County Health Department In Near-Revolt
Inspector General Investigating: Director of Department under scrutiny for alleged misappropriation of more than $5,000 of state funds. Investigator has interviewed more than a dozen current and former employees. Director says that it has been "recommended" to her that she resign.
An investigator from the State Inspector General’s (IG) Office is reportedly looking into allegations that Dr. Susana May, Director of the Monroe County branch of the State Heath 
Department (MCHD), may have misappropriated more than $5000 of state funding.
Dr. May reportedly told an accounting supervisor that she would be fired unless she agreed to falsify documents to cover up the cost of buffet lunches for all 80 employees in the MCHD during a two-day meeting at the Hawk’s Cay Resort in 2005. State regulations do not allow expenditure to feed employees during departmental conferences....
Allegations also reportedly include multiple complaints of conduct unbecoming of a public official.
On Monday, Dr. May sent an email to a number of her contacts in and out of state government telling them that it had been “recommended” to her that she resign “in the best interest of Monroe County” and that she is considering her options. She told those who received the email: “If you have any opinion, please write the office of the Governor in Tallahassee.”
The email did not say who had recommended that she resign and she did not respond to an email from Key West The Newspaper asking for comment.
Key West The Newspaper has learned that Inspector Specialist Lori Van Riper, from the IG’s office in Tallahassee, has visited the Health Department here several times over the past two months and has interviewed more than a dozen current and former employees, including Dr. May.
This is reportedly the fourth investigation by the IG involving Dr. May since she was named Director in 2004. According to some of those who have been interviewed by Van Riper, the current investigation is not only looking at new allegations, some of the previous investigations are being reopened.
• In 2004, the IG investigated a complaint that Dr. May had threatened to bring a gun to work. She was forced to apologize.
• In 2005, an IG investigation found that Dr. May had violated a patient’s confidentiality. She was counseled.
• In 2006, the IG investigated allegations that Dr. May discriminated and retaliated against some employees.
Sources close to the MCHD report that, since Dr. May has been on the job, at least six employees have been fired and more than a dozen others have been forced to resign. An anonymous letter sent to state officials last November alleged that since Dr. May took over the helm of the department, many good employees have been fired without cause.
“Recently, three employees have been fired in eight weeks and many more since her tenure began,” the letter-writer said. “Who in Tallahassee is responsible for allowing her to intimidate empoloyees who cannot defend themselves for fear of retaliation?”
Albert Howe was a management analyst at the MCHD until he was abruptly fired by Dr. May last October. His dismissal letter, signed by Dr. May, did not give a reason Howe was being fired, but it did remind him that he was a “Select Exempt Service” employee who served at the pleasure of the agency head. Dr. May told Howe that his last day in the office would be October 27, the day he received the letter.
In a letter to County Commissioner Dixie Spehar last November, Howe accused Dr. May of creating a hostile work environment. He alleged that if any Health Department employee dares to disagree with Dr. May, they are subject to verbal abuse, retaliation and firing. “Most employees are fearful of losing their jobs . . . I have been a subject of Dr. May’s retribution,” Howe told Commissioner Spehar.
Howe also accused Dr. May of mismanagement. “She has misspent the trust fund from $1.2 million down to less than $189,000 in a little over one year,” he said.
Last September, Dr. May reportedly announced to all employees during a County-wide conference call that the department was experiencing financial problems and she said, as a result, there would be, for the time being, no raises, no promotions and no vacant positions would be filled.
But, according to sources inside the MCHD, one of Dr. May’s "favorite employees” then received a raise of about $10,000 per year, while another employee was fired because of the budget crisis.
Two weeks ago, Dr. May announced that the Health Department would begin to charge for medical services due to a shortage of funding to provide for medical services to those with inadequate or no health insurance.
Nica Martinez, a former MCHD Accounting Service Supervisor, told Key West The Newspaper this week that she resigned after Dr. May told her she would be fired unless she went along with a scheme to falsify records to cover up misappropriation of funds.
