I am submitting this complaint to the Oregon Government Ethics Commission in the form of a post on one of my blogs because the complaint is lengthy owing to the complexity of this matter, which would have made it difficult to file the necessary information on the Commission's web site.
In addition, by consolidating all of that information in a single document, I felt this would make it easier for Commission staff to read and understand the issue at hand: whether Salem Mayor Julie Hoy engaged in prohibited serial communications involving the forced resignation of City Manager Keith Stahley.
This complaint is in three sections: (1) Grievance notice sent to City of Salem; (2) Response to grievance notice by City of Salem: (3) My comments on City of Salem response to the grievance. Due to the length of this complaint, I've inserted a page break after section (1). Simply click on the notice of the page break to read the rest of the complaint. There are a few formatting and font problems in the complaint, a result of copying and pasting from other documents, but the problems don't interfere with readability.
(1) Grievance notice sent to City of Salem
TO: Acting City Manager Namburi, Mayor Hoy, City Attorney Atchison, city councilors, and other city officials
FROM: Brian Hines
RE: revised Oregon Government Ethics Commission grievance notice
Please consider this my revised grievance notice to the notice I sent you last night. After reading a story in today’s Statesman Journal about Stahley’s resignation, I’ve added mention of a part of that story as it demonstrates that Mayor Hoy told Councilor Nishioka that a majority of City Council members wanted Stahley to resign, and edited some other parts accordingly.
In accordance with the policy of the Oregon Government Ethics Commission that before a complaint alleging a violation of the Public Meetings Law can be submitted, the public body at issue — in this case the City of Salem — has to be given 21 days to respond to a written grievance setting forth the facts and circumstances of the alleged violation, this email sent on February 16, 2025 is that written grievance.
Official FlashAlert communications from the City of Salem provide a primary basis for my grievance. Stories published by the Salem Reporter and the Statesman Journal also will be used to support this grievance.
The issue at hand is the recent forced resignation of City Manager Keith Stahley. It appears that Mayor Hoy violated Or. Admin. Code 199-050-0020 dealing with the prohibition of serial communications. However, there may have been additional violations of Oregon law and administrative rules.
I’ll use excerpts from these to make my case for this grievance, supplementing that information with information from two Salem Reporter stories, both by Joe Siess: “Mayor Julie Hoy set in motion events that led to Keith Stahley’s abrupt resignation” (February 13) and “Councilor Micki Varney breaks the silence about city manager’s resignation” (February 14), and a Statesman Journal story by Whitney Woodworth “Salem city councilor calls for transparency after city manager’s exit” (February 16).
This saga began at some undisclosed date when, according to the city, "Mayor Julie Hoy had individual communications with different members of City Council concerning Keith Stahley's performance and potential separation from the City.” The Salem Reporter learned that Councilors Micki Varney and Shane Matthews had talked with Hoy by phone. In addition a city communication says that Hoy "spoke on the phone with Councilor Linda Nishioka.”
So Mayor Hoy, a member of the City Council herself, spoke with at least three other councilors about Stahley (four, actually, since we can assume Hoy speaks to herself). The Salem Reporter has gotten "no comment" from Councilors Nordyke and Tigan about this, adding "Hoy and Councilors Deanna Gwyn, Irvin Brown, and Nishioka haven’t responded to emailed questions about when they decided the matter of Stahley’s resignation and to whom they communicated that decision.”
The current membership of the City Council is eight, as one seat on the nine-member council is vacant. Thus at a minimum, Mayor Hoy had spoken with half of the City Council (again, including herself) about Stahley’s performance and potential separation from the city via resignation or firing prior to Nishioka’s meeting with Stahley on February 7. And as noted below, the Statesman Journal story indicates that Hoy spoke with a majority of the council members.
Regarding that meeting: there is no evidence that prior to February 7, anyone on the City Council had expressed to Hoy a desire for Stahley to resign. In fact, according to the Salem Reporter, on February 2 Varney had told Hoy that she needed more information to make a decision either way, and Matthews told Hoy that he didn’t indicate support for Stahley’s resignation.
