A woman who ran D.C.’s technology office is on Vince Gray’s shortlist to be the next city administrator.
Sources with knowledge of the D.C. Council chairman’s plans for when he likely takes the mayor’s seat say Suzanne Peck, who is widely championed for bringing the District into the 21st century technologywise, could take the top administration job come January.
Peck took the reins at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer in 1999. She stayed on for eight years, transforming the city into an award-winning technological enterprise. In March 2007, she left her city job to take the equivalent job at the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, where she works today. Despite her achievements, when she left a bribery and kickback scheme had taken hold.
As city administrator, it would be Peck’s job to implement the mayor’s policies across city agencies. Peck did not return calls for comment. “She was a change agent in the [Mayor Anthony] Williams administration and took the city’s information technology from worst to first,” Gray campaign manager Adam Rubinson told The Washington Examiner.
Rubinson said Gray has made no decisions about any hires he’d make after Nov. 2. “We’re focused on the general election,” he said.
He added, however, that Peck was “extremely involved with the Gray campaign.” According to Rubinson, Peck helped with fundraising, took on “individual projects,” and sometimes did data entry.
Peck was Rubinson’s boss at OCTO, and Rubinson says she had “real controls in place” while they worked there.
But in 2006, D.C. Auditor Deborah Nichols chastised Peck in an audit saying “OCTO operated in flagrant violation of applicable laws, regulations, and rules” because “OCTO management circumvented applicable internal financial management and administrative controls.”
Nichols was investigating a 2003 incident in which Peck signed off on OCTO paying nearly $30,000 in moving expenses for the agency’s new fiscal director and program manager, husband and wife Pedro and Kim Agosto. Kim Agosto was the niece of Peck’s chief of operations, and the agency failed to follow the District’s regulations for covering moving costs. The couple later paid the city back.
It was also during Peck’s tenure that a bribery and kickback scheme took root, beginning in September 2005 and netting those involved – including the agency’s chief of security – hundreds of thousands of dollars before the FBI busted it in the spring of 2009.
When asked about the bribery-kickback scheme, Rubinson said, “There was never a situation where something like that could have happened when we were at OCTO.”
He added, “We were shocked when we learned about what happened in the last few years.”
