The case of the county bureaucrat’s pee-soaked desk chair

The question was simple: Was a disgruntled Pierce County employee responsible for the puddle of urine found on a coworker’s desk chair last fall?

The answer didn’t flow freely.

Despite quarantining the chair in a vacant office and sending the cushion to a lab for testing — yes, the county has a protocol for this type of thing — a Human Resources investigation was unable to unequivocally answer who left the 3-by-10-inch wet spot, which the California lab confirmed was pee.

All signs seemed to point to a water quality specialist in the Public Works Surface Water Management department.

The woman denied “spilling” anything at work that day, but key-card data and interviews with coworkers raised suspicions, investigators said.

The coworker whose chair was wet offered three names of potential suspects. He singled out the woman because the pair have history: Two days before the anonymous puddle appeared on his chair, he had identified 250 errors in her work.

The October chair incident is outlined in a 109-page report — including appendices — completed by county Human Resources in April. A copy was provided to The News Tribune.

The squabble dates back at least two years, when the man and woman quarreled over religion. The woman contends that after she told him “God bless you,” for sneezing, he handed her a copy of the county’s regulations on religious discrimination. He has a different account, saying that she asked if he was baptized. No, he said. “Well, we know who is going to hell, then,” he said she replied.

Following the Oct. 15 incident with the chair, the man sent an email to his supervisor and HR citing a “toxic work environment” where he receives “nasty looks and exasperated sighs” from coworkers.

“I have also been stared down at meetings and heckled,” he wrote.

He believes his reports to supervisors about some coworkers are to blame for this reaction. Among the man’s duties is auditing the work of his peers.

“I have complained over the last few years about the government waste that I see because every time I walk by my coworkers’ desks ... they are shopping or surfing on the internet, playing on their smart phone, paying their bills,” he wrote.

In an effort to unravel the whodunit, investigators looked at key-card data to see who was in the building around the time of the incident. The data showed the woman was there and that it was the “earliest time she had entered the building on any day within the months reviewed,” according to the April investigators’ report.

Over a two-month period the woman arrived to work, on average, 33 minutes late, according to the investigation. On the day in question, she arrived just two minutes late. Her co-worker arrived a hour and half later and discovered his soaked chair.

In the end, investigators could not prove she left the pee on the chair. But the woman could be disciplined for other misdeeds outlined in the investigation, including falsifying county records and lying on her time card.

A subsequent audit of the woman’s work as a result of the investigation raised questions about whether she had done the site inspections of stormwater facilities that she claimed to have done. A review of her work showed she failed to include information about a stormwater retention pond that auditors found had “a significant amount of trash and old tires dumped in it.”

“These discrepancies would have been noticed if the pond was actually inspected,” the investigation stated.

All of the properties inspected by the woman have since been reinspected, said Pierce County spokeswoman Libby Catalinich.

The woman, who was paid $67,829 in 2015, returned to her job a couple of months ago after being placed on paid administrative leave in October. She has been assigned different duties and has a different supervisor until Human Resources wraps up its review of the investigation and decides if she will face disciplinary action, Catalinich said.

As for her nemesis, he has a new chair.

This story was originally published June 20, 2016 at 5:53 PM with the headline "The case of the county bureaucrat’s pee-soaked desk chair."