closed session – C-VILLE Weekly

Woodshed moment: Councilors rebuke and restrict mayor

Charlottesville City Council now has a mayor on restriction. Council is made up of five elected equals, with the mayor playing a largely symbolic role, and that was a lesson Mayor Mike Signer appears to have forgotten. On August 30, his fellow councilors held a three-hour closed door meeting to discuss the “performance and discipline of an elected official.”

Afterward, Councilor Kathy Galvin said the elected officials had accepted Signer’s apology and were not requesting his resignation, a signal of the gravity of the confrontation.

It was a humbled Signer who read an apology to reporters and citizens gathered in council chambers. “In the deeply troubling and traumatizing recent weeks, I have taken several actions as mayor, and made several communications, that have been inconsistent with the collaboration required by our system of governance and that overstepped the bounds of my role as mayor, for which I apologize to my colleagues and the people of Charlottesville.”

The only “ill-advised” action Signer specifically apologized for was an August 24 Facebook post in which he publicly pointed the finger at City Manager Maurice Jones and police Chief Al Thomas for the devastating events of August 12.

Jones was called into a closed session with councilors on August 24, and the next day, a copy of a nine-page Signer-written memo demanding explanations from Jones was leaked—a breach that some suspect Signer of, but which he has adamantly denied.

Even the night before facing the jury of his peers, Signer emailed a reporter to denounce Jones for releasing “confidential closed session material in a blame game.”

Jones publicly responded August 26 to the allegations in the leaked memo, and he noted that in the middle of the violent white nationalist crisis, Signer was clamoring to get into the command center and twice threatened to fire Jones and Thomas when his entrance was denied.

The remainder of Signer’s tenure as mayor comes with conditions, which he listed in his apology, flanked by somber fellow councilors. Those include meeting with senior staff only with another councilor present, except for regular check-ins with Jones; being more mindful of the time of the council clerk; allowing fellow councilors to make announcements and comments at council meetings, and not making pronouncements as mayor without working with his colleagues—and having one present if he did so.

“My comment to two former mayors was, ‘Wow,’” says former mayor Blake Caravati. “Unfortunately it’s necessary. It’s also mortifying to me. Not so much the apology, but the four to five will-dos. That’s mortifying.”

Adds Caravati, who supported Signer in his 2015 run for council, “It seems unfortunate to me they had to put a code of conduct in writing.”

Caravati says all of the 13 mayors he knows have said the wrong thing at times. “We all do,” he says. “Unfortunately Mike did that numerous times over the past few weeks.”

Former mayor Virginia Daugherty says there was a feeling Signer had stepped out in front of council when he’s supposed to represent fellow councilors. “I think they were right to do it,” she says of the figurative spanking.

Following the August 12 Unite the Right rally, Signer called for a special session of the General Assembly to allow localities to repeal monuments, which did not come up on the council agenda. Nor did his capital-of-the-resistance rally, for which he had council clerk Paige Rice send out a notice.

On August 17, less than a week after the hate rally that resulted in the deaths of three people and dozens of others injured, Signer posted a photo of himself leaping in front of the Love statue erected in Central Place on the Downtown Mall, with the message, “After a hard week, Cville is back on our feet, and we’ll be stronger than ever. Love conquers hate! @virginiaisforlovers!”

“I was a bit disappointed in that public relations thing,” says Caravati. “It’s not all good. We’re struggling and we’ll get out of it, but it’s not all good.”

For some, like longtime resident Mary Carey, council calling Signer to the principal’s office did not go far enough. “It was a slap on the wrist,” she says. And she’s concerned about Signer’s political aspirations, and says he’s publicly said he was going to become governor and president.

“Mike Signer’s political career is over,” opined activist Jalane Schmidt while waiting for the results of the closed session.

However, Signer is not the only councilor who has eyed higher office, says Caravati, who admits he would have too, had the timing been right.

“In the short term, he’s debilitated,” Caravati says. “He can rehabilitate himself. Right now, it might be difficult, but he’s a stalwart guy.”

The councilors did not announce who called for the closed session, but it was Galvin who read the group’s response that the officials accepted Signer’s apology, and she reiterated council’s “shared responsibility for good governance.”

“That’s a hard thing to do,” observes Caravati, “to call your peers out.”

Signer’s term as mayor ends in January, and the likelihood of him being elected to another term, says Caravati, “at this time doesn’t seem probable.”

Statement of Mayor Mike Signer 083017

City Council Response to Mayor

Statement of Charlottesville City Council 083017

Spin cycle: Leaked memo throws Jones under the bus, council to discipline one of its own

Usually it’s hard to squeeze personnel matters discussed in closed session out of city councilors. That’s why the August 25 leaking of a confidential Mayor Mike Signer-written memo to City Manager Maurice Jones demanding explanations of the events leading up to the August 12 hate rally was such a shocker—as was Jones firing back a response that included the mayor’s threats to fire him.

