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By Lexi Reese
“Personnel matter.” That was the label. Two words, last item on the agenda, last meeting before summer recess on July 28.
Nothing in it told a resident that the Woodside Town Council was about to resolve the only sustained finding against a sitting councilmember for disclosing a colleague’s confidential closed-session concerns in an investigation that took four months and used considerable public money.
Residents figured it out anyway. They read the packet, they wrote letters, and, to the Town Council’s credit, the item was moved from last to third. The letters worked.
But consider what it means that they were necessary. One councilmember said from the dais that when she picked up her packet, “no reasonable person would have any clue what the agenda item was meant to be about,” and called it a glaring failure of transparency. When a sitting member says that about her own agenda, that is not a drafting error.
When the item came, Mayor Pro Tempore Paul Goeld recused himself — but not before reading aloud a letter apologizing for his lapse in judgment and asking that no further action be required. Then he left. Residents spoke. Special counsel Richard Bolanos of Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, retained through the town’s liability insurance carrier — which also identified and authorized the investigator — delivered the recommendation: Accept the apology, and require ethics training.
The public reaction was immediate and it was not close. A 35-year resident said a slap on the wrist and a little training would never have survived in private industry. A former councilmember asked for a written censure and that Goeld not be handed the gavel in December, warning that elevating him would tell residents that our standards are situational. Another said plainly that people with business before the town are afraid to speak.
Then several of us asked a simple question: What was tonight for? Were we being told a recommendation had been made, or that it had already been accepted? Nobody on the dais could answer clearly. Counsel eventually explained the item existed to present steps the Town Council had already determined to take. A councilmember replied that this was not her understanding and that it would have been nice to see it on the agenda. The mayor moved to close discussion.
And so it fell to Councilmember Jenn Wall to bring order to a proceeding the council itself could not describe. Wall is not a bystander. She is the person whose confidence was breached. What Goeld disclosed to then-Town Manager Jason Ledbetter were her closed-session concerns about whether that hiring had been run on merit — raised in the one forum built to protect exactly that candor. She then spent four months as a subject of the complaint that followed, and was cleared. At last Tuesday’s council meeting, she had to argue, in real time and without the report she had requested in advance, that an apology was not a sufficient answer to an admitted ethics violation — to colleagues who had themselves been named in the investigation, with one of them, Mayor Brian Dombkowski, presiding.
Wall and a colleague made and seconded a motion for further action. The mayor and Councilmember Dick Brown stated they accepted the apology. The recommendation stood: training.
Look at that arithmetic. The mayor was a subject of the same investigation — cleared, and still a subject — and he presided, and his position carried. The professional advice before the council came from a firm appointed under the protocols of an insurer whose role includes managing the town’s legal risk and potential liability. Nobody elected the insurance company. The councilmember whose confidentiality was breached had no comparable support, and her motion for further action failed.
I don’t think anyone acted in bad faith. That is the point. A structure assembled to manage the town’s liability produced what such a structure produces, and the two members who tried for a different result were outnumbered by a chair with a stake in the outcome.
Publish the full investigative report once litigation resolves. Say who set the investigation’s scope, and why residents’ questions were not in it. Bring corrective action back on a date certain, labeled in language a resident can read. And the next time this council discusses one of its own, the presiding officer should not be someone the investigation named.
Residents moved this item once already. That was the easy part. The question now is whether two votes on this Town Council can become three.
Lexi Reese is a Woodside resident.