NC Auditor Boliek discusses preliminary report on Charlotte transit security (10-01-2025--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendarshow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. I'd like to welcome back to the program the auditor for the State of North Carolina, Dave Bullock. How are you, Auditor Bullock peek. I'm doing great. It's a great day to be a North Carolinian. Okay, yeah, I agree. So you put out your office put out this special report. This is a preliminary report, not the final report on the Charlotte area transit systems security. And as is the case with these audits, these reports, you give the agency or government that you auditing the opportunity to respond. You give them an advance copy and then they can address things in it that gets put out as part of your report. And the Mayor of Charlotte vy Lyles wrote in her letter in response, to the preliminary report that the report appears to suggest that the private security company is not qualified, but fails to offer specific evidence to support this conclusion. So I guess I'll ask, is your office suggesting that this firm PSS is not qualified to be the security contractor and provide that service for Charlotte Area transit system. Nowhere in our report do we say the firm that's currently contracted is not qualified. That's the mayor reaching, in my opinion, I think anybody who reads the report. In fact, there is a line in our report that says we've not made a determination on the results or qualifications or quality service that the contractor who is currently contracted with the city to provide security on the CAT system is qualified or not. We haven't made that determination yet. Now we're going to ask questions about the actual service delivery as we dive deeper into the security that the City of Charlotte is providing to writers of CATS. Now and the I guess. She's made that up. She made that up. She made it, yeah, because and she gives her She gave herself some I guess wiggle room here by saying the report appears to suggest, right, So it's not like a direct assertion. I think she's leaving herself some wiggle room, but I just wanted to give you the opportunity to respond. Well, yeah, and I appreciate that, but I think that that comes from the fact that we did point out and we've not made a judgment. Look, it's up to the political leadership of the City of Charlotte, who are elected by the people to make certain policy decisions, and is spears from the contract that the leadership and managing and the Charlotte decided that at least a large part of the security contract that was executed in twenty twenty two would be limited to only firms that qualified under the Charlett Business Inclusion Program, which quite frankly is DEI right. So they split the contract and this is really and maybe I'm in the weeds on this, but I used to cover this city council so as a reporter years ago, so I've sat through a lot of these contract RFPs and stuff. And it's so they split the contract for armed security versus unarmed security. They made the armed security contract, which appears to be the larger contract the unarmed security contract. They then said that had to be essentially an MWBE minority women owned business enterprise, and then the armed component that would just be open bid for anybody with the qualifications. But then after a year they fired the armed security contractor and they just folded it into the contract that existed for the unarmed service provider and there was no competitive Get it. Right, You've got it right. That's the preliminary finding, and it's important, I think, for the people of Charlotte to have the full story, which is why we preliminarily released this as we develop our full report. Because the City of Charlotte's making rapid changes to the way they provide security and the way they're doing things on CASS, we felt it was important for the people of Charlotte to have some context as to maybe why some of these changes were necessary. Go back to twenty and eighteen. In our report, it shows that the city spent five point nine million dollars on sixty eight to eighty eight armed security officers. The twenty twenty two contract, which was the successor contract to the twenty eighteen contract, the split contract you just aptly described. They tripled the budget to more than eighteen million dollars, but decreased the number of armed guards by at least half. At least forty percent was our conclusion because it was sixty eight to eighty eight armed guards, but could have been slashed by as much as half because the new contract only provides as many as thirty nine armed security guards, with one hundred and eighty unarmed security personnel. Right and armed in this case, you identifying the report means armed with a firearm or a taser, so it's not even not even guns. So well could be it, couldn't you know? From our preliminary review, it appears that most of the armed security personnel do carry glocks, and so that would be a fire arm, but the contract allows for an armed security guard to also carry a taser. The conclusion that I think is easy to make here is that in twenty twenty two there was a clear policy change by the political leadership in Charlotte away from the use of armed security on the CAT system. So the on the contract that was not competitively bid when it was folded into the existing unarmed