In the past week the Vanguard received a letter from a thankful individual in South San Francisco expressing appreciation for an article written in March of 2008 on former Waterford School District Superintendent Howard Cohen.
That article apparently helped tie together enough threads between Mr. Cohen’s conduct in Waterford and his conduct in South San Francisco to force his resignation on December 17, with allegations, amid among other things, that he tried to hire an old associate from Total School Solutions to a new position during a time when the school district was forced to lay off and cut salaries of teachers.
In the process of doing so, Mr. Ahad, who was the Chief Business Officer at the time, created a conflict of interest for dozens of DJUSD employees as well as making a series of mistakes stemming from a missed deadline to receive state matching funds for renovations at Montgomery Elementary School.
At the same time that we were working on the four-part series, the Vanguard attracted the attention of public officials in Waterford, a small town of approximately 8,500 just east of Modesto.
On Sunday, March 2, 2008, the Modesto Bee ran an investigative report about fiscal mismanagement performed by their Superintendent Howard Cohen and his relationship with Total School Solutions.
Howard Cohen was a former principal at Davis High School, and then it would appear he developed close ties to Tahir Ahad after he left the district.
According to the report from the Modesto Bee, there was a report “critical of relaxed financial practices” in the Waterford School District, which focused on “three main areas of unauthorized or unexpected payments.”
Specifically, stipends totaling $25,000 paid to two principals over two years, administrative pay raises of 5.2 percent, including a raise for Superintendent Howard Cohen, that were paid five months before the board approved them, and most notably a “contract with a Bay Area consulting firm, Total School Solutions, was ratified as a $33,000 agreement to polish the district’s master plan but turned out to be an open-ended contract that cost the district $124,000 before it was canceled with the work unfinished.”
The Vanguard, in fact, learned that these allegations were merely the tip of the iceberg, and that Mr. Cohen had put key contacts into positions of power, arranged money for contractors favorable with his business ties, and forced people out who were disloyal.
For more on the problems at Waterford you can listen to the podcast from the Vanguard’s July 9, 2008 radio show talking to the then-Mayor of Waterford and a school board member.
A year later he was gone. In July of 2009, Howard Cohen would move on to South San Francisco as their Superintendent making over $170,000, and soon he would start up his old practices.
Mr. Cohen got in particularly hot water this fall when he attempted to install Interim Assistant Superintendent Vince Kilmartin as interim bond program liaison to administer the recently-passed $162 million school facilities bond.
Board members complained that the district had yet to sell bonds, had no money at hand, and therefore there was no need for the position.
The San Jose Mercury News reported that board members also said that Mr. Kilmartin isn’t qualified for the job and the proposition raises uncomfortable questions of cronyism.
The Mercury News continued, specifically citing the connection between Total School Solutions and Mr. Cohen.
They write, “Kilmartin and Superintendent Howard S. Cohen worked together at the West Contra Costa Unified School District, where Kilmartin oversaw a large school construction bond. Later, when Cohen had moved on to become superintendent of the Waterford Unified School District, the district hired Kilmartin’s educational consulting firm, Total School Solutions, to update the district’s master plan. Concerns arose when the district ended up paying the company tens of thousands of dollars more than the originally agreed upon amount.”
The Mercury News continued by reporting that board members were caught by surprise when an attorney that had consulted with the board stood up to support the hiring of an individual.
“Board members were taken by surprise when attorney Mark Williams from Fagan, Friedman & Fulfrost, who had previously consulted with the board facilities subcommittee, stood up to speak on the resolution. Cohen had asked him to present staffing options to the board and was paying him his billable rate for the appearance.”
“He [previously] came to the subcommittee to present different options with a tacit push for Vincent,” Board Member Maurice Goodman said.
“Attorneys are people we hire to do different things,” Board Member Philip Weise said. “One of the things we don’t hire them to do is to try to preserve people’s jobs.”
On December 6, 2010, it was reported that Howard Cohen took an “unexpected leave of absence last week following a recent board meeting in which trustees raised concerns about potential impropriety involving his recommendation to hire a bond liaison.”
