation backs him up. Not once did they find evidence that
Fritz was consuming alcohol while on the job.
Campbell did not return a call
that was placed at his office this week. Kerr, however, did.
When asked, she said the county spent $11,000 on the surveillance.
But she declined to comment on anything else pertaining to Fritz's
case. "I haven't seen the complaint," she said. "And
it's not appropriate to litigate the trial in the press."
While Fritz's lawyer, Tom Petersen,
who has offices in Fortuna and Willow Creek, alleges invasion
of privacy in the complaint, it is not one of the core charges
that he levels against the county. There is no evidence the investigators
crossed a line and did anything illegal, such as peering through
a window at Fritz's house, located on the McKinleyville airport
property. "They were very careful," Petersen said.
Ignorance of work
schedule
Evidently
from Campbell and Kerr's point of view the surveillance was well
worth it, as they used the report's findings to argue that they
proved Fritz was charging the county for time he didn't actually
work. "The falsification of time cards amounts to a theft
of county funds," Campbell wrote in his final termination
letter to Fritz of April 17, 2003, exactly a month after the
initial notice.
But in making that statement,
Campbell revealed his ignorance -- willful or otherwise -- of
Fritz's irregular work schedule. For, again, the surveillance
only tracked Fritz during regular working hours. The detectives
never observed what Fritz did at night or on weekends for the
simple reason that, unlike Fritz, they weren't on duty then.
As required by law, Campbell
met with Fritz after issuing the initial termination notice.
The meeting took place in Campbell's office on April 11, by which
time Fritz had retained Petersen as his lawyer. According to
Petersen's 19-page complaint, it was at this meeting that Campbell
was told that Fritz worked an irregular work schedule. Campbell
"was unaware of plaintiff's irregular work schedule,"
according to the complaint, but stated he would investigate the
matter before making a final decision on termination.
Six days later, Fritz received
his final termination letter, which according to Petersen was
essentially unchanged from the initial notice. Not only that,
but according to the complaint Campbell made no effort between
April 11 and April 17 to determine whether Fritz did indeed have
a flexible work schedule -- even though doing so would simply
have required a telephone call to Dan Horton, Fritz's immediate
supervisor at the time of his termination, or to Beninga, the
man who made Fritz airport operations supervisor in the first
place. "Campbell's failure to contact Airport Manager Dan
Horton to determine the truth or falsity of plaintiff's work
schedule constitutes a gross denial of plaintiff's due process
rights under both the state and federal constitutions,"
the complaint says.
At the hearings on the county's
challenge to Fritz's unemployment benefits, which took place
on Aug. 5 and Sept. 11 of last year, Campbell said under oath,
"It was my contention that [Fritz's] work hours were basically
8 to 5." Both Horton and Beninga testified that Fritz worked
a flexible work schedule. Horton, who resigned from the airport
manager position the same month Fritz was terminated to take
care of an ailing family member, testified that Fritz "was
on a floating shift. He worked whenever we needed him. When I
took over [in 2000] we just had two deer strikes. His job, whenever
we had some sightings of deer, was to go out [at night] with
a government hunter and remove the deer from the airport. So
[his schedule] was very flexible. It depended on what we needed."
When asked if Fritz worked a
40-hour week, Horton said, "I never found at any time that
he worked less than that." When asked if he sometimes worked
more than that, Horton said, "Oh, yes," and laughed.
"There were times he would drive to Sacramento and return
the same day, and he'd do that without putting in for overtime."
When Colgan, the presiding judge,
issued her decision, it was pretty much a slam-dunk for Fritz.
"It is found that the employer's evidence regarding [Fritz's]
work hours is too incomplete to be compelling in that the investigators
did not observe [Fritz] after normal work hours on most days.
[Fritz's] credible testimony taken together with that of his
two previous supervisors regarding the flexibility of his work
hours leads to a conclusion that [Fritz] did work at least 40
hours a week and usually more. The employer provided no credible
evidence to refute any of the hours the claimant reported he
worked."
Colgan dismissed other reasons
the county offered for terminating Fritz, such as that he had
driven an unauthorized visitor onto a runway at the McKinleyville
airport and that he had pointed a pellet gun at a co-worker as
the co-worker came around the corner of a building.
Fritz testified that he had
never pointed the gun at the co-worker, and that the co-worker
"was at least 45 degrees away" from the direction in
which Fritz was aiming. Colgan, noting that the co-worker gave
conflicting accounts about the incident, said the alleged "discourteous
treatment is too unreliable to be given credence." As for
the unauthorized tour, Colgan said Fritz had given the tour at
the direction of a supervisor and that the county had failed
to "offer any evidence as to what regulation may have been
violated."
The county appealed Colgan's
ruling, but an appeals board upheld her decision in January.
In
light of that, and in light of the surveillance that was used
to justify Fritz's termination, Petersen called on the county
Board of Supervisors to conduct an investigation independent
of the county risk manager's office, which Kerr, the official
who authorized the spying, heads.
"If [Kerr] concludes that
Frank did not falsify his time cards she would be admitting that
she erred in authorizing the spying and the thousands paid to
the detectives was wasted. The supervisors need to ask Mr. Campbell
and Ms. Kerr why Frank was spied on and fired for not following
his work schedule when they didn't know what his work schedule
was."
'I am not a thief'
While the victory handed Fritz
by Judge Colgan was welcome, it merely meant he had a right to
his unemployment benefits. Those expired in December. At the
moment, he's living rent-free with a friend in McKinleyville
and odd-jobbing it, mostly as a construction laborer.
"The only way I get jobs
now, and they're little jobs, is from people who know me, who
know I wouldn't steal from them," Fritz said recently as
he sat in Petersen's Willow Creek office.
Fritz and Petersen ticked off
the financial damage done to Fritz by the county. Approximately
$50,000 for a year's lost income. (That includes Fritz's $44,000
salary, plus overtime.) Approximately $10,000 to $15,000 worth
of lost benefits. Over $10,000 in attorney's fees. "So $75,000
to $100,000," Petersen said. He noted that Fritz, who is
50, was five years away from retirement. If he is not reinstated,
he will receive $600 to $1,000 less per month in retirement benefits
for the rest of his life, Petersen said.
In addition to reinstatement,
Fritz wants a public apology from Campbell.
"This has pretty much ruined
my life," Fritz said. "I did everything I thought I
was doing right, and I was told it was right, and then I'm terminated
and called a thief. I'm told I stole time from the county. Which
I did none of that.
"I am not a thief."
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