An utter waste of time, effort, goodwill and money
– that’s the impact of the scandal that’s enveloped Morgan Hill
City Hall. It’s also caused a lack of trust among council
members.
An utter waste of time, effort, goodwill and money – that’s the impact of the scandal that’s enveloped Morgan Hill City Hall. It’s also caused a lack of trust among council members.
Scurrilous gossip that two top city employees were having an affair – an allegation that both deny – turned into a bumbling, Keystone Cops-style investigation, thanks to the bad decisions and questionable intentions of local attorney Bruce Tichinin.
Although we can’t follow his reasoning, it seems Tichinin thought finding evidence to support the gossip would help his client in a land-use case pending before City Council; or he believed such evidence might help his client, Councilwoman Hedy Chang, defend herself against possible defamation and harassment claims made against her one of the two city employees. Chang denies authorizing the investigation.
Tichinin hired a private investigator who apparently contracted with an unlicensed investigator to do the job. Tichinin said he was representing an undisclosed client, not Chang, when the investigator was hired.
This unlicensed private detective then clumsily followed the city manager on a business trip. The man Tichinin hired was so incompetent that City Manager Ed Tewes noticed his bungling attempts at sleuthing and told City Council members about it.
There’s also the question of the two cups of hot chocolate ordered from room service at the hotel where Tewes was staying. Tewes said he did not order the drinks. But someone did – from inside the hotel room.
City Council, for reasons we still don’t grasp, then decided in closed session to hire its own detective – a decision that has cost taxpayers at least $50,000 to date – to investigate the investigation.
City Council members then released the report in order to, as report co-author Larry Carr put it, “maintain the public trust.”
We’re not sure how secretly spending $50,000 of public money in these tight fiscal times to investigate a private matter promotes the public trust.
One thing, however, is clear: It seems that no one involved in this mess has put the best interests of Morgan Hill taxpayers first.
That’s almost understandable behavior for Tichinin; as a lawyer his job is to put his clients’ best interests first, but he certainly doesn’t come out unsullied in this entire regrettable mess. Tichinin, who has enjoyed community leader status in his role as president of IDI, the volunteer group in charge of Morgan Hill’s annual Independence Day celebrations, and who has developed a reputation as the man who saved El Toro mountain from development, has likely squandered that goodwill.
Tichinin has defended himself by saying that the surveillance he authorized was not illegal. That’s small, cold comfort to the taxpayers of Morgan Hill, who not only must foot the bill for the city’s investigation, but also have to suffer the ignominy of having their city’s reputation marred by this ponderous scandal.
In our estimation, Tichinin deserves whatever loss of reputation and money he suffers as a result of his ill-advised investigation.
But our lack of understanding doesn’t stop with Tichinin’s decisions. We also can’t understand why City Council members believed the situation merited their time, attention and secret outlay of $50,000 in taxpayer monies. We’re disgusted that City Council never gave Morgan Hill citizens the chance to voice their opinions on that highly questionable expenditure of – so far – $50,000 of their money.
We urge City Council and the citizens of Morgan Hill to look at the scandal through the lens of what’s best for the city. City Council members will have hard decisions to make and difficult votes to cast as a result of the rumor-mongering, ill-advised investigations and closed-door decisions of the past several months.
In November, Morgan Hill residents will elect two City Council candidates and a mayor. The handling of this scandal will be one important benchmark by which voters will judge candidates.
Morgan Hill residents will rightly judge their community leaders – elected and unelected – by their stewardship of our city’s reputation and assets in their professional lives as well as in their volunteer work.
We can’t recoup the money or time spent on this miserable mess. We can’t undo the damage done to personal and civic reputations by whispering gossips, poor decisions and bungling sleuths. But we can we can work together to minimize the damage from this point forward – and that ought to be the top priority of everyone involved.