“In June of 2005, the department was getting ready to conduct a two-day hurricane preparedness conference,” Martinez said, “This would be a required meeting of all of the approzimately 80 Health Department employees plus some outside guests from the Red Cross and other agencies. Dr. May had personally arranged for the meeting to be held at the Hawk’s Cay Resort.
“When I learned that there would be a charge for the meeting room, I informed Dr. May that we had no state funding for a hurricane preparedness conference. Her response was that we would simply call the hurricane conference an annual staff meeting.
“Then I learned that she had also made arrangements for the hotel to serve a buffet lunch on both days of the conference,” Martinez said. “Since state regulations do not allow for this kind of expenditure either, I asked Dr. May if we should charge for the lunch. she said absolutely not; the Health Department would pay for the lunch.
“When I told her that I could not approve the expenditure, she threatened me,” Martinez said. “She told me that I would not only approve the charge, I would put it on my state credit card and find a way to cover it so it would not be questioned in Tallahassee. She told me: ‘You are a single mother and you need your job. You are also a Select Exempt Service employee and, unless you do what I am telling you to do, I will fire you!’
“I did what I was told to temporarily save my job,” Martinez said.
“But I immediately began to look for another job and I was able to submit a letter of resignation within several weeks. And I did report the misappropriation of funds to Tallahassee.”
Martinez said that her immediate supervisor, Luis Diaz, was in the room while Dr. May was ordering her to falsify documents in order to justify the more than $5000 expenditure.
“Diaz and I had a meeting later that day and he told me that he would never admit to having any knowledge of the scheme to falsify records and misappropriate funds,” Martinez said. “He told me, ‘My hands will be clean and Tallahassee will never be able to link me to anything.’ And he added that, if I informed on him, he would fire me.”
When Nica Martinez did turn in her letter of resignation, she said that neither Dr. May nor Diaz would accept it. But she had already given it to the department’s Personnel Liaison, Christopher McGahee, and he had sent it to Tallahassee.
“But that didn’t keep Dr. May and Diaz from ordering McGahee to write up a letter of dismissal for me,” Martinez said. “In case I started talking about what they had done, they wanted to be able to paint me as a disgruntled employee, rather than an employee who had resigned to protest their illegal actions.”
Reportedly, McGahee did what he was told but, the next day, shen he contacted Star Metcalf in Personnel in Tallahassee to request that Martinez’ resignation letter be replaced with the dismissal letter, Metcalf rejected that request.
Although Dr. May directed that employees refer to the buffets at the conference as “breaks”, rather than lunches, the news hit the press after there was an outbreak of apparent food poisoning. According to a report in the Keynoter newspaper on June 17, 2005, at least nine MCHD employees became violently ill after lunch on the second day of the conference.
“Everyone had just eaten lunch prepared by the Hawk’s Cay banquet kitchen when some began suffering symptoms of what appeared to be food poisoning,” according to the newspaper report.
Martinez said that Luis Diaz was later forced to resign from the MCHD, but not because of any fallout from the alleged misappropriation of funds, but because he allegedly sexually harassed another male employee. He was reportedly given the option to resign with the understanding that he would never be allowed to work with the Florida Health Department again.
“But guess what?” Martinez said. “I hear he is now head of Children’s Medical Services in Dade-Broward.”
Dr. May, who is a medical doctor with a masters degree in Public Health, was appointed director of the Monroe County Health Department in 2004 after the resignation of Dr. Jake Rutherford. When she was introduced as the new Director, employees who were at that meeting reported that Dr. May walked in wearing a crown and a cape and holding a scepter, and announced that she was the “Queen of the Health Department”.
She had not been on the job very long when she tried to call her Key West office while attending a meeting in Miami. Reportedly, no one answered the phone, so she got voice mail. It is not clear if she knew that she was being recorded, but this, in part, is the message she left:
“This is the health Department, you’ve got to answer the, somebody’s got to answer the phone. I have to bring a gun, I have to bring a gun to work. Could I borrow somebody’s gun, please? I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I might have to fire somebody . . “
After an IG investigation, Dr. May was ordered to apologize to employees.
Stay tuned.
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