Less than two weeks later, Howard Cohen resigned.
Reports the San Mateo County Times, “In a letter to the board, Cohen, who has been on a paid leave of absence for more than two weeks, tendered his resignation, effective June 30, 2011.”
Furthermore, “Cohen remains the district superintendent only in title, as he will continue to be on leave until the resignation date, trustees said.”
Mr. Cohen barely lasted a year.
In addition to the attempt to hire his associate Mr. Kilmartin, he also did a couple of other practices that he had learned in Waterford.
For instance, he brought in a person to work as a technology specialist before the board officially approved the hire. Mr. Cohen also raised the ire of teachers earlier in the year when he pushed for administrative salary increases.
“That caused a huge controversy because it happened at a time when we were facing drastic cuts and layoffs,” said Jan Speller, president of the South San Francisco Classroom Teachers Association.
Unfortunately, Tahir Ahad, the former DJUSD Chief Business Officer who founded TSS, has built his company into a successful consulting practice, despite the misuse of public funds that the Vanguard exposed back in the winter of 2008. The good news is that at least one person, Howard Cohen who has ties back to the 2008 Davis debacle, has been put out of business.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
It seems to me there is a lot of shady business, if not outright corruption or fraud, in the consultancy game.
Rackets like TSS develop relationships with people who have their hands on the purse strings of a government (or school) agency; and then they sell their bogus “solutions” to the agencies; and then the people who bought the solution with taxpayer money go to work for the seller of the solution.
A different version of this happens with the “solutions” that cities like Davis buy all the time. State law–written largely by lawyers and consultants who make money providing “solutions”–require an EIR or some other boilerplate report for this or that. The staffs for cities then hire one of these consultancies for some $50,000 to $150,000 to produce for them a boilerplate report which includes about 40 hours of original work and a lot of pages which look the same in every report they produce. So on a dollars per hour basis, the consultancies can make $2,500 an hour or so each time they get to produce their boilerplate EIRs or other reports. Years later, the people who retire from cities or counties become consultants, and the racket goes on.
I’m not saying all consultants are corrupt, nor are all city staffers who order these reports and then later become consultants. What is corrupt is the price these folks are paid for the little amount of actual work they do. There’s not a chance in hell that anyone spending his own money would pay what cities or districts pay to outside consultants. The taxpayers are getting royally ripped off.
A different example of the same phenomenon is when the Yolo County Board of Supervisors hired a “water law firm” to help the county take over Conaway Ranch in an eminent domain action. That law firm charged the taxpayers $2.4 million for its work on this one case over a period of about 1 year. I don’t have my notes handy on this case, but my recollection is that our Board of Supervisors was paying that law firm around $2,000 an hour; and I was highly suspicious of the huge number of hours that firm billed for. Again, no one on our Board would have made that deal with those water lawyers if it was his money being spent. But they just don’t give a damn when they are blowing the taxpayers’ money.
Excellent work, David. Must be nice to see the “ripple effect” of your efforts. Great way to finish out the [u]Vanguard[/u]’s year.
One thing I don’t get is the apparent practice of a school board to keep paying a top district official when he “remains the district superintendent only in title.” Didn’t Davis pay for two people to do the same job sometime back, after another pending retirement announcement?
It seems like most operations that are investigating improprieties consider themselves in a position of advantage in dealing with the “person of interest.” Are school districts the only ones that propose:[quote] “Okay, we suspect you’re doing something illegal or, at least, inappropriate. However, we’ll stop investigating, and you can “resign” effective at the end of the school year without working until then–so that potential employers and the public never will know what you’ve done here.
But, we’ll only do this deal if you’ll allow us to give you $150,000 over the next seven or eight months. Take it or leave it!”[/quote] Yep, it must be nice!
Great Job! Revealing what’s going on behind the scenes and putting all the pieces of the puzzle together is so important and a big public service. Thanks.
Congrats to you on this one DMG!