Former Odessa Municipal Court Director Kimberly Jozwiak said her replacement is a good, long-standing friend of hers, but she’s just misinformed about many of the statements she made during last week’s city council meeting.
Jozwiak left the court last month to become the municipal court director in Garland. Her departure came a little more than a year after former assistant city manager Phillip Urrutia became assistant city manager in that community.
Interim Director Leah Huff-Albertson told the council last month that municipal court wasn’t communicating with the Odessa Police Department about tickets not being processed, that money orders and checks had been stuffed in drawers and that the state fined the city thousands of dollars for late report filings.
Huff-Albertson said that since she came aboard she realized there is a glitch in the software for electronic citations given by the Odessa Police Department that OPD was unaware of. The glitch resulted in tickets not showing up in the system.
“I did not realize that until I came no one was giving them these tickets. These errors were put in a drawer and had lots of checks and money with them. And anyway, a whole other story there,” Huff-Albertson said. “I know you’re laughing, but it’s really true. You can’t make this up.”
Jozwiak said she was in constant communication with OPD Detective Yolanda Rincon about the glitches with the ticket writer software. Lists of missing citations were created and shared, she said.
It was quite common for people to come into the court to pay for a ticket and for court staff to not find the ticket in the system, Jozwiak said. It also wasn’t uncommon for people to mail the court checks and money orders for tickets that also couldn’t be found.
“Every time we would figure out citations were missing or there was some other issue, we’d notify her and she would contact their vendor and they would work on it and try to figure it out,” Jozwiak said.
Every day, Court Supervisor Kasheva Smith would take the checks and money orders that had been mailed in and check the system to see if the missing tickets were imported, Jozwiak said.
At the end of the day, those not matched up with incoming tickets would be returned to the safe, Jozwiak said.
When a fellow court staffer notified City Hall Smith was planning to turn in her two-week’s notice, Smith was told her services were no longer needed and she had to leave her post mid-day, Jozwiak said. She suspects that’s why there were checks and money orders found in a drawer rather than in the safe.
“I was advised that OPD has had so many problems with the software company that at one point Chief (Mike) Gerke was fed up with them and was going to just scrap it and go to someone else after they’d been working on it for months,” Jozwiak said. “They begged and begged and said ‘Let us work on it it. Let us work on it.’ So he gave them two weeks and at the end of the two weeks was right when I left.”
As for the city being fined thousands of dollars for late report filings, Jozwiak stated she filed the October report for September’s activity with the Office of Court Administration prior to her Nov. 1 departure. The subsequent report was due Nov. 20.
Huff-Albertson also told the city council it’s taking people three to four months to get a first court date after receiving a ticket.
However, Jozwiak said that, too, isn’t entirely accurate. When people receive tickets, their first court date is printed right on it and it’s 14 days from that date.
And while subsequent pretrial hearings are often delayed for months it’s because the city attorney’s office has never returned to full staff since City Attorney Natasha Brooks was fired Dec. 13, 2022, and several of her staff members quit in protest, Jozwiak said.
Huff-Albertson also spoke at length about improving communication between the courts and the city by creating additional reports.
Jozwiak said that several types of the reports Huff-Albertson was talking about already exist and she would regularly share them with Urrutia and later then City Manager Michael Marrero and then Assistant City Manager Aaron Smith.
However, when Agapito Bernal took over when Marrero and Smith were fired, he did not take her up on her offer to continue sending the reports, she said.
While she sent Urrutia reports monthly and met with him every other week, she met with Bernal twice during the 11 months she worked under him, Jozwiak said.
Huff-Albertson has also been touting the recent purchase of kiosks to improve efficiency at the court, but Jozwiak said she was the one to purchase the first kiosk.
According to city records, the city council approved the purchase of two additional kiosks from Adcomp Systems, Nov. 28. The price of the kiosks, plus the software, cameras, training and annual remote support came to roughly $74,000.
According to LinkedIn, Mansur Plumber is the owner of Adcomp Systems and founder of New in Blue. Huff-Albertson is listed as the director of technology on both their websites.
The CEO of New in Blue is Mike Wilson of T2 Professional Consulting, which was hired by Mayor Javier Joven hours after the city council fired Marrero and Brooks without explanation. New in Blue’s slogan is “law enforcement technology by cops for cops.”
Jozwiak, who came aboard right as the pandemic struck, said she and her staff had a lot of challenges. The city had just purchased new software from Tyler Technologies and no prep work had been done before it was implemented.
“So we struggled for a very long time trying to create workflows as we’re working, creating workflows and creating queues and creating a standard operating procedure manual that would match and flow with that software,” she said.
On top of that, Jozwiak discovered a backlog of more than 100,000 cases going back to the 1980s that needed to be cleared up. Much has been said about the court writing off thousands of dollars in unpaid fines, but state law dictates that specific cases may be deemed uncollectible by the court after 15 years, she said. They weren’t indiscriminately closed without authority, she stressed.
Jozwiak said she began going through the backlog at the request of then Assistant City Manager Cindy Muncy because outside auditors mentioned it could be detrimental to cities to carry so much uncollectible debt.
“It was just happenstance that they had passed the statute about tickets 15 years or older later that same year. ‘The court can find these uncollectible and get them off of your city’s books’ because it was causing concerns with auditors all over the state of Texas,” Jozwiak said.
Jozwiak also questioned Huff-Albertson’s plan for OPD to train current court staff to become bailiffs. She worries about the time when an unruly defendant will require hands-on detainment and have to be taken into custody. Law enforcement officers must go through police academies to become certified police officers. Court staff are regular citizens with no authority to detain or arrest, she said.
Having said all of this, Jozwiak said there are always ways to improve and many of Huff-Albertson’s plans are excellent.
Jozwiak, whose endorsement of Huff-Albertson is on the interim director’s LinkedIn page, said she hopes she’s successful in implementing them.
“I have known Leah for many years and based on what I know, she will be a perfect fit for the City of Odessa,” Jozwiak said. “I wish them much luck and best wishes.”