security contract is there are there requirements that the city is supposed to go out and get competitive bids. Isn't that? Isn't it always the case? Or are there some exemptions or exceptions where they don't have. To do that. Well, Pete, it's a little unclear because of the peers that after eight months of having this split contract that that's when they indeed folded the armed portion end to the primary contractor who is on the job currently. So that's unclear and in full disclosure. We're digging into the mechanics of that. Again. We've released this preliminarily primarily because there have been a lot of changes and a lot of announts changes from the City of Charlotte, and is really important because a lot of these details have not previously been released to the public. Right well, at the Charlotte City Council meeting from I think the twenty second I believe it was the co owner. So the owners are Lee Ratliffe, who is a former public information officer for CMPD and his wife, longtime CMPD officer as well. They owned PSS. She was there and she left the impression that everybody that they hire on at PSS goes through the same law enforcement training as CMPD. Do you know that to be the case or not, because it doesn't seem like what you found in the audit that does not seem to be the case. Well, preliminarily found is that the minority of the eighteen point four million dollars or so a year that is spent on security of the CAT system is clearly spent on unarmed personnel. So if they go through the Charlotte Police training, they're doing so, but at the same time not carrying a firearm. Again, that's a policy choice that is clear the City of Charlotte has made. Now to your point, that's one of the questions we're digging into deeper, is exactly the deliverables, because I want to point one thing out is is that you know what raises questions what are the metrics right that the City of Charlotte expects. The mayor has said they're performing. In fact, I think there was a release this morning that they're performing exceptionally and doing everything. They're performing as they are expected to perform. I think what is the real question that's been raised heraped is what are the metrics? Give us the numbers, give the specifics of how you say they're performing. There's a Charlotte City councilman, Edwin Peacock asked for the crime stats and asked for sort of a crime map, a heat map, like where are the hot spots of crime? And they and cats could not provide that and said, but PSS, they know those areas. But PSS then didn't tell us where those areas are. So it's kind of like, how are you making decisions? To your point, like, how are you making staffing decisions if you're not tracking where the hot spots are? And you don't because you obviously don't have the information to provide to the city council, Like this would seem to me to be a pretty obvious stat that you would be able to deliver, but they're not. Well, that's part of the questions that I think have been raised here and that's why we wanted to deliver this preliminary report, is to get it into the arena of public discussion, because the public deserves answered. Look, we're doing this audit and this investigation on cash on behalf of the service workers, the students, the fans of the panthers that use this system all the time, and quite frankly, the parents of Areno Zuliska asked in their public statement for additional oversight on this contract. So we're hoping to answer that call as well. North Carolina Auditor Day Bullock. Anything else you want to add that you think is important for people to know before we let you go. I do, I really think that. I hope this provides an opportunity for the City of Charlotte to move forward with security and not double down and say everything's okay, because clearly there was a policy change and the people of Charlotte and the writers of Cats deserved the maximum security possible. So I look at this as an opportunity, a point in time where the community can move forward to make the City of Charlotte and the Transistor is some better moving for them. North Carolina Auditor Dave Bollock, thanks so much for your time, sir, Thanks for the work, and we look forward to the final report when it's completed. Yes, sir, thanks Tate, all right, take care, thank you. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. So yesterday the auditor put out the Auditor's office put out this preliminary report. I have read it twice because you always get something extra, you know, when you read through it the second time, So I read it first last night when it came out. I read it again this morning, marked it up with way too much highlighter, which really works to my disadvantage because I end up highlighting so much that I don't get to it's if everything is a top priority, nothing is the top priority anyway. So this is from the press release from the Auditor's office. They site well, they say the solicitation for the security contracts was guided by a Charlotte Business Inclusion Requirement CBI okay CBI, which is essentially the program that Charlotte has had for thirty years or so to try to award contracts to mwbs minority women businesses, enterprises right women owned and minority owned businesses, and they try to In the past, they set quotas and they were worried about getting sued over that, so they changed the law. And that was back