Mellow Mushroom Council
Stealing a page from the county manager’s playbook, the city manager and police chief have apparently taken to treating the city council and the public like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them crap.
In this case, it takes the form of City Manager Curt Walton coming before council last month and explicitly telling them that a report on airport security and the death of Delvonte Tisdale had been classified by the federal government and that the director of the Transportation Security Administration had “declined to allow release of the report.”
“The report has been classified and very little, if anything, can be shared,” Walton told council at the time. Police Chief Rodney Monroe followed in lockstep, providing only a vague and ultimately vacuous overview of the report to council and the public.
We now know that Walton and Monroe either overtly lied or actively obfuscated the actual status of the Tisdale investigation, that the federal government had not classified or sealed the report – as represented by Walton and Monroe. That in fact, federal officials had not even seen the report, much less classified it or declined to allow its release.
The uptown paper reports that, “the city’s decision to withhold the entire report was made on its own. The Transportation Security Administration hasn’t reviewed the report to determine what can or can’t be made public.”
The city has refused to release a redacted report, saying the entire report had been sealed.
The Observer also requested written correspondence between the city and federal government about the Tisdale investigation, specifically regarding the report being labeled security sensitive.
Charlotte assistant city attorney Mujeeb Shah-Khan said the city has no written correspondence with the federal government about the case. Shah-Khan told the Observer that the federal government informed the city verbally that the report would be classified, which was apparently incorrect.
The city released Monroe’s Wednesday letter to David Wray, the TSA security director at Charlotte/Douglas. Monroe said the city report contained previously stamped SSI documents from Joint Vulnerability Assessment Reports, and “as a result we were obligated to follow the law and not release the report.”
Charlotte/Douglas aviation director Jerry Orr said Wednesday that he wasn’t directly involved in the CMPD probe, and wasn’t part of the process that determined whether the report was classified.
“I wasn’t in on the police report,” Orr said. “But I think sometime in the last 24 hours is when the TSA indicated that it wasn’t Security Sensitive Information (SSI). They didn’t exactly say it wasn’t SSI, they said they would have to go through the report and classify it. I think (Monroe) thought it had already been labeled that way.”
On Feb. 28, Monroe and City Manager Curt Walton read a three-page summary of the report to City Council.
Under a section called “City Manager Walton’s report,” the summary said the report was controlled under the Code of Federal Regulations, and no part of it could be disclosed to people without a “need to know.”
As they have on previous occasions (see Jackson, under Marcus), councilmembers elected to act like mindless mushrooms, preferring to be left in the dark rather than uncovering any ugly truths. After Walton and Monroe’s “classified” tap dance, not a single councilmember raised a single question or concern. Mayor Anthony Foxx, who should have known the classified claims to be suspect given his employment history with the Department of Justice, took the non-report report in stride, offering praise to Walton and Monroe for a job well done.
Given the latest revelations, Foxx and council’s refusal to press this issue moving forward, and actually hold someone accountable for what can at best be considered either massive dereliction of duty or gross incompetence, can only be interpreted as an endorsement of the same.
Meanwhile, there’s been yet another security breach at the airport, this time involving a heist of construction equipment near an area occupied by planes. This from WSOC TV:
According to police reports, someone cut through the chain link fence sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning. They said the motive appears to be burglary. A construction trailer was broken into and more than $12,000 worth of equipment was stolen, the report stated.
… The area where the burglary occurred is a short walk from the planes, but airport officials said an aircraft was not the target over the weekend.
“If someone cut a fence where the airplanes park, that’s one thing. Cutting a fence on the back side is certainly not the same,” said Airport Director Jerry Orr.
Nothing to see here; move along.
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