You’ve
probably never heard of Seattle City Light, the city’s public
electric provider, or its CEO, Jorge Carrasco. If you have, it was
probably something bad, and it probably only crossed your path in
the form City Light’s own fail train that keeps chugging along,
trying to make Carrasco’s reputation better in all the wrong ways.
The latest stop in this saga is City Light’s demand for a refund
on a $17,500 bill. That’s a hefty sum, so it doesn’t seem like such
a petty squabble – except that it was paid to a site called
Brand.com, which was tasked with improving the online reputation of
Carrasco. Until the utility provider decided it wasn’t pleased with
the results, it had been willing to fork over nearly $50,000 total
for the service. That was
public money.
City Lights represenatives assure that
it was actually trying to boost its organization reputation,
but Ars Technica
reported this weekend that it got its hands on some documents
that indicate exactly what Carrasco was trying to scrub from the
web: a 2008 Seattle Weekly article that portrayed the
electricity chief in a bad light. Ars points out that
“Brand.com’s work doesn’t appear to have borne much fruit;
the article still remains the number four hit on Google
when searching
for Carrasco’s name.” The site was also supposed to churn out
positive stories about Carrasco, but most of those failed to launch
because Google has a policy of weeding those kinds of things
out.
But, hey, what’s that Seattle Weekly article
about?
It’s not all bad,
praising him as “charming [and] engaging,” but it also details
Carrasco’s inability to hold onto jobs in other cities and
describes him as a “short, slight Texan” with a “short fuse,” and
says that he flipped out on his staff after receiving an email
accusing City Lights of mismanaging public money under his
rule.
But his reputation issues don’t end there. When the
publicity-improvement deal was made public in May, it inevitably
raised questions about why the City Light chief needed it, and
got people talking about the fact that in April he somehow allowed
con artists to walk off with $120,000 worth of copper owned by City
Lights.
He only added fuel to this fire by later asking for a $60,000
raise, despite the fact that he already earns the city’s second
highest salary at $245,000. Then Carrasco denied asking for the
raise. Then he issued a dodgy apology for the denial,
saying that when he was questioned about it his “answer was
wrong.”
The thing is, few people outside of Seattle would be talking
about this epic ineptitude hadn’t Carrasco thrown a fit and tried
to have it covered up. For the folks at home, this is called the
Streisand
Effect: the harder someone (usually a public figure with a big
ego) tries to hide something, the more the Internet is titillated
by it.
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