As Damien Newton covered recently, on October 7 Mayor Phil Brock and Councilmember Oscar de la Torre discussed their desire to enact a Project 2025 style purge of city staff. De la Torre said that this Night of the Long Knives should involve requiring every single member of city staff to officially resign and reapply for their jobs, but Brock responded that civil service protections meant they could “only” do this to the department heads.
During the discussion, Brock referenced a previous incident in which he was forced to apologize for what he described as a (slight but only very slight paraphrase) “silly social media post that was blown out of proportion”, but this social media post was in fact a city charter violation.
Earlier this year, there was allegedly an incident in which Design and Historic Preservation Planner Stephanie Reich requested a police officer to come into council chambers during a raucous Architectural Review Board meeting which was dominated by a large number of agitated NIMBYs in attendance.
In a discussion of this on Facebook, Brock mentioned that he had already expressed his displeasure about this to Reich’s supervisors. This caught my attention as the city charter expressly forbids city councilmembers from seeking to influence the employment status of staff—this is what Brock was referring to when he corrected de la Torre that they could only purge the department heads. But depending on who Brock was referring to by “Reich’s supervisors”, a second charter violation had occurred as well, as the charter specifies that councilmember inquiries about staff must go solely through the city manager.
610 Interference in administrative service.
Neither the City Council nor any of its members shall order or request directly or indirectly the appointment of any person to an office or employment or the removal of any person therefrom, by the City Manager, or by any of the department heads in the administrative service of the City. Except for the purpose of inquiry, the City Council and its members shall deal with the administrative service under the City Manager solely through the City Manager and neither the City Council nor any member shall give orders to any subordinates of the City Manager, either publicly or privately.
(Amended at General Municipal Election, November 3, 1992, certified by Res. No. 8503CCS)
To find out who Brock communicated about with Reich, I submitted a public records request. The PRA response revealed that Brock had emailed about this not just with City Manager David White but also Planning head David Martin. Again, including Martin on this was a city charter violation by Brock as any questions about staff should have gone solely through White. Brock was forwarding emails from the public saying things like ‘Reich needed to be fired’ and ‘needed to be forced to enroll in anger management classes’, and included his own commentary that he had received “dozens” of complaints about Reich.
All of these messages were clearly illegal attempts to influence Reich’s employment status. I suspect that Brock does not feel that he should be forced to enroll in anger management classes for threatening to have the police escort me out of council chambers for giving public comment at the October 22 meeting.
I’ve included the full PRA response in this article, but as a note to the reader, the response is not as long as it looks and is slightly confusing to follow on first read because Brock included the full preceding email thread history for each new email he included in the PRA response. But the facts speak for themselves.
Brock has already tried to purge the city staff and was merely working out the details, in public, with de la Torre about how they could more effectively achieve this goal in the event that they’re both reelected to another term.
