More than 500 private security guards last month remained at their posts at more than a dozen area federal facilities despite not receiving pay or benefits from their now-defunct employer, according to testimony received Thursday during a hearing on Capitol Hill.
The employees of D.C.-based Startech International Security, which held five contracts with the Federal Protective Service to guard 14 buildings in D.C. and Maryland, went without salary from May 4 through the beginning of June. It was only then that the Department of Homeland Security declared Startech in default and shifted the contracts to another firm. Yet during that month, no more than a handful of guards left their posts in protest.
“I am the first defense, the eyes and ears for the Federal Protective Service and homeland security, a deterrent if you will,” Latanya Montgomery, a former Startech employee, told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management. “So even as the morale of myself and that of many other contract guards is at an all-time low, we continued to report for duty.”
Startech’s financial problems are a matter of dispute. Weldon Waites, Startech’s leader blamed the DHS for the company’s persistently slow payments. The company defaulted on one loan after another, Waites said, until it was “at the mercy of the bank” and simply had nothing left to pay its employees.
But Ann Marie Messner, the company’s former chief operating officer who resigned earlier this month, accused Waites of “playing fast and loose with the finances.” He drew a $360,000 annual salary, she said, and used the company to pay mortgages on condominiums in the District and Myrtle Beach, S.C.
She called on the federal government to revoke all Startech contracts.
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the subcommittee’s chair, called for “top-to-bottom reform” of the contract guard program.
