Dismissed Employee Files Claim of Race Discrimination

A Long Beach woman who was fired in December as Hawaiian Gardens’ housing officer has filed a racial discrimination complaint against the city.

Cheryl Shavers, who is black, said Latino city officials got rid of her because she was helping too many blacks move into Hawaiian Gardens through a federal rent-subsidy program that she administered.

City Administrator Nelson Oliva said Shavers’ allegations are “totally ludicrous.”

Shavers was fired Dec. 20 for violating city personnel and conflict-of-interest rules, he said. She accepted money from a property owner participating in the rent-subsidy program, Oliva said.

She had been placed on administrative leave in August when the City Council launched an investigation.

Shavers acknowledges accepting $100 from Frank Richards, who lives out of state, to manage a rental home that he owned on Ibex Avenue. She did not think she was doing wrong and her boss, former Community Development Director Carl Holmes, “didn’t have a problem with it either,” she said.

Holmes was laid off in November in what Oliva said was a cost-cutting move.

Shavers complained that Holmes and former City Clerk Carol Dorfmeyer--both white--got better treatment from city officials when they departed. Oliva said, however, that Holmes and Dorfmeyer were never suspected of violating city personnel policies.

Shavers’ attorney, Duane R. Folke, says city officials callously threw his client “out on her proverbial rear end” just days before Christmas. Shavers, 32, remains unemployed.

She was hired by the city in November, 1991, as an administrative assistant in the Community Development Department. Her duties included overseeing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s local Section 8 program, which subsidizes the rents of low-income families. She also ran a home improvement loan program funded by the city’s U.S. Community Development Block Grant.

She filed the discrimination complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.