LOST TO PUBLIC SERVICE Ex-city parks director troubled tale of gifted bureaucrat's self-destruction

Reports that Oliver Spellman has been charged by the U.S. attorney in Cleveland, Ohio, with conspiring to obtain bribes will surely trouble the people whose image of him was so different when he worked for the city of Houston.

Spellman, who had been recruited as Houston's parks director in 1998, came from a similar position in Cleveland. Once here, he charmed parks supporters and won plaudits for streamlining the bloated departmental bureaucracy and cleaning up and renovating city-owned green space.

So highly regarded was Spellman that he was touted as a leading candidate for the parks directorship of New York City, where he had previously worked. In early 2002, Spellman made a fateful choice, deciding to leave his parks career behind to become chief of staff in the chaotic top tier of Mayor Lee Brown's administration. That position had already chewed up and spit out three predecessors who got caught between competing power players vying for the mayor's attention.

In that stressful environment, previously undetected inner demons began undermining his performance. As he later admitted, "My alcoholism was the start and end point for my daily activities." Two years ago, he resigned from the chief of staff position and did not deny reports by sources in the Brown administration that he had flunked a random drug test.

After putting himself through a substance abuse rehab program, the chain-smoking Spellman got a second chance when he was hired by incoming Harris County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia to a staff position that specialized in maintaining precinct parks. Although Garcia said at the time that Spellman had faced his problems and worked through them, there were continuing warning signals. According to a fellow staffer, Spellman made no secret of the fact he was making weekend jaunts to Las Vegas to gamble at casinos. One of the allegations in the latest Ohio criminal information charge is that an unnamed consultant paid for a Spellman hotel stay in Las Vegas.

Houston District C Council Chief of Staff Sharon Adams was a colleague of Spellman's both at the city and the county. "It's incredibly sad," she said. "This is a man who had all the promise in the world, was an excellent administrator and did a stellar job in the Parks Department."

The criminal justice system will decide whether Spellman is guilty of the Cleveland bribery allegations. Houstonians should feel compassion for his wife and two young children and sorrow at Spellman's squandering of a prodigious talent for public service.

I came across this Houston news item while researching some of the craziness out here in San Diego:

Will Houston’s “Virtual Desktop” Deal Crash?

Posted November 25, 2002

Within a month of Houston Public Library completing the installation of SimDesk word-processing, spreadsheet, and e-mail software on all its public-access workstations, a city council member has discovered on the municipal computer server some 55 e-mails that call into question the circumstances under which the $9.5-million SimDesk contract was awarded in June. According to Councilman Bruce Tatro, the summer 2001 e-mails exchanged between former Houston technology chief J. Dennis Piper and several employees of SimDesk (then known as Information Access Technologies) prove that “awarding the contract to IAT was the forgone conclusion in August 2001,” when city council gave the firm permission to test a prototype at three branch libraries, the November 15 Houston Chronicle reported.

Tatro discovered the trail of e-mails a month after it was revealed that the Houston Office of the Inspector General and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office are probing Piper’s actions for alleged violation of Texas bid law. Piper, who quit his Houston job the day before city council approved the contract, is also under investigation for the alleged theft of almost $300,000 from his one-time employer Reliant Energy...

Piper bailed out of his San Diego County CIO job to head back to Houston to answer that Reliant indictment; the County has gone through two CIOs since then. Not sure if you folks have more current news on this well-travelled individual.

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