Seattle-based Summit Law Group is investigating a former city employee’s allegations that city of Federal Way personnel forged his signature.
Michael Morales, the city’s Community Development Director from March 2015 to April 2016, said he doesn’t recall signing an Oct. 12, 2015 letter from the city to Heartland, the real estate firm Weyerhaeuser hired to sell their 425-acre property, now owned by Industrial Realty Group.
Yet the letter depicts a pixelated, blue signature that reads “Michael Morales.”
Titled “Re: Zoning for Weyerhaeuser’s Corporate Campus Property,” the letter is addressed to Jim Reinhardsen, Heartland’s principal and senior managing director.
In it is an interpretation of zoning laws that apply to the former-Weyerhaeuser property – land that is zoned as an Office Park 1 and Corporate Park 1, a unique zoning code. The letter explains that, because of a 1994 Concomitant Pre-Annexation Zoning Agreement between Weyerhaeuser and the city, one that is “binding and in full force and effect,” according to the letter, the zoning laws outlined in that agreement still stand.
While the letter doesn’t make a determination on the types of projects that can be developed on the land – that’s done through an application process – it’s documentation that the city assured outside agencies that still upholds the concomitant agreement, which many residents have questioned.
“In the face of these allegations involving a crucial zoning determination, we believe the City Council is obligated to protect the Weyerhaeuser Campus and city by immediately enacting a moratorium on the acceptance of additional building permit applications and by suspending action on the Preferred Freezer/Orca Seafood permit application,” said members of the Save the Weyerhaeuser Campus group.
The group has been actively against the construction of a fish processing warehouse since the city received the project application in August.
In fact, it was in a Mirror article about that very issue that Morales said he became aware of the letter.
Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell was quoted in an Aug. 25 Mirror article titled, “Federal Way residents protest Preferred Freezer, Orca Bay Seafoods project proposal.”
Ferrell said in the article, “When they were talking about selling the land, one of the most important things was the concomitant agreement that was passed by the City Council 22 years ago. It stays with the land. I think that was our legal interpretation and that was the interpretation of Heartland and IRG, and Michael Morales, as late as last fall in October, basically said that.”
Confused, Morales filed a public records request asking for more information. He also sent an email to residents who oppose the Preferred Freezer/Orca Bay Seafoods project, and they provided him the Oct. 12, 2015 letter.
But it wasn’t signed.
“When I saw the contents of the letter that was unsigned, my first reaction was, ‘OK, yeah, I remember seeing that kind of language and that wasn’t an uncommon assessment of the concomitant agreement, but that’s when I noticed all the formatting issues with the letter and the problems with it, and so I asked for it and was told it would take a month,” Morales said, adding that he pressed them further and received it earlier than anticipated. “When they turned it over to me, voila, I got a signed copy.”
The document broke “all kinds of communication protocols.”
He said he was told to address people by their title, last name and then first name in parantheses, but the letter is addressed, “Dear Jim.”
“I wouldn’t have that kind of relationship to just say, ‘Dear Jim,”‘ Morales said.
And he noticed the signature “didn’t look right.” Morales said he typically signs his name with his middle initial, an “A,” and directed his staff to include the “A” when they provided documents without his middle initial. The name underneath the signature doesn’t include an “A.”
“So at that point I became really leery about what was going on,” Morales said. “I made a request for the metadata and the metadata came back pretty ugly.”
Who created the document?
Metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. Metadata on a document can show where the document was created, by whom and when various edits or changes were made.
The metadata revealed the letter was created by a woman named Angela Jin, an associate program manager with Heartland, on Sept. 24, 2015. It was named “L50923 CLEAN DRAFT letter re City Zoning Issues.docx.” It was then edited on Oct. 10, 2015, on Federal Way Chief of Staff Brian Wilson’s wife’s laptop. The user on the laptop was “Brian,” and the letter’s name was changed to “IRGLetter10122015.docx”
After Wilson made a few edits to the document, the metadata shows it was last modified as “Heartland10122015.pdf” at 12:42 p.m. on Oct. 12, 2015. The folder path shows it was scanned in the Mayor’s Office.
“If this is supposed to be on the up and up, then why are you having them email it to your home address and never saving it on a city computer until you had a PDF?” Morales questioned. “There’s no freaking way you create a letter like that.”
Morales said there’s nothing that connects him to the letter except for the “funky” signature.
Ferrell couldn’t answer why the letter was drafted by Jin, pointing out he wasn’t involved in that level, but he said the city and Heartland had a working relationship.
“I think they were working on trying to ascertain whether the concomitant agreement and zoning would stay the same,” Ferrell said.
