Human Resources Director
City of Compton
205 S. Willowbrook Avenue
Compton, CA 90220
RE: Disputed Results of Selection, Advancement and Placement Procedure
Dear HR Director:
On March 8, 2023, I participated in a Zoom interview for the open position of Director Community Development. A result letter was emailed a week later indicating that the interview resulted in a score of 60%, and thereby disqualifies me from continuing the interview process for this position.
It is my contention that this 60% score is in error based on a predetermination of technical knowledge of the applicant to the questions and a misinterpretation from the raters of my answers provided during this online interview. The essential questions focused on Planning, Section 8 Housing, Economic Development, Grants, Budgets, and Supervision.
I am alleging that the raters carried out an inadequate interpretation of my responses. The following outline the questionable ambiguity asked by the raters, as the City of Compton’s standards of operations were misunderstood.
1. What is your knowledge of Public Housing?
- I shared that for four years I served as the city of Compton Housing Hearing Officer, where the reviewers had zero follow-up on my input as to the frequency of the housing disputes and related activity and the outcome of the hearings.
2. Share with us the area of Planning?
- The manner in which the rater gave the question was they wanted a text book answer and not one associated with the current planning operation underway in the City of Compton. The rater’s understanding of planning services in Compton city were insufficient to rate the response. The rater had no knowledge of the Specific Plans on Compton and Artesia Blue Line Stations that have been mishandled
3. The question posed on Economic Development was nonspecific?
- The response provided should have been rated extremely high, but since the rater’s are unfamiliar with the challenges of business attraction to the city of Compton, it is apparent that their technical review missed the mark. Whereas, my response addressed how the last business attraction companies that have come to the city of Compton all included my expertise to guide the companies through the process from entitlements to groundbreaking. I briefly addressed that Best Buy Warehouse, Plenty Unlimited, Everytable, UPS, and Olson Willow Walk were all brought to the city through my expertise. I even explain how I wrote the Staff Report on Plenty’s unprecedented Utility Usage Tax reduction from 10% to 5% over a seven-year period, which was used as a business incentive to move to Compton over Torrance and Santa Fe Springs.
4. Address your knowledge about budgeting?
- The rater predetermined response to a nebulas question such as budgeting has to bear more specificity. The response provided is you build a budget based on the parameters of the position and monitor the expense and variances from the actuals. The raters should have had a follow-on question when I stated that for a year I have served on the City’s Audit Committee that is in place from the CA State Controller’s findings. Presumably, my contributions to this mandated was undervalued.
5. Address your knowledge about grants?
- The rater had no understanding about the brief response given on obtaining and managing grants. This tech question was not given with any consideration to how the grants department has failed the city of considerable amount of time, and the raters did not understand how I initiated the receipt of 100 Electric Vehicle Charging from the los Angeles Economic Development Corporation.
There was no interchange on external job development that would have been handled through CareerLink. There was no interchange about the city’s General Plan, and more importantly, there were no questions pertaining with working with community groups.
Sincerely,