in the early two thousands. This was a big, big debate on council and so they have these targets that they always try to hit. This is a pretty explicit contract that was put out for proposal, an RFP request for proposal, and I'm going to get to it. I'm just kind of giving you the broad scope of it first. And they went back to the Auditor's office, went back to twenty eighteen and started tracking the contracts and the personnel. That's really what this is focusing on is the contracts and the personnel, Like, there's no data in here. So somebody asking me if there was any kind of accounting for fair collection, and no, there's nothing in here about fair collection. Right, there's no comparison. Like I was curious when I started reading, I was like, Oh, are they going to have any kind of comparison to transit systems of our size? What's their security footprint? How many armed versus unarmed personnel do these other transit systems have That would be you know, of a comparable nature an open system like we have, not like a turnstile system. How many people do they use to police those systems? Don't know? So from twenty eighteen through twenty twenty, there were three different security firms that CATS had contracted and so the original contract was with G four S Secure Solutions. G four S Secure Solutions, I'm just going to call them G four S, and they, as you heard Dave Bollock say, they had a contract that provided for between sixty eight to eighty eight armed guards, armed security. The current contract with PSS and we heard some disagreement at the city council level. Lawana Mayfield was like it's not PSS, it's PPS. And I thought Brett Kagel was making a mistake, the interim CEO of CATS, I thought he was making a mistake, just mixing up the acronym. But no, in fact he was correct. PSS is the company that because it's a PPS doing business as PSS, So. Either one is fine. Anyway, So the current contract has the armed security figure at just thirty nine. So it went from between sixty eight to eighty eight, so let's just call it seventy eight. It went from seventy eight to thirty nine. Meanwhile, the contract value went from six million to eighteen million, So you have a twelve million dollar increase in the contract cost and a decrease in the armed security personnel figure. Why is that important? In my mind, that's important because armed personnel would theoretically cost more money. Right, They're going to cost more money to train, more money and equipment. So why now the mayor has said, well, we have increased security personnel by over one hundred percent, right, but the focus of that has been on the unarmed guards, the unarmed component, right. And this is what this is what stuck out to me, and I mentioned this with the auditor is that. In the city council presentation, the representative from PSS said that the training they go through is the same or greater than Charlotte Mecklenburg Police. And at one point, I believe it was Councilwoman Renee Johnson asked, how are you able to recruit so many people for your company? We're having a hard time staffing up CMPD. How are you able to recruit so many people so quickly? And she never got an answer to that, but now we know why. It's because you're not actually at the level of CMPD. I don't know who you're comparing in your two hundred and nineteen total personnel footprint. I don't know who is qualified at that law enforcement level. You said they all go through the same training, So how much training actually is that. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Ashville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion. Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. 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If city Council was truly interested in increasing security for the transit system, they could increase the proposed sales text to one and a half cents, and dedicate those extra funds to pay for CMPD officers and security related technology in the Transportation division. Not sure if they could hire and retain enough officers given the current shortage, but it would be better than what they are proposing now. Also, the statement from Miss Ratliffe from PSS that she made about her sworn officers receiving the same training the CMPD officers received was misleading. While it's true they may be bled certified as CMPD officers are CMPD officers receive approximately one hundred and fifty additional hours of training and are required to complete twelve weeks of additional train and devaluation after graduation. They are not cleared to patrol on their own until they successfully completed those extra twelve weeks. That's not to mention the ongoing training that CMPD officers complete each year. That is above and beyond what private company police do. You get what you pay for. The city made strategic financial decisions to provide security. On the cheap. That is what it looks like. Also, the way the contract was not rebid competitively, but rather just folded into the contract for PSS. It just reeks of cronyism. I'm just gonna I'm gonna say, like, I don't know that to be true, but that's what it looks like. That's what it reeks of. Smells like it. I guess I should say, looks like it and smells like it. Okay, you have first the decision. Hang on, let me go, let me go to They provided a helpful timeline in the preliminary report. Twenty