In response to my email to the city council members, city manager and city attorney -- I am very concerned over the circumstances of the firing of Elizabeth Riel as our new Information Officer for Santa Monica. It seems an issue of free political speech, which is, of course, against the law, if true. I received this response from Kevin McKeown -- I met with Rod Gould on Monday and asked him to schedule an employe evaluation for himself at our next Council meeting. When the agenda for next Tuesday came out last night, it was not on it. However, I have seen an internal email that indicates the employee evaluation for Rod Gould will be posted for Tuesday in an agenda update. When I further inquired -- Is that something any council member can ask for, of any city employee? I think everyone should be made aware this is on the agenda. I think very many people would be very interested in that. What form does it take? McKeown replied (at length, but well worth reading) -- There are only three employees the City Council directly hires and oversees: the City Manager, the City Attorney, and the City Clerk. They are the only three whom we evaluate periodically, nominally once a year. In the time I’ve been on the Council there’s never before been an evaluation called out of sequence in reaction to an event. The evaluation will not be on what the City Manager did, but on how it was done. In particular, I cannot fathom how if Elizabeth’s political involvement for residents and supporting my candidacy was A-OK after I pointed it out, being compulsively transparent, then her political involvement against the proposed Macerich towers and another candidacy was enough to terminate her. If the City Manager had from the outset been clear that he wanted someone in that position who had NO relevant political allegiances whatsoever, that would have been one thing. To make hiring decisions based on the CONTENT of someone’s political interests is something else altogether, something much more troublesome. I asked Rod if after I’d disclosed that Elizabeth and I had been allied politically, whether he then did some research on any other political activity. If political involvement troubled him at all, Google and the City Clerk’s campaign finance archives would have turned up the SMCLC connection, certainly. But Rod told me no, the information that caused him to rescind the hiring of Elizabeth Riel was brought to him. This raises the question of who has the political clout in this town to get someone fired. I asked Rod twice who conveyed the information to him. He declined, twice, to tell me. It was at that point that I made a suggestion. Rod had pointed out earlier in our conversation that he was accountable to ALL the Councilmembers, particularly by means of our employee evaluations. Given that I was not able to get what I felt were important facts of the matter from Rod as an individual, and knowing that this situation is going to grow in community outrage after Rod hired someone from the Downtown Santa Monica/Convention and Visitors Bureau development realm to replace Elizabeth, seen as slow-growth and resident-friendly, I asked him to schedule an evaluation of himself for our next meeting. He hemmed and hawed about how the agenda is set with the cooperation of the Mayor and Mayor pro tem. I simply said he should do whatever it took to get his evaluation on the June 10th agenda. (Yes, a Councilmember could have brought it up even more publicly by placing a 13 item asking for a public vote to schedule an evaluation, but that would have delayed things two more weeks.) The agenda for next Tuesday came out yesterday. It did not include an evaluation. Later, I saw an email from the City Manager to the City Clerk’s office sent after five o’clock yesterday, asking that the item be added. That means it does not appear on the original agenda that goes out to the whole community. It is now on the City website as item 1-D, and I believe item 1-C may be the threatened lawsuit from Elizabeth Riel against the City. While both these items will be heard in closed session, being personnel matters and a legal strategy discussion, there IS the opportunity for public testimony. The Council convenes next Tuesday at 5:30 for the pledge, the roll call, and then the public calling of the items on the closed session agenda (items 1-). Just as with any item elsewhere on the agenda, members of the public may speak (twice) to items 1-C and 1-D.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 17:51:03 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015