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Pa. anti-discrimination agency 'horrible for the citizens'

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, created in 1955, is an obscure government agency with a modest budget. Most taxpayers will never need its services.

Gov. Wolf quietly removed Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission Chairman Gerald Robinson (pictured), who was named to the post in 2011 by then-Gov. Tom Corbett.
Gov. Wolf quietly removed Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission Chairman Gerald Robinson (pictured), who was named to the post in 2011 by then-Gov. Tom Corbett.Read morePennlive.com

The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, created in 1955, is an obscure government agency with a modest budget. Most taxpayers will never need its services.

But for victims of discrimination who can't afford a lawyer, the commission might be their best shot at justice.

"The reason it was brought into place is because people that had these problems had no place to go," said Homer Floyd, a titan of the civil rights movement who served as the commission's executive director for 41 years until he retired in 2011.

Floyd, who has fought racial segregation and hate groups and once shared a stage with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said the commission is needed today for a simple reason: Discrimination still exists.

"It's necessary," Floyd said, "because we still have forms of discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations and education."

But the commission's future is uncertain and its effectiveness has been called into question. Its findings of probable cause have plummeted over the last decade.

Last week, the Inquirer and Daily News reported that Gov. Wolf had quietly removed commission Chairman Gerald Robinson, who was named to the post in 2011 by then-Gov. Tom Corbett. Robinson has been accused in federal lawsuits of using racial epithets and tampering with the controversial selection process for Floyd's successor, JoAnn Edwards.

Current and former employees - 18 people, from investigators to lawyers - say the agency was practically dismantled under Edwards, triggering a prolonged exodus of longtime staffers amid allegations that clients' discrimination cases were being dismissed without sufficient consideration.

"It wasn't good for the workplace and it was horrible for the citizens we were serving," said Lynda Kent, an investigator who left the commission's Philadelphia office in April. "We missed so much."

Kent, who worked at the commission for nine years, said Edwards - a former human resources vice president with no direct civil rights experience - ended the practice of taking walk-in complaints in the Philadelphia office and implemented strict timetables that forced investigators to clear out cases prematurely. As a result, she said, complainants "didn't get a fair dealing."

Cecilia Keller, a former investigator in the Philadelphia office who handled the 2009 Valley Swim Club racial-discrimination case, said Robinson and Edwards ultimately forced her to retire early in 2013.

"People that never wanted to leave left," she said. "They came in and turned it upside down."

Keller said new performance standards were put in place that seemed to discourage discrimination cases from moving forward.

"It's like they did everything they could do to keep us from finding probable cause," she said.

In 2007-08, the commission recorded 147 probable cause findings, agency records show. By 2013-14, that number had fallen to a low of 40.

"We got to feeling like, 'What's the point if you're going to believe everything the respondents say?' " Kent said. "You had to process the case and it wasn't about investigating the matter."

Joel Bolstein, the Bucks County lawyer and longtime PHRC commissioner whom Wolf has named interim chairman, said the agency's main challenges have been increased costs and state budget cuts. Staffing has fallen from about 250 in 1999 to 78 people, he said.

"You find an agency in state government that has lost more than two-thirds of its staff complement, with the same number of cases and complaints coming in year after year, and tell me how well they are handling things," Bolstein said by email this week. "It's a challenging environment."

Edwards said in a statement that a case-management process installed in 2013 led to "increased efficiency and quality of the investigations," with settlement rates up 8 percent and settlements up by nearly $1 million. Probable-cause findings last year increased to 68.

Wolf's 2016-17 proposed budget would restore some of the commission's lost funding and enable it to boost its staff to 104 and conduct more training and outreach, Bolstein said.

But the commission will likely need more than money, according to ex-staffers who say unfairness is pervasive within the organization.

Vivian Lambert, a former investigator in the commission's Harrisburg office, said her former bosses' harassment forced her to retire last year. She filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint.

"I could no longer work in a hostile work environment," she said.

Lambert recalled her superiors pressuring her to close out a case because of the complainant's sexual identity. They were uncomfortable handling a case involving a transgender person, she said.

"They were telling me to close it without the completion of the investigation," Lambert said.

A former supervising attorney in the commission's Pittsburgh office, who asked that her name not be printed, recalled a colleague saying she wouldn't work with an intern because she was a lesbian or a Chinese clerk because her English was poor.

"When I left each day, I felt I needed to take a shower, that's how disgusting the place was," the attorney said.

Karen Pitt, the former employees' union steward in Harrisburg who retired in 2014, asked, "If an agency is supposed to eradicate discrimination, how sad is it that the employees are being discriminated against and harassed?"

The agency, she said, is "supposed to be the shining example and here we are one of the worst offenders. There's something wrong with that picture."

In an interview, Robinson denied the allegations of racial discrimination leveled by two former workers and said he was not sure why Wolf had removed him. Colleagues and acquaintances liken Robinson, who is black, to Clarence Thomas, the conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice.

"We're supposed to enforce the antidiscrimination laws of the state," Robinson said. "It's not a wellness center."

Wolf spokesman Jeffrey Sheridan declined to comment on the reasons for Robinson's removal or why he was replaced last week, and not when the governor, a Democrat, took office in January 2015.

"There are hundreds of commissions in the Commonwealth, and several where the governor has authority to appoint the chair," Sheridan said. "We did not make changes to each one right away."

Sheridan said the decision has not been made whether Bolstein should be named the permanent chair.

benderw@phillynews.com

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@wbender99