EDITOR’S NOTE: In spring 2011, The Towerlight published several anonymous “Letters to the Editor” regarding practices in the facilities management department. These letters were hand delivered and left in The Towerlight office or slipped under the door of The Towerlight’s office by unknown individuals. If you have any information regarding these allegations, The Towerlight is looking to speak with individuals on the record about their concerns.

Last year, there were several letters written to and published by The Towerlight regarding ongoing problems with the management of the facilities management department.

A year later, those problems still exist and the morale of the employees is lower than ever before.

You may remember that the problems started with the forced retirement of Associate Vice President Stephen Showers more than two years ago and the hiring of Roger Hayden to fill that job.

Mr. Hayden was brought in apparently as a favor to Ted Zaleski, Robert Caret’s former chief of staff and a colleague of Hayden’s when both worked for Baltimore County.

Mr. Hayden, whose management philosophy is “cheap and dirty,” proceeded to move three of the top-level department directors out of positions of authority and into other areas, backfilling the positions with lesser-experienced people.

And in the case of the maintenance director, brought in someone– Curtis Pendleton, who has absolutely no maintenance experience– to replace Harry Hughes, the long-time maintenance department head.

Overlooked for the position was Warren Riefner, the long-time associate director who went through what was a bogus interview process only to have Pendelton “win” the permanent job.
Hayden and company have come up with some bizarre ideas over the past year or so.

First, moving to outsource much of the vehicle maintenance “acquaintances” of his: Bob Davidson Ford, where Hayden buys his cars, and also hooking up with a company that has done landscaping work at his home and pervious employer to perform some work for the University. All of this is old news, but his “promises, promises” attitude is getting old and overloading the staff.

Now we have the Linthicum Hall fiasco.

According to several employees, a renovation is taking place in order to move Health Professions people in from the Towson Center and Burdick Hall into yet another old building that will undergo one of Hayden’s “cheap and dirty” renovations by doing minimal work with in-house staff, pulling them off of other maintenance projects and not really solving the problems of a building that had not been given the attention that it needed due to the intent of tearing it down to fulfill our illustrious “Master Plan.”

I’ll bet that Dean Charlotte Exner will be doing back flips when she sees what her people are moving into.

Oh yeah, and ask about the mold problems in the new dormitories in West Village.

How do you get mold in new buildings — by not having proper oversight on a project.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, and hopefully our new president will see this joke for what it is: A continuation of the “old boys’ network” that has backfired and made matters much worse, to the point of where other departments are laughing at us.

This bunch of idiots are running a once-proud department into the ground.

— Yet another dissatisfied facilities management employee