This week at City Hall

Here are this week’s notable city meetings and summarized agenda items.

City Council

Item 9

The Community & Economic Development Department is asking the city council to review city-owned properties to determine any potential economic benefit or liability and whether the city has a need for them. City staff recommends that the city council adopts a resolution to declare the six City-owned properties as surplus property and authorize the marketing and sale of the properties. This comes as an effort to respond to unfunded pension obligations and financial impacts associated with the pandemic.

Item 32

Council members are being asked to consider the findings of a Board of Ethics hearing panel, who determined in an appeals process that Councilmember Gaby Plascencia violated state and local law on two counts.

On April 14, the hearing panel reheard a complaint filed by resident Jason Hunter, who filed a Code of Ethics and Conduct Complaint with the city against Plascencia in June 2020.

In September 2020, the Board of Ethics Hearing Panel heard Hunter’s complaint and sustained his allegations and the case was appealed to the city council. The city council made findings of clear errors and abuse of discretion by the hearing panel and found Plascencia innocent of all allegations. When the complaint was reheard by the hearing panel on April 14 of this year with the new findings sent back from city council, the panel unanimously voted to sustain Hunter’s allegations.

Should the council find no clear error or abuse of discretion in the panel’s findings, they may adopt the decision of the hearing panel as their own on appeal.

A constituent-led effort to remove Councilmember Plascencia from the dais was unsuccessful in April when they were unable to submit the amount of petition signatures in time.