{"id":272155,"date":"2026-05-15T11:58:31","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T11:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/272155\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T11:58:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T11:58:31","slug":"tallahassee-lead-paint-grant-whistleblower-fired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/272155\/","title":{"rendered":"Tallahassee lead paint grant whistleblower fired"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>May 13, 2026Updated May 14, 2026, 12:28 p.m. ET<\/p>\n<p class=\"gnt_ar_b_p\">A former city employee filed whistleblower retaliation complaints alleging she was fired after notifying management about high costs and other problems with its <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tallahassee.com\/story\/news\/local\/2026\/05\/11\/hud-auditing-city-of-tallahassee-lead-paint-grant-program\/90011539007\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\" data-t-l=\":b|e|k|\u2691u\" class=\"gnt_ar_b_a\">federally funded grant program<\/a> to replace lead paint contaminated doors for low-income families.<\/p>\n<p class=\"gnt_ar_b_p\">Kevin\u00a0Kostelnik, a Tallahassee attorney representing the former employee, detailed her allegations in a March 9 letter to city Inspector General Dennis Sutton, which was obtained by the Tallahassee Democrat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"May 13, 2026Updated May 14, 2026, 12:28 p.m. ET A former city employee filed whistleblower retaliation complaints alleging&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[64,112356,484,485,781,1532,491,12221,490,308,59796,307,50,35,232,234,233,34],"class_list":["post-272155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-accessmetered","tag-sourcetallahassee-democrat","tag-sstsnewslocal","tag-sstsnlocal","tag-tagcrime-justice","tag-tagdemocratic-party","tag-taggovernment","tag-taggovernment-grants","tag-taghousing-development","tag-taglocal-news","tag-tagmedia-critics-watchdogs","tag-tagoverall-negative","tag-tagpolitics","tag-tagstory-highlights-ai-enabled","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news","tag-typestory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}