However, it is entirely possible that of the remaining six councilors on the current eight-member City Council, five (including Hoy) expressed a desire for Stahley to resign or be fired during the talks Hoy had with councilors. That would be a majority of the council. Since we know that Hoy spoke with three councilors, it seems likely that she spoke with all seven of her fellow councilors. In fact, the Statesman Journal story says tthis about a statement Councilor Nishioka released on February 15.
Nishioka said a discussion with Hoy led to her reaching out to Stahley. She said Hoy told her a majority of councilors believed Stahley should resign.
On February 7 Councilor Nishioka met with Stahley after meeting with Hoy. There’s no dispute that Nishioka asked Stahley if he would consider resigning. A key question that spurred this grievance is what Nishioka told Stahley.
In a February 9 resignation letter that followed his meeting with Nishioka that was included in the February 13 Salem Reporter story, Stahley said, in part:
I understand the desire of the Mayor and Council to move forward and have a fresh start. I hope that my resignation per Section 14: Severance (b) (3) of my contract will help to facilitate that.
I am submitting this resignation based on a meeting that I had with Councilor Nishioka on Friday February 7, 2025, where she represented that she was the duly authorized representative of the Mayor and a majority of City Council and requested that I tender my resignation.
Note that Stahley says that Nishioka represented herself as being both a duly authorized representative of the Mayor and a majority of the City Council. Since Nishioka is president of the entire City Council, her saying that she was a representative of a majority of the council clearly indicates that she’s speaking here about whether Stahley has the support of that majority to remain in that position.
Obviously Stahley was told by Nishioka that a majority wanted him gone, or he wouldn’t have resigned two days after his meeting with Nishioka.
The key point here is that the only way Nishioka could have known that a majority of the City Council wanted Stahley to resign or be fired was if Mayor Hoy had told Nishioka this in their meeting prior to February 7. This is precisely what the Statesman Journal story says, referencing a statement from Nishioka. The February 13 city communication says:
Due to public meeting law limitations, Councilor Nishioka was concerned that speaking with other members of Council about this issue would violate the law. She relied on her understanding of the situation after speaking with Mayor Julie Hoy.
So how would Nishioka be able to tell Stahley that she represented a majority on the City Council that wanted him gone? Because Mayor Hoy didn’t have the concerns about breaking Oregon’s public meeting law that Nishioka did. Hoy engaged in what’s known as prohibited serial communications under Or. Admin. Code 199-050-0020. It states:
A quorum of the members of a governing body shall not, outside of a meeting conducted in compliance with the Public Meetings Law, use a series of communications of any kind, directly or through intermediaries, for the purpose of deliberating or deciding on any matter that is within the jurisdiction of the governing body.
The prohibited methods of communication include in-person; telephone calls; emails; and such, including “any other means of conveying information.” Deciding whether to keep a City Manager on the job is within the jurisdiction of the City Council.
In his resignation letter, Stahley said that Nishioka told him that she represented a majority of the City Council and requested that he tender his resignation. This is strong evidence that Hoy engaged in a prohibited serial communication with members of the City Council and instructed Nishioka to tell Stahley that he should resign. Again, Nishioka said that she avoided talking with her fellow councilors about this, so it was Hoy who concluded through her serial communications that a majority wanted Stahley gone.
Legally, it doesn’t matter whether Hoy spoke truthfully with Nishioka about this. What matters is that Nishioka, putting herself forward to Stahley as a representative of a majority of the City Council, asked Stahley to resign. This action needed to take place at a public meeting, not via a series of private phone calls or other communications Mayor Hoy had with city councilors.
In the February 15 communication that was the city attorney’s statement concerning Stahley’s resignation, City Attorney Atchison said about Nishioka’s meeting with Stahley:
At that meeting, Councilor Nishioka asked Keith Stahley if he would consider resigning. Councilor Nishioka never said that she was City Council’s “duly authorized representative" or implied she was speaking on behalf of City Council.
However, what Stahley said in his resignation letter directly contradicts what the city attorney claimed in the quotation above.
