When Fred Hansen became general manager of Tri-Met eight months
ago, he inherited a number of problems from his predecessor,
Tom Walsh. One of them was Tri-Met's failure to run background
checks on medical-assistance drivers like Daniel Robertson,
a convicted murderer who raped Tri-Met passenger Tammy Rattey
last year.
On June 10, WW interviewed Hansen about the Rattey
case and Tri-Met's ignorance of the backgrounds of the drivers
who transport the agency's most vulnerable passengers. Clearly,
Hansen's staff had not fully briefed him on Tri-Met's problems,
which left him unable to answer key questions. Still, it
was evident that Hansen knew there was a problem. He said
he had been preparing to run more extensive checks on medical-assistance
drivers before the state stepped in on June 1 and handed
down new rules making it difficult to get national criminal
checks on subcontractors.
The day after the WW interview, Hansen issued a
stern memo calling for Tri-Met to round up the names--and
fingerprints--of its medical-assistance drivers by June
28.
Below are excerpts from WW's interview with Hansen.
Questions and answers have been edited for clarity.
WW: You've said that Tri-Met's current system
of background checks is flawed. I'm curious if you are aware
how flawed it is. Do you know that Tri-Met does not even
keep the names of OMAP drivers on file?
Hansen: I wasn't aware of that.
Is that a good way to run a railroad?
I have to understand it more thoroughly. There are certainly
some circumstances where a contractor would have employees
that we would not necessarily be aware of, an engineering
firm or what have you. From my standpoint the issue here
is the one about the criminal-background check, and that
is something that we need to know about at Tri-Met, not
just [rely on] the contractor to provide.
We have found drivers with
a number of convictions for theft, assault and selling drugs.
Should those people
be driving?
Anybody who has those types of convictions on their records
should not be serving vulnerable populations. That is, in
my view, clear. I think people who have that kind of a background
shouldn't be dealing in unsupervised settings with vulnerable
people. So then the issue becomes, how do we discover that
and then make sure the system actually weeds out people
who are inappropriately so involved?
What keeps Tri-Met from doing checks on OMAP drivers
today?
Other than to be assured of exactly how that system works,
other than to be able to put together the mechanical things...it
may happen within a day. I'd say a couple weeks just because
I don't know how many mechanical administrative pieces I've
got to be able to put in place to be able to order it. Do
we need to be able to amend the contract to be able to require
that all names come through us? I need to be able to ask
my counsel how we can in fact accomplish it. But this issue
isn't one of, is it being done today or is going to be done
tomorrow? I want it to be done as soon as possible.
Why hasn't it happened yet?
Because--this is the thing you apparently do not want to
focus on--up until June 1 of this year we had the ability
to get after the much more effective criminal-background
checks by being able to get into the national criminal-information
database. Then the new state rule came out. They narrowed
it and explicitly removed transportation providers. Now,
can we in fact still do the Oregon check? Yes, but it is
not nearly as effective because of the number of people
migrating from other cities.
Why didn't you go ahead and say, "From now on Tri-Met
will check the criminal records of OMAP providers, even
if it's an Oregon-only check"?
I wanted to get to the most comprehensive approach. For
me, what was most important was to be able to get to that
broader criminal check, and the ability to do so was a door
that was wide open for us. We were marching down that direction
to put it in place. What's at issue, and what frustrates
me, is that door was closed on June 1, and that then means
that we have to drop back to what I think is a much inferior
system, because it only deals with that record which is
in the state of Oregon.
--BY
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Willamette Week | originally
published June 23, 1999
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