City manager accused of sexually harassing co-workers and members of the public

A district manager for the city’s Department of Family and Support Services was accused of sexually harassing co-workers and a particularly vulnerable member of the public while on the job.

Sexual misconduct was, once again, a focus of Inspector General Joe Ferguson’s quarterly report Thursday, even though the City Council has strengthened Chicago’s sexual harassment ordinance and employee training requirements nearly a half-dozen times to drive home to city employees the powerful message of the #MeToo movement.

This time, the accused employee was the district manager of a community service center run by a Department of Family and Support Services that’s supposed to help families in crisis — not victimize them.

Instead, the now-fired manager is accused of using his position to “sexually harass numerous individuals.”

Specifically, the manager was accused of: making “unwanted comments about a security guard’s physical appearance and rubbing the guard’s shoulders; making “sexually explicit comments” to another security guard and rubbing the arm, hugging and attempting to kiss a Fleet and Facilities Management employee.

The manager was also accused of kissing the lips of a member of the public and following up with repeated phone calls to the woman.

“The member of the public was a relative of one of the district manager’s co-workers and had mental health and developmental delays that rendered their functioning level as that of an adolescent,” the report states.

Equally troubling to Ferguson was the fact that the district manager “had a history of sexually harassing female co-workers through inappropriate comments and unwanted physical contact,” but was promoted anyway after undergoing discipline and training after the prior violations.

The district manager retired during the course of the investigation and “refused to appear for an interview,” the inspector general said.

But Ferguson was nevertheless troubled by the decision to assign an employee with a “history of being a perpetrator of sexual harassment” to a location that included daily contact with the public without “close monitoring by supervisors.”

He recommended that the Department of Family and Support Services reexamine its “policies and procedures for assignment and supervision of employees who interact with the public.”

After consulting city attorneys, Family and Support Services said it promoted the district manager because he had “acted appropriately” since being disciplined for the earlier misconduct and “should not be denied” the opportunity to be promoted “based on a past mistake.”

But the department is asking the departments of law and human resources to “assist with creating” a new policy for promoting internal candidates.

In 2018, one of Ferguson’s quarterly reports accused a Fleet and Facilities Management employees of using a personal cellphone to record the employee masturbating while on-duty at a city facility,” then sending the videos to a teenager the employee had met on Facebook.

The same employee, who has since been fired, also twice used a personal cellphone at a city workplace on city time to take a photo “in which the employee’s genitals were exposed and sent” to the same teenager.

That same report accused a clerk in the city’s Department of Planning and Development of accessing “356 pornographic images and videos on two city computers” and using the internet to “search for and view images of nude men and women in various sexual positions while at work.”

The new quarterly report released Thursday also includes allegations another case of Family Medical Leave Act abuse at the city’s 911 emergency center and allegations that a deputy aviation commissioner repeatedly lied about absences of work when the manager was either in police custody or concealing an arrest for $35,286 worth of fraudulently-disputed credit card charges.