This is one reason I’m initiating an inquiry by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission: to resolve the question of whether Mayor Hoy and possibly other city officials engaged in prohibited serial communications that caused, in Stahley’s view, a request by a majority of the City Council for him to resign — even though no public meeting of the council had been held regarding this issue.
I want to note something misleading in the February 15 statement by the city attorney. Atchison said:
Stahley’s resignation letter stated that Nishioka said she was “the duly authorized representative of City Council" acting on Council’s behalf. That language is straight from Stahley’s employment agreement concerning severance benefits. Stahley used that exact language apparently because it was consistent with the language in his employment agreement concerning his eligibility for severance, not because Nishioka ever uttered those words.
There are several problems with this assertion by the city attorney. First, the quote Atchison shared, the part in quotation marks above, isn’t in Stahley’s resignation letter, which actually said:
I am submitting this resignation based on a meeting that I had with Councilor Nishioka on Friday February 7, 2025, where she represented that she was the duly authorized representative of the Mayor and a majority of City Council and requested that I tender my resignation.
I’m virtually 100% sure that this language isn’t in Stahley’s employment agreement. So the city attorney was wrong when he claimed that Stahley was echoing the language in the employment agreement. Second, the city attorney doesn’t know why Stahley said what he did in his resignation letter. That’s why Atchison included “apparently” in his conjecture that Nishioka never said that she was the duly authorized representative of the Mayor and a majority of the City Council. Basically, the city attorney is accusing Stahley of lying.
Here’s a much more likely reason Stahley said what he did: it was the truth as he remembered it from the meeting with Nishioka that occurred just two days before he wrote his resignation letter.
Lastly, I want to share Councilor Varney’s public statement about the resignation of Keith Stahley that appeared in a February 14 Salem Reporter story by Joe Siess, “Councilor Micki Varney breaks the silence about city manager’s resignation.” It provides a valuable perspective from the only member of the City Council who has issued a public statement about this disturbing action that, as argued above, seems to violate Oregon’s public meeting law.
“I write this feeling great sadness and regret at what has transpired over the past week. It has eroded the trust and transparency we as a Council have been trying to rebuild over the past year.
The public has every right to, and deserves, an explanation of the events leading up to and following the city manager’s submission of his letter of resignation. The public has a right to demand that their elected officials follow the rules and statutes they all took an oath to uphold when they took office.
I believe that trust matters and respect is the currency of trust. I also believe that my duties, as your elected city councilor, include the sharing of concerns when warranted, and in a timely manner.
Transparency is a standard you have every right to expect of your government.
Members of the public and members of the Council deserve answers. The manner in which the city manager’s resignation occurred is untimely and unacceptable. I believe we all must continue to ask questions in order to discover exactly what actions were taken, and by whom and why, between the timing of the recent audit report and the abrupt resignation of the city manager earlier this week.
I am unaware of what really happened over the past few days, and I believe it is essential that we understand the reality of how we ended up in the situation we now find ourselves. Namely, we are now without a city manager while beginning the city budget setting process for the upcoming fiscal year.
There are many reports circulating around the various media speculating what may or may not have occurred. This suggests that either the facts were not provided to the media, or someone, or someones, misreported the facts to purposefully shape the larger narrative for a desired outcome.
It is apparent the city manager accepted a request to resign from a representative of the whole or (at least as stated in the resignation document), a majority of the council. However, no single city councilor – or mayor – has the authority to ask for a resignation absent a vote of the entire council. In this instance, this never occurred.
I, and to the best of my knowledge many of my fellow councilors, were not aware of what was transpiring during the week prior to the city manager’s resignation. We were following the rules which specify that we do not communicate with one another regarding city matters outside of a public meeting.
I was shocked to hear of the city manager’s resignation.
I am looking forward to being able to fill in many of the gaps as more facts are brought forward. I urge patience as more information is gathered.
In conclusion, I ask our city and community to remain engaged and participate in the steps ahead of us. I recognize the need for trust-building and truth-telling, and that is precisely why I am sharing my concerns with you in this message.
Together, I believe we can and will move Salem forward, but it will take all of us working together to be able to achieve that objective.”
— Brian Hines
No Comments