MARTINSVILLE, Va. – After nearly a year of investigations, the long-awaited workplace investigation into former Martinsville City Manager Aretha Ferrell-Benavides is taking shape.
Wednesday, the city released a summary of the investigation, detailing a pattern of retaliation against employees, mismanagement of city funds and questionable hiring practices.
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The two-page summary details how Ferrell-Benavides would pay for expensive restaurant outings for councilmembers and staff, even purchasing a hot tub for Mayor LC Jones and his girlfriend before he voted to give her a pay raise.
The report also details how Ferrell-Benavides hired employees, oftentimes without vetting them or doing background checks. She also failed to complete standard paperwork for new employees.
Mismanagement was central to the report, including how the city nearly lost $4.4 million in federal funds because the city missed filing deadlines. It took intervention from Congressman Morgan Griffith’s office to ensure the correct files were sent to the Treasury Department to keep the city from losing those funds.
The report says Ferrell-Benavides would also make unauthorized budget amendments and transfers of city funds, including transferring $170,000 from the Economic Development budget into her budget, making budget amendments without Council approval or required hearings and allowing the Chief Operating Officer to make a $10 million school appropriation without Council approval.
One topic that was partially addressed in the forensic audit of city finances that came out in April was more thoroughly addressed in this report: Ferrell-Benavides’ use of her city purchase card. The city acknowledged in the report that Ferrell-Benavides’s purchased card lacked independent oversight. The purchases she made on the card were often reviewed by either herself or people she was in charge of.
These purchases included multiple violations of the City’s travel policy, as she would oftentimes go far over the spending limit or recommended spending amounts for her trips. The report says she never turned in thousands of receipts for purchases made on that card.
Finally, the report detailed Ferrell-Benavides’ multiple attempts at retaliation against the whistleblower who tried to alert the city attorney of the mismanagement detailed above. After the whistleblower took their concerns to the city, the report claims Ferrell-Benavides tried to undermine them to other city employees. On one recorded phone call, she went so far as to call them a “chauvinist” who was “full of [expletive]”.
On another occasion, the whistleblower discovered the Chief Operating Officer, who had resigned, still had access to the city’s computer system and was continuing to create new funds. The report says that when the whistleblower tried to bring these concerns to the former city manager, she responded by copying several city employees, including the mayor, on an email that accused the employee of being unable to do their job.
The city says these and other facts that haven’t been released due to attorney-client privilege or constitutional protections permitted “termination for cause immediately, without notice, for malfeasance, dishonesty, policy violations, unsatisfactory performance, and ‘any other behavior or conduct that may be deemed by City Council to adversely affect the confidence of the public or the integrity of the City.’”
There are ongoing criminal investigations into Ferrell-Benavides and Mayor Jones over the matter.