Yesterday one of our readers stated that City of Miami assistant fire chief Veldora Arthur was on administrative leave since she was federally indicted for mortgage fraud and was using her accumulated vacation time while on leave. Turns out we were wrong, our contact from the fire department sent us this correction...
Veldora has been on Paid Leave for most of the past 3 months. She has in fact traveled for personal reasons during her absence but from the records i have seen; she was charged vacation time for those VACATION absences. But it is an absolute fact that aside from the few short personal trips she has taken, all of her absences over the past 3 months has been billed to the taxpayers through "Paid Administrative Leave" absences while she has been at home getting paid to watch TV, surf the web, do chores, working on her defense case,. and probably engaging in some form of 'work from home' outside employment that she has already shown a propensity for!
SHAZAM! While the city is reported to have anywhere between a forty to eighty million dollar budget deficit this year, Veldora is sitting home collecting over $300,000 per year from the city's taxpayers! Our contact goes on to comment on the allegation that most people in the upper echelons of the FD have gone home by 1:30 in the afternoon...
Very exaggerated. The real heroes in the fire rescue department are definitely the firefighter/paramedics out on the street saving lives and definitely not the 20 or so behind desks shuffling papers, except for Veldora, the 1:30 part is an exaggeration. Most probably work longer days that they get paid for. Veldora on the other hand has engaged in a criminal neglect of her duty to the taxpayers.
That last bit makes me wonder, "criminal neglect of her duty to the taxpayers". Could there be an angle here? Could this not showing up for work and now this paid administrative leave situation rise to the level of criminality? Think about that for a moment...
Even before the federal mortgage fraud indictment, if Veldora was only showing up for work half the time while getting paid by the city to work full time, isn't that just straight up theft? Anyone from the State Attorneys office paying attention here? On the other hand, how about the bogus severance packages former City Manager Tony Crap and former City of Miami CFO Larry Spring gave themselves? Doesn't that sound like Grand Theft and Organized Scheme to defraud?
It's time for someone to take action, whether from the City or the State Attorneys Office. Enough is enough.
Don't even get me started, I can't begin to describe how pissed off I am right now over this nonsense. Look where where we're at right now...
Record unemployment
Record foreclosures
Record Bankruptcies
Honest hardworking government employees getting their pay and benefit packages cut
Cities and municipalities teetering on the verge of bankruptcy
I don't need to restate the obvious about the economic state our country is in right now, to add insult to injury we're living in a city that's being described as one of the most corrupt cities on the country. Fantastic.
In the middle of all this mayhem we have none other than Veldora Arthur, the City of Miami's first black female assistant fire chief who between her base salary and benefits gets paid close to three hundred thousand dollars a year by the City of Miami tax payers. Now, let's put that into perspective, let's assume that her position as the Assistant Fire Chief requires her to be at work say from nine to five and let's just say for the sake of argument that she puts in a forty hour work week, that works out to about $144 per hour assuming that she works 52 weeks a year and takes no vacations. Let's disregard her benefits and figure out her hourly rate based on her base salary, $184,336.44, again assuming she takes no vacations and works a full 52 weeks per year, that comes out to roughly $88 per hour. I'm sure City of Miami firefighters who actually put out fires don't make that kind of money! Now, how many of you guys make that much money?! Not many of us I guess, at the very least, I DON'T!
I ran those numbers over the last couple of days and started to get all worked up, things got even worse when we got this comment on our blog on Tuesday...
Veldora Arthur comes in at 10:00 and leaves at 4:00p.m. She doesn't come in to work, but does not take any time off the books. Works, better yet, shows up to work for 20 hours a week.
WHAT THE FUCK! Let's forget about the federal mortgage fraud indictment she was named in for a moment and simply consider the audacity of this statement, this woman makes nearly $300,000 per year and comes in to work for a few hours a day? What gives! I started looking around then stumbled on to this website, as always click on the image to enlarge...
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! Take a closer look...
Here's the text of that quote...
The credit workshop was very informative. The real life scenarios were exceptional and very realistic. I related to some of the scenarios and such was able to come up with realistic solutions. The information on short sales and foreclosures was invaluable and right on target. I will be referring my clients and my friends to "Crbcredit.com" for credit restoration. -Veldora Arthur
HUH?! "I related to some of the scenarios...The information on short sales and foreclosures was invaluable and right on target." No kidding! The feds certainly seem to think so! Could this be for real?!
Let's disregard all the bullshit in this quote and cut right to the "I will be referring my clients" part. Clients? WHAT CLIENTS? Let me see, as an employee of the City of Miami fire department, who the hell are your clients? The guy whose house just burnt down? Or maybe the little kid who got her cat stuck up in a tree? Perhaps the guy who called 911 after getting his penis caught in a bottle? (not me I swear) Why would any of these people need "credit restoration"?? The question that we're left to ponder is WHO THE HELL ARE THESE CLIENTS SHE'S REFERRING TO?! A quick trip to the Florida division of corporations website helped answer that question, here's what we found...
Here we have the articles of incorporation for a company owned by Ms. Arthur named Capitol Investment Enterprise, LLC. Interesting, next we find this...
Nice, here we have the articles of incorporation for a second company owned by Ms. Arthur, Hidden Bay Properties, LLC, a company that coincidentally is named after the condominium where all the units involved in the federal mortgage fraud indictment were located. Another important detail to note is that the company is co owned by none other than Neil Fagan, the man who is accused of orchestrating the mortgage fraud scheme that they were both federally indicted for. So much for her lawyers "she didn't know what was going on" explanation, right?
Last but not least we have this third corporation owned by Ms. Arthur...
No kidding, Ms. Arthur also owns a company called Financial Solutions Team, LLC. Now that's nice isn't it? You think the clients she was referring to in her testimonial for the credit repair company were customers from Financial Solutions Team, LLC? Now comes the next question, when did Ms. Arthur find time during her work day to service these clients? After all, her position at the Fire Department didn't call for odd hours, from what we understand she had a nine to five desk job so where did she find the time to attend to this or any other business let alone it's clients?
If Ms. Arthur's glowing review of the company that lists among it's products a book called "It's OK not to pay" wasn't bad enough, now we're left to consider the fact that she was running not one but at least three other businesses while on city time. That's where I draw the line, we're all wallowing through the mud of this economic downturn and this woman is running three different businesses whilestealingcollecting $300,000 per year from struggling tax payers? Not to mention whatever she garnered from her foray into mortgage and real estate fraud and then having the gaul to want to help her "clients" repair their credit?! WTF!
Our justice system operates on the presumption of innocence, so put the federal fraud indictment aside for the moment, Ms. Arthur needs to be investigated and held accountable for what shes been doing on City time while being paid by the tax payers. Based on what little research I've done and the comments that we've had on our blog over the last few days, it certainly sounds like she's got some explaining to do.
I read a story in the Miami Herald on October 7, 2008 regarding a mortgage fraud case that didn't make any sense to me, I did a little digging and what I found left me stunned. A tale of a task force head whose political ambitions have run amuck, a detective without a modicum of common sense, a reporter that prints anything that's put in front of him, the railroading of an attorney by this machine to further the ambitions of its head and the lengths that those involved will go to in order to salvage a case that should have never been. Please take the time to start from the oldest post first and enjoy...
