City auditors say an examination of the Anchorage city ombudsman's office revealed disorganization, inefficiency and a growing backlog of unresolved cases.
The ombudsman's office is supposed to safeguard citizens' rights and mediate problems people have with city government or the school district -- from a difference of opinion with tax assessors to a complaint about police enforcement. The office has subpoena powers.
The audit, released last month, described the office as of Dec. 31 last year.
Among findings:
• The auditors were unable to find copies of any formal investigation reports for 2010.
• The number of cases reported to be resolved annually dropped 89 percent over five years, from 203 cases in 2006 to 23 in 2010.
• The number of open cases at year-end skyrocketed from 327 in 2006 to 1,238 in 2010.
In January, the Anchorage Assembly appointed Barbara A. Jones as a new acting ombudsman, and she was given the job on a regular basis in May. The office under Jones had cleared 771 cases at the time of the audit, leaving 309 open cases, the audit report says.
Kristin Cada, who was ombudsman from 2007 through 2010 and acting ombudsman for a time before that, said Friday that the office was understaffed and that she had told the Assembly so when presenting annual reports. Once a five-person office, the staff dwindled to two people, she said. Cada made a decision to focus on serving people and letting paperwork go, she said.
The office still logged in complaints, Cada said. "We wanted at least to get them all counted. The follow-up reports is where we were lagging."
Many complaints were resolved but not reported as such, Cada said.
The ombudsman reports to the Anchorage Assembly chairman. Some Assembly leaders and former leaders say the Assembly leadership changed so frequently that there wasn't adequate oversight of the office.
"It's the kind of thing that tends to happen when the boss is distracted and the oversight isn't put in that should be over that department," said Ernie Hall, Assembly vice chairman. "Everybody tends maybe to get a little sloppy."
The roster of Assembly chairmen and chairwomen over the past 2 1/2 years includes Harriet Drummond, Debbie Ossiander, Patrick Flynn, Dick Traini and Ossiander again.
"It was a problem that was growing for a number of years," Ossiander said. "There were some issues that came up when I was chair (in 2009), then Patrick, then Dick."
Ossiander was concerned about the ombudsman's office back when she was Assembly chairwoman in 2009, she said. "I kept hearing from people they were not getting responses back," she said, and it wasn't possible to quantify "what was going in and out of the office." But she was also focused on extended hearings and debate over an effort to change the city's equal rights laws to prohibit discrimination against gay people. She had wanted an audit of the ombudsman's office, she said. "(But) frankly, I didn't have time to get it all done."
Traini, the chair from April 2010 to April 2011, appointed Hall to chair a committee to check into how the office was doing.
"We had some red flags," Hall said. "Staff wasn't present in the office the way we felt they should have been."
Traini said he told Cada before her contract expired at the end of 2010 that it wouldn't be renewed and ordered the audit.
City internal audit director Peter Raiskums said this is the first audit of the office that he knows of.
With Cada already out of the office at the time auditors were doing their job in March and April, the auditors couldn't tell in many cases what work had been done, said Raiskums.
New ombudsman Jones said she couldn't comment on the audit. Jones was staff attorney and executive director of the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission before becoming ombudsman. She had been with the commission since 1999.
Ossiander said she is impressed with how thorough and even-keeled Jones is.
But Ossiander does think the office could use more staff and has already talked with Jones about the possibility of adding a half-time position, she said.
Reach Rosemary Shinohara at rshinohara@adn.com or 257-4340.
By ROSEMARY SHINOHARA
rshinohara@adn.com