Morales said be believes the letter to Heartland was significant for the point of sale.
“This is Heartland telling IRG this is what the city says you can do on this property,” he said. “You don’t want to come back directly to the city and want those assurances made directly to you as the potential buyer and not just through the third-party, but they were trying to keep everything so secret that they didn’t want anybody’s name on there but Heartland.”
The manner this letter was handled is unethical by “any development professional standards” and isn’t standard protocol in other municipalities, Morales added.
“I would have likely asked Heartland to provide me with any information to reconsider any disagreements we might have, but not to author their own determination letter from the city,” he said. “Even if they offered, it would have been routed to the city attorney’s office for concurrent review and formulation of a response. I have a 20-year career and track record of doing things the right way and this doesn’t smell right.”
“It’s just so smarmy, you know? It’s a real estate letter,” Morales said. “We’re not the ones trying to sell it.”
Morales forwarded the information to the mayor and acting city attorney on Oct. 3.
In a response to Morales, Acting City Attorney Mark Orthmann said, “You have attributed much significance to the fact that the Oct. 12, 2015, letter originated from Heartland. The city routinely receives reports and proposals from developers for review and subsequent adoption. In this case, a draft letter was presented to the city, it was reviewed by city staff (including Mr. Morales), and adopted largely unchanged as it confirmed the existing zoning and was an accurate statement of the rules and regulations that applied to the former Weyerhaeuser property.”
Wilson said he is authorized to work at home on city documents, although it is not a common occurrence.
“Best practice would be to do work in the office on a city computer or take my city computer (laptop) home to work on documents,” he said in an email. “In this case, I used my home laptop computer.”
Orthmann confirmed the city directed the City Attorney’s Office “several weeks ago” to retain a third party to investigate Morales’ forgery allegations.
Oct. 12, 2015
Morales checked his calendars and confirmed he and Wilson had a meeting with Heartland on Oct. 12, 2015, but said he wouldn’t have signed the document because there was too little time between the Oct. 10, 2015, edits and the meeting with Heartland on Oct. 12, 2015. He said he would have sought legal review on the agreement, which uses a very technical interpretation.
Wilson and Ferrell maintain Morales signed the letter.
“Community Development Director Morales signed the letter in my office on Monday, Oct. 12, 2015,” Wilson said. “It was subsequently scanned into the city system and sent to Mayor Ferrell with a copy to Community Development Director Morales and me on the same day.”
The Mirror obtained a copy of that email, which was sent at 4 p.m. that day. Morales was copied on the email.
‘Disgruntled employee’
“He signed it in the presence of Brian Wilson and then, just recently, after Michael was terminated for cause, for criminal behavior earlier this year, we became aware via email for the very first time of this allegation that he’s claiming that this was, this letter was somehow, that his signature was somehow forged,” Ferrell said, noting that Morales didn’t claim the document was forged in the seven months he worked for the city after the letter and before his termination.
Morales was terminated on April 25 after criminal charges were brought against him for driving with a suspended license. Police discovered this after he was involved in a fender-bender on March 30. Morales also didn’t have proof of car insurance at the time.
Safe City cameras recorded Morales driving his vehicle after he was issued a citation telling him not to drive until his license was no longer suspended. He was placed on paid administrative leave and terminated by Wilson on April 25 after a predisciplinary hearing on April 14.
Ferrell said Morales had meetings with Industrial Realty Group and Heartland and discussed the concomitant agreement multiple times in the seven months between the letter and when he was terminated.
In a Feb. 10 email provided by the mayor, Morales writes to Wilson a synopsis of the concomitant agreement, noting it has “been in full force and effect since October 1994” among other interpretations, such that “principal uses permitted in the CP zone include (but are not limited to): corporate offices, parks, research, development and testing; production and light assembly; and, warehousing and distribution…”
“He’s a disgruntled former employee,” Ferrell said. “So there’s no way as the community development director that he would have not known, seen and been aware of this letter.”
Morales said Ferrell’s comments are “typical Trumpian deflection” and questioned how his termination correlates with Wilson’s actions.
“This isn’t disgruntled employee syndrome,” he said.
Morales also questions why the email he was copied on with the letter never showed up in public records requests made by himself and North Lake residents.
The Mirror has sent a records request for more information on this email.
The signature
To the naked eye, a scanned copy of the signature appears pixelated. The Mirror does not have the original file, nor has the city produced it.
“While the rest of the document has the same issue, the signature line and ‘very truly yours’ are a different type of pixels, with a different shadow,” Morales said. “Typically, it would indicate that there are two different photos or jpegs at play. In other words, the megapixel settings for the signature are different than the rest of the document. That is one explanation, but I am not a forensic expert.”