eighteen, City of Charlotte enters into the contract with G four S. They then amend that contract in twenty twenty one, so three years later. Then two months after that amendment they amended again because at that point G four S became Allied Universal, so I think they got bought out by another company. A year later, less than about six months later, that contract gets amended and then amended again in April. Then the email goes out in June of twenty twenty two on new security solicitation notes that unarmed security services are only open to CBI firms. This is like minority women business owned firms. So this is when they split the contracts, saying the bigger contract is for the unarmed portion for the armed portion that's going to be a separate contract. So in other words, they knew and they said this. There are quotes in here from meetings where they touted this as a good thing. This is going to be a really good way to get minority owned businesses city contracts. So it seemed like they and I don't know this, but this is what it seems like, is that they split the contract in order to award it to a company based on race or sex, right, and they touted it. Now, did they know it was going to go to PSS. I don't know that. I don't know that, but PSS had done work for the city before. And this is a pretty standard thing in the city of Charlotte, where you have like one or two firms in these different areas like architectures. Harvey Gant's firm, Harvey Gant would get contracts all the time from the city because his firm, he's, you know, the former mayor of Charlotte, but also he's black, and so he would then check the box for a black owned business. And I've heard stories too about how he would kind of lend himself to other businesses so they could score the contract, and he didn't he would just take a fee and then they would do the work. I believe Leeper Construction is another one, also a former Charlotte City councilman, Ron Leeper. He was gone by the time I started covering the city. And so is that the same sort of dynamic going on here? I don't know. I don't know how many other firms were qualified and actually could bid on the work and could you know, had the capacity to do this kind of of a contract. But in June of twenty two they split the contracts. They then put them out for a request for proposals. They do an amendment with the allied contract that they still have. They then approve a new contract two contracts because they're split, one for PSS for the unarmed and a company called Strategic Security Corporation. Strategic they got the arm the armed guards contract. PSS enters the contract for the unarmed security in July of twenty three. Two months later, Strategic enters into its contract. A month after that, the contract is amended with PSS where they add more unarmed guards. Then the contract amendment gives PSS for the contract amenden gives PSS the contract for armed security services in June of twenty twenty four, so it seems like Strategic didn't even have a full year. Okay, now, according to this report from the auditor, they basically terminated Strategic for failure to perform. But we don't know why. There isn't any it says here in twenty twenty two, the request for proposal for unarmed security was targeted only to businesses registered with CBI, But then when they scrapped it with Strategic, they never explained. There's no record, at least in the report that they had. They're still trying to figure out what exactly did they not perform? What was that due to? What was the failure to perform? Because if they're not doing the contract, then yes you can fire them, but at that point you should have put it out for another competitive bid to get somebody else involved. But they did not do that. They just handed it off to PSS, and that smacks of favoritism. So in twenty two they are told you're that you are you're going to be taken over this contract or I'm sorry in a twenty four In June of twenty twenty four, the contract amendment gives PSS the contract for the armed component, but they don't actually take over until fourteen months later. I'm sorry, hang on, no, no, no, no. They take over six months later, and then eight months after that is when Arena Zarotzka's murdered. So they had fourteen month window from when they were told they're getting the contract for the armed security, so they needed to start ramping up at that point, right, They had six months to prepare. They take over the contract in December twenty twenty four, and Arena Zarutskas murdered in August of twenty five, so that is a fourteen month window. And in that fourteen months they never ramped up enough security personnel that they were still behind when they went before Charlotte City Council last month to say we're still trying to hire to get to the two nineteen. They had a fourteen month window to ramp up and they didn't before Arena's death and they didn't do so they didn't get it done. And they only have thirty nine armed guards. That's not enough for one per train. They're forty eight light rail trains and maybe more. Voters give them more money to build some more lines. You know, stories are powerful, They help us make sense of things to understand, experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven in Minhill, North Carolina. 