And in the latest sign of a City Council in turmoil since outraged citizens commandeered its August 21 meeting to voice anger over the violent Unite the Right rally, a closed special meeting has been called for August 30 to “discuss the performance and discipline of an elected official,” according to the notice.

Mayor Mike Signer tries to bring the council meeting to order August 21. Photo Eze Amos

“It’s rather extraordinary,” says former mayor Dave Norris. “I can’t recall another time when the mayor and city manager were going after each other publicly with press releases or memos and trying to throw each other under the bus.”

The nine-page leaked memo calls out Jones for taking vacation before the rally, for not deciding to move the hate fest to McIntire Park until a week before the event, for not having police posted at Congregation Beth Israel synagogue and for “the apparent unwillingness of officers to directly intervene during overt assaults captured in many videos in the time before the unlawful assembly was declared and after it was declared.”

The memo also takes aim at city spokesperson Miriam Dickler, and cites an email from Signer to Jones in which he says her refusal to work with crisis communications firm Powell/Tate “bordered on insubordination” and was “exhausting for me to deal with.”

And the confidential file devotes nearly a page to Signer not being allowed in the command center in the Wells Fargo building, where he came despite Jones and Police Chief Al Thomas asking him not to. And it was there, according to Jones’ rebuttal memo, that Signer threatened to fire him.

“On two separate occasions during the height of the crisis, the Mayor threatened my job and that of the police chief because of our concerns about allowing him to be part of the command center,” he wrote. “He said, ‘You work for me’ and I replied that ‘I worked for the City Council.’”

“Typically during emergencies, it’s the city manager and police chief who have the lead roles,” says Norris. In the past, “the mayor and councilors didn’t try to micromanage.”

Because Charlottesville uses a council-manager type of government, the mayor does not have the CEO job like the mayor of Houston does, says Norris. “In a crisis, the mayor and City Council need to be in the loop, but we have professionals and they don’t need a part-time politician to be in the room.”

The councilors who responded to C-VILLE Weekly were not pleased with the leakage. “I didn’t like it,” says Fenwick. “I didn’t do it. And it’s not moving us forward.” Fenwick declined to say who he thought leaked the memo, but he says the memo itself appears to blame Jones and Thomas for the violent encounters August 12 that left Heather Heyer dead and dozens injured.

And he notes that Signer was on vacation the same time he was accusing Jones of being on holiday.

Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy declined to comment on the leakage, and Councilor Kathy Galvin did not respond to an email. Councilor Kristin Szakos calls the breach “appalling,” and says it “erodes trust and makes it difficult to work together.”

Szakos says the memo was a compilation of councilors’ concerns, but did not reflect the concerns of City Council as a whole. “It was not something we had gotten together on,” she says. In the memo with its 17 issues that ask Jones to “please provide an explanation,” two are from other councilors: Szakos with an email asking where the police were during accounts of violence, and one from Galvin conveying concerns about the vulnerability of Friendship Court residents.

Jones’ public response to the Signer memo was justified, says Szakos, because the memo was “one-sided” and did not include answers he had given to councilors in the August 24 closed-door meeting. And some of the memo points, she says, “turned out to not be factual.”

“I think it was Mike Signer,” says independent council candidate Nikuyah Walker. “I haven’t talked to anyone who doesn’t think he did this.”

Signer did not respond to a call from C-VILLE about the perception by many that he’s the leaker.

Signer was a fixture in the national spotlight the week after the rally, and was called a “hero” by the Jewish newspaper Forward. But at the August 21 council meeting, Charlottesville again made national news for the chaos and the mayor’s total loss of control over the meeting. Protesters mounted the dais holding a sign that said, “Blood on your hands.”

City councilors faced demands that they resign. Signer declared the meeting canceled, and left for about 10 minutes.

In an August 24 Facebook post, Signer explained his absence: “I needed to talk and meet with and reassure my very worried wife, which I felt I had no option but to do.”

Walker doesn’t buy that explanation. “He had become upset because he couldn’t handle [the meeting],” she says. “He thought the rest would follow him. That’s not what happened. That was just his excuse for not being able to handle the criticism.”

“I don’t think that was a shining moment on the City Council, when the mayor abandoned ship and left four councilors,” says Norris. “I’ve got to commend [Vice-Mayor] Wes Bellamy for stepping up and throwing the rules out the window, and running it as a town hall.”

Norris declined to say who he thinks spilled the memo, but offers this: “Anytime there is a leak of information, there’s a strategic reason for it being leaked. These don’t happen accidentally. Clearly someone had a motivation for releasing that memo that tries to put the city staff and police in a bad light and put council and the mayor in a good one.”

cityCouncilLeaked memo