When questioned about this, Wilson, the only reported witness of Morales’ signing of the document, could not explain why the signature appeared this way.
Acting City Attorney J. Ryan Call said Wilson was not informed of this because the city didn’t want to interfere with the ongoing investigation. However, he did say his “lay conclusion” was similar when he first looked at the signature.
“It appeared out of place or fuzzy compared to the rest of the document,” he wrote in an email. “I decided to perform an experiment myself by signing a document in blue pen and scanning it into our system using the default scanner settings.”
Call said the results mimic “what you see in the Morales letter perfectly.”
“The printed text is clear, while the verifiable real signature and the printed text above it is slightly fuzzy after being scanned,” he said. “I am no expert and do not claim that my little experiment is definitive, but it makes me think I don’t know as much about what real signatures look like as maybe I thought it did.”
“As we showed very directly yesterday, we have a security system in our printer to change signatures to make them look pixelated,” said Steve McNey, the city’s community outreach and government relations coordinator. “We did them. Same effect.”
The city invited the Mirror to try out the experiment on Tuesday and the Mirror had similar results, but not identical. For instance, the signature did turn up pixelated with some of the above text affected after scanning the document into the city’s scanner, but it wasn’t as pronounced.
And when the Mirror ran the documents, both the alleged forged document and its own test documents, through an image-editing program, there were again similar but not identical results. While pulling images from the documents, the editing software pulls the alleged forged signature and the words “Very truly yours,” identifying it as an image (as opposed to a part of the scanned document like basic text), while the same action only pulls the signatures from the test documents, not words above it despite those words being affected.
McNey said the city did a full search through the city computers and Wilson’s home computer and couldn’t find any jpegs, deleted or otherwise, of Morales’ name.
“That would have been the easiest thing to find – a signature – but it’s not there,” McNey said. “We have a statement by the chief of staff who has attested to the fact that the department director signed the letter.”
McNey pointed out that, as the former chief of police for Federal Way and with more than 30 years of service to the state, Wilson is credible.
“I think that it would be a shame that just because someone throws out an allegation, people have to be muddied,” McNey said, noting Morales was terminated with cause and is going after the person who terminated him – Wilson.
Call also believes it would be a disservice to the public to draw conclusions before the report from Summit Law Group comes out.
Summit Law Group investigator Alex Baehr said he has no comment on the issue of the signature being an image, as the investigation is pending and proceeding.
What’s next?
Ferrell said his administration takes the allegation “very seriously” and pointed out the city’s actions of hiring an independent legal council to do the investigation.
“The investigation continues into the allegation that the signature on the attached letter is claimed to be a forgery,” Baehr said. “As a full record has not been developed in this regard, it would be unfortunate for anyone to make a premature judgment on what amounts to an incomplete record.”
City spokeswoman Cathy Schrock said the city estimates it will be between one and two weeks before Summit Law Group delivers their full report on their investigation.
She said it’s normal for the Federal Way Police Department to investigate accusations of unethical behavior, but because of the nature of Morales’ allegations, the city hired the third-party.
“I’m confident in the fact that this has been taken outside,” Schrock said. “I know how these kinds of things work. We do a lot of it in the police department. [There are] accusations and we take them seriously but when they’re going to be investigated, we have to be hands off.”
Schrock said Wilson is not on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.
“This would be a terribly disruptive policy, as anyone with an axe to grind could effectively halt the operation of government,” she said. “For this reason, administrative leave is actually the exception, not the rule.”
She added that employees are put on paid administrative leave if an initial review of the preliminary facts by the supervisor, the legal department and human resources supports the allegation made, leading then to the belief that leaving the employee in place could expose the city to liability.
Morales said if Summit Law Group finds physical evidence of forgery, then Ferrell, a former prosecutor, is duty-bound to forward that information to the King County Prosecutor’s Office for review.
“Ultimately it’s just going to come down to Brian’s word versus all the metadata, and I think they’ll probably give him a pass,” Morales said. “Probably let him retire.”
Morales said if nothing is done then the public has to deal with the knowledge that an appointed official “is basically running his own clandestine government at his house.”
“This opens up questions about all kinds of developments,” he said. “The Federal Way apartments at 1st and 348th and how all the efforts that were going through to try to get those guys off to the races before they could pass a moratorium, you know, start to pull that stuff up off his home computer. I think it’s all suspect at this point.”
[Note: The original version of this story used an outdated photo of Brian Wilson from before his retirement as Federal Way Chief of Police in January 2014. The photo now accompanying the article is more recent and reflects Wilson’s civilian status as Mayor Jim Ferrell’s chief of staff.]