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I don't know how many pockets that went into, at least that's what it looks like. So you've talked about this the you know, the the Fabian Society, which was, you know, we're gonna give, We're gonna we're gonna turn Western society socialist, but we're gonna do it slowly. Their original mascot was literally a wolf in sheep's clothing. That was on their banner. They literally had that on their banner, and then they were like, maybe this is a little too overt, let's take that off. But yeah, this is the way that. This is the way that Marxists operate is they go into an institution that has built up credibility and reputation over you know, a long period of time with people doing good work of all political stripes. But they go in, they build up you know, the worth, the value of this institution, and if left unguarded, parasites then descend and they they destroy all of the stored value and then they will move on to another institution. You see this happening in the churches, where you've got this parasitic mind as Goad said calls it. They don't go and start their own churches. They go into yours and they hollow it out, and then they walk around with the shell of the institution as like a skin suit and demand the level of respect that the institution deservedly had prior to the hollowing out right, And I kind of get the sense that that's what we're looking at in all of these big cities that are run by democrats. This is what happens. You get people that are in there and look a lot of people that go into you know, go into politics. They score pretty high on sociopathy, okay, and psychopathy. They do politics, media law, those are like the big categories. So I say that as one who is in media. So yeah, there's a personality type that goes in there, and the politics really doesn't matter. If you've got people that are in there with the dark tech trad personality traits, they don't care about the politics. The ideology doesn't matter to them. It's the power that's all, and they'll just shed whatever ideology they need to shed in order to achieve more power. Which is why it's always kind of interesting to me that you get democrats that run these big cities and they claim like, you know, we're the party of government and all this, and it's like, well, then why do you run it so poorly? Why does it not seem to work anywhere you guys operate it? Kimberly said, this makes me sick. Dude, Hang on a second. This is from Andrew, but this is from yesterday. This is from today. Oh okay, so no, no, not in Charlotte. Almost like doing a payout behind closed doors to a chief of police. Yeah, that would never happen. That would never happen. This is from a random number. Glad to know we are the tenth safest city. Just wonder how those numbers work with the city having shootings every day. Nowhere in this discussion about security on the transit, do I hear that we hired the best? I did hear we hired based on race? Right? And that is also an element to this story. Now, because of this kind of DEI policy that the City of Charlotte has been engaged in for thirty years, it makes the normal person, any normal person aware that this system exists now has to ask because of the policy, not because of the individuals or the winner of the contract for no other reason, just by the mere existence of the program. Now the question is asked of every single MWBE did they actually earn it? And that's not fair to them. That's the trade off here, right, As Thomas Soule says, there are no solutions, only trade offs. This is one of the trade offs. By the way, this is also one of the lies that people are telling on the left about Charlie Kirk his comments and I've played it a couple of weeks ago about the Black Airline pilots. He was talking about the use of United Airlines they were going to hire based on dei quotas, and what that does is then it forces anybody getting on the plane. It now raises the question in their minds, like, wait a minute, is this guy actually qualified to fly the plane or was he just somebody that they hired based on race or sex or whatever. And people shouldn't think that way. We don't want people to think that way. I don't want people thinking that way. But when you have these programs, people start thinking that way because that's what the pro makes you do. So now that's part of this discussion as well. Does PSS actually have the capacity to fulfill the contract requirements. Why did they go from under the G four S company when they were running the security and they had one hundred and eight security personnel one hundred and eight and between sixty eight and eighty eight of them were armed one oh eight up to eighty eight of the one oh eight were armed. Now thirty nine out of two hundred and nineteen are armed. That is a decision, right, That is obviously an explicit intentional decision that was made. Now who made that decision, we don't know. The auditor doesn't know either. The office that his office that did this report, they don't know that either. But that remains to be investigated. How much of a role did the did this CBI program play in the decision? Was PSS actually qualified to take on both contracts or. Maybe one but not the other. We don't know. We're gonna find out. We're gonna find out. And I think the City or Cats was supposed to do a press conference today but they pushed that off, which is not a great sign. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.