Integrity Florida<\/a>, a nonpartisan government watchdog group based in Tallahassee, said the findings show why oversight of public agencies matters.<\/p>\n\u201cThis is the public’s tax dollars that’re being spent,\u201d Wilcox said.<\/p>\n
The public works director told investigators that if the complainant had not come forward, she likely would not have known about the overtime, according to the report.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it’s a public employee, that person is being paid with public funds \u2014 taxpayer funds \u2014 and there needs to be oversight and there needs to be procedures that’re followed,\u201d Wilcox said.<\/p>\n
Wilcox said the inspector general\u2019s findings raise concerns about accountability.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a number of red flags that’re raised in this inspector general’s report, and I think there needs to be accountability and transparency in how it’s dealt with,\u201d Wilcox said.<\/p>\n
According to the report, the manager resigned before a scheduled disciplinary hearing. The report also says the supervisor was terminated during the investigation for unspecified reasons.<\/p>\n
Pinellas County Public Works has since developed new ways to approve and monitor overtime hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen things like this are happening, we want to be able to report on it, so number one it can be known, it can be corrected in whatever way the county deems necessary, and also to try and prevent it from ever happening again,\u201d Eckert said.<\/p>\n
The county declined a request for an interview with the Public Works Department and referred Spectrum Bay News 9 to the inspector general\u2019s report.<\/p>\n
Public Works is working with the county attorney and human resources to determine whether any overtime payments can be recovered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PINELLAS, Fla. \u2014\u00a0Two Pinellas County Public Works employees are no longer with the county after an inspector general\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[4323,3140,63156,115,139,596,99,202,204,203,199,201,200,135,835,63157],"class_list":["post-308439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-andy-cole","tag-app-local-state-politics","tag-app-watchdog-investigations","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-pinellas-county","tag-politics","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-tampa","tag-vod","tag-watchdog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308439","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=308439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}