Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical utility, City Light, is now demanding a refund for the $17,500 that it paid to Brand.com in a botched effort to boost the online reputation of its highly-paid chief executive, Jorge Carrasco.

The project was concocted by the CEO’s chief of staff, Sephir Hamilton . In an interview with Ars, Hamilton said that the agency may even file a lawsuit to enforce this refund.

"We're leaving our options open,” he said. “I hope that they'll see that what we signed up for was not the service that they delivered. We were sold one bill of goods and we were given another.”

Documents received by Ars via a public records request show that City Light was particularly concerned about a 2008 Seattle Weekly story critical of Carrasco.

The piece said that he was "a short, slight Texan, Carrasco has brought a certain kind of cowboy justice to City Light, unsurprising, perhaps, from someone who earned the nickname 'Jorge Fiasco' while city manager in Austin, Texas, the first of three jobs he was ousted from before landing here." (Here are Carrasco's specific quibbles with that piece.)

Brand.com "enhances online branding and clears negatives by blanketing search results with positive content" in an attempt to counteract unwanted search engine results. City Light signed a contract with the company in October 2013 and extended it in February 2014. The contracts authorized payments of up to $47,500.

E-mails obtained by Ars show that a Brand.com campaign manager researched how to get the Seattle Weekly piece de-indexed from Google search results in the United States. Carrasco himself even asked Hamilton—who in turn, asked Brand.com—if the new European Union “right to be forgotten” ruling could be applied to getting rid of this pesky story. (It could not.)

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. For this lack of results, City Light spent $17,500 with Brand.com—and it does not intend to pay any more.

"Suppress any negatives"

Hamilton said that he first raised the issue of the utility’s online reputation when he was interviewing for the chief of staff job in early 2013.

“All I saw were negative stories about storms, outages and pay increases and I raised it as a concern during that interview,” he said. “And then after I started, [CEO Jorge Carrasco] and I discussed what we could do to more accurately represent the utility and what the utility is all about, because we didn't feel it was well represented online.”

Thus, the Brand.com contract. City Light says that it only ever thought Brand.com would help it place legitimate material in legitimate outlets—talking up some of the positive changes that have taken place at City Light during Carrasco's tenure. Instead, it appears to have received mostly bogus blog posts.

“We were told that they would provide help in getting some of our past material and news releases placed in reputable blogs and journals and ultimately didn't know that they would be paying for placement or creating fake news websites to place that news,” Hamilton said in an interview. “And ultimately, all of the material that was generated has been taken off search results because it violated Google's policies.”

E-mails from City Light show that Justin DeLisi, a Brand.com campaign manager, provided links to “stories” posted to websites that have since been pulled down and that appear to have been utterly fake. The "whois" information on those domains, which include weeklytimes.com, gazers.com, and advisories.com, is also obscured.

Brand.com did have more notable successes with story placement, including a January 2014 piece published in The Huffington Post. That story, "Affordable Green Technology for Your Home," touted Carrasco as a "green expert."

Among the documents obtained by Ars Technica was a draft copy of the article sent from Brand.com intended for Carrasco and his staff to insert quotes into. When the City Light contract with Brand.com came to light, the Huffington Post retracted the post for being in violation of its policies. It was replaced with an editor’s note saying the item “failed to disclose a material conflict of interest.”

None of this did much to help, and Carrasco soon realized it. By February 13, 2014, Carrasco expressed his frustration in an e-mail to Hamilton.

“Sephir, I did a name search and found the subject article listed as #6, #5, or #4 depending on which name listing I used. It is clearly going in the opposite direction. Seems to confirm something is amiss. Let’s touch base when you have a minute.”

So Hamilton pressed further and even asked Brand.com about ways to get the search result for the Seattle Weekly story removed entirely.

“It presents a challenge because we cannot normally de-index News Websites from US Google.com searches unless a comment is posted on the article that is false, defamatory, and anonymous,” DeLisi wrote back. “There is a section for comments in the majority of news articles at the bottom (the same with yours) and many times people will leave comments there which is the basis for de-indexing. As of now there is no comment on the news article which presents a problem. They are working on a couple different test methods that they are going to see if they can work for Jorge. I should know more in the next day or so as they review this and I will keep you posted.”

How not to be forgotten

By May 30, 2014, Carrasco was getting increasingly frustrated, and he forwarded Hamilton a ZDNet story about the recent EU “right to be forgotten” ruling: “Want to be forgotten by Google? Here’s how you do it.”

“If you can confirm if this opportunity is available in the US, that would be great," Carrasco wrote. "Alternatively, maybe the company we’ve been using [Brand.com] has a less expensive alternative available.”

The following day, Carrasco followed up.

“Sephir, the Seattle Weekly article we’ve discussed has ascended to #2 or #6 place in listings depending on the name used,” he wrote to Hamilton. “I can’t imagine how this could occur without a lot of activity focused on this article.”

Hamilton sent this on to DeLisi, asking if Europe's new rule might help City Light. DeLisi replied, “We are very encouraged and excited about the changes abroad however they don’t impact what we can do here as of now. Each country has different laws regarding this process and those laws do not apply here. Is Jorge a citizen of any European countries? That could possibly change things a little bit.”

Hamilton responded, “OK, thanks Justin. No European connection.”

Neither Brand.com nor DeLisi responded to our requests for comment.

Fallout

In mid-May, the Seattle Times broke the story of the Brand.com deal, and it all went downhill for Carrasco from there.

After the contract was revealed, the City Light CEO lost his bid for a $60,000 a year raise—but he remains the second-highest paid city employee with an annual salary of $245,000. That's just behind the city’s new police chief, who makes $250,000. In June 2014, the Seattle Times reported that Carrasco personally fell for a con involving two men who claimed to be members of the Cherokee Nation, but in fact were scammers—they made off with 20 tons of copper wire and scrap metal worth $120,000.

And earlier this month, Carrasco said at a press conference that he regretted the entire effort to scrub his online reputation. Hamilton concurred. “It was an experiment that certainly didn't work and we would not do it again,” he told Ars.