After Mayor Lee Brown took office in 1998, he deposed veteran public works chief Jimmie Schindewolf and ushered in an era of anarchy in the city department that fixes streets and sewers and is most visible to voters. After several directors turned out to be duds, a desperate Brown called in Vanden Bosch, a former Army Corps of Engineers disciplinarian and veteran of the Kathy Whitmire administration. Vanden Bosch finally restored order out of the chaos, but not before the image of leaky water mains and mishandled downtown street construction had permanently tarnished the image of Brown's administration. Thanks to this bureaucrat, we'll never know how much worse it could have been.
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