Dear Editor, Months ago, in its July 9-12 edition, the Morgan
Hill Times correctly reported what I intended to do if my
investigation of the city manger showed an affair between him and
the city attorney –
“Go to the (City) Council and show the City Attorney’s lack of
independence” which could be inferred to have resulted from the
relationship.
Dear Editor,
Months ago, in its July 9-12 edition, the Morgan Hill Times correctly reported what I intended to do if my investigation of the city manger showed an affair between him and the city attorney – “Go to the (City) Council and show the City Attorney’s lack of independence” which could be inferred to have resulted from the relationship. I then would have asked the City Council to remove the city attorney from my client’s case so that the City Council could receive unbiased advice from an attorney who was not merely assisting the city manager in an improper and groundless campaign of personal retaliation against me.
This would have been an entirely proper way of restoring integrity to the city’s conduct.
Despite the above correct reporting months ago, The Times got the same facts wrong in its Dec. 21-23 edition (in the story about the City Hall scandal), by attributing to me the idea that “if the (City Attorney’s) change of mind (from initially telling me my client’s position was reasonable to later telling the City Council it was prohibited by law) could be attributed to an improper relationship with (City Manager, then the City Attorney) could possibly be pressured to changing it back.” This is a false statement that I unlawfully intended to blackmail the city attorney, not, as was my true and proper intention as accurately reported earlier, to ask the City Council to obtain independent advice.
I demand a retraction by The Times and a personal apology from reporter Carol Holzgrafe and editor Walt Glines.
City Councilman Larry Carr wrongly attempts to shift responsibility from himself to me for the huge and unjustifiable expenditure of taxpayer funds for the improper, but successful, purpose of suppressing my investigation. He claims that the city’s specially hired attorneys “spent a lot of extra time because of threatened litigation from … Bruce.”
If Carr will have the courage and integrity to release the city’s legal bills that the city has thus far kept secret despite demands for their public release, they will show I never threatened to sue the City until Sept. 15, 2004, fully seven months after it started spending money on an investigator and attorneys in February.
Only the very tail-end of the expenditures could have been in response to my threat of suit, which itself was made necessary only because the City Council had renewed its efforts to remove me from the Greenbelt/ Urban Limit Line Committee in retaliation for me demanding that the council either “put up or shut up” on its groundless threats to attempt to get me prosecuted by the district attorney or the State Bar.
Councilman Greg Sellers deserves some credit for being the first involved person at City Hall to admit that, “To spend a dime on this incident was too much money,” – especially since the only apparent purpose of the expenditure was to suppress an investigation of whether the relationship existed and was corrupting the legal advice that the City Council was receiving.
Bruce Tichinin, Morgan Hill
EDITOR’S NOTE: We acknowledge the error and apologize to Tichinin.
