Wow. It’s really creepy to me that a city administrator can seek to have one of her elected bosses removed from government. All the more so because the councilor in question, Lena Tam, is the same one who dared inquire about the administrator’s recent end-run around competitive procurement to give some bond counsel business to an old friend and employer.
If this maneuver works, every other elected official is going to have to double back and revisit every email they’ve ever sent to see if they too might have stepped over some line in regards to some rule or other. If they have, and the administrator, ICM Gallant in this case, has the ‘goods’ on them, then we only have our democratic republic in working order right up until Gallant decides to hit the eject button. Reminds me of Dr. Evil, ready to dump the next underling into the fire with the push of a button.
Our elected councilors are essentially citizen legislators. If they have indeed crossed some line, the right thing to do as a highly paid senior professional in this regard is to point it out to them. Not build some file with some private eye or attorney and then drop it all off at the DA’s office with a press release at the ready to further spin the gotcha.
This is really twisted. And the further irony is that the ICM’s own e-mail trail gets destroyed for no good reason after 30 days, per city policy. My own hotmail and gmail accounts can store large quantities of email for years and not run up any sort of appreciable tab. Electronic data storage is dirt cheap. So the current city policy of covering its own tracks should be revisited if nothing else.
I’m sure there won’t be any ‘smoking gun’ for the ICM. She’s been down this road multiple times before. But a good publicly accessible records retention policy might help us keep an eye on our money in the future.
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If you look at the filing, this investigation started before the ICM was called on the carpet for her practices handing out contracts without oversight, and the filing shows pretty damning evidence against Councilwoman. Frankly, the ICM needs investigating every bit as much as Councilwoman Tam, but whether or not it's in retaliation for anything is irrelevant- the paper trail is clear: Tam broke the law.
ReplyDeleteSome of the supposedly "confidential" documents that Tam is accused of forwarding actually originated with Suncal or from other previously public sources, according to some readers of these legal documents.
ReplyDeleteIf these documents were already public then the ICM's accusations are groundless.
The ICM's actions prior to her mishandling of city contracts and her apparent conflicts of interest (and lack of transparency) go back months before Gallant (and Johnson?) initiated the "investigation" into Tam's alleged violations.
Where is the interest in investigating the ICM, who has apparently dealt with her personal or political opponents/enemies this way in her previous posts.
It looks like Gallant's hitting the eject button when a council member doesn't vote the way she wants them to. Although I wouldn't be surprised if she's monitoring all of the City Council's emails to nip any dissent in the bud. Does anyone else detect a resemblance between the interim city manager and Stalin?
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