By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One reviewed how I obtained documents on the efforts of Elrich’s taxpayer-paid staff to save him from term limits and listed the cast of characters. Now let’s start reviewing the records.
The document trail shows that Elrich’s staff was interested in the work of the charter review commission as early as April. The commission, which is established in the charter itself, is a group of volunteers installed by the county executive and the county council. Its purpose is to study the charter and prepare reports with recommendations on potential changes. The commission is advisory and cannot change the charter on its own. Only the council or petitions by voters can place charter amendments on the ballot, which then must be approved by voters.
As I wrote in an earlier story, this year’s charter review commission proposed an alternate form of term limits that could accompany term limits organizer Reardon Sullivan’s amendment on the ballot. Sullivan’s amendment would change the number of allowed consecutive terms for the executive from three to two. The commission’s amendment would instead provide for three lifetime terms. A state attorney general’s opinion indicated that if conflicting charter amendments passed at the same time, they would nullify each other. Ultimately, the commission’s amendment proved to be of little consequence since county staff concluded that it would not in fact conflict with Sullivan’s amendment. Accordingly, the council never placed it on the ballot. But if it had conflicted with Sullivan’s amendment and if the council placed it on the ballot, it would have saved Elrich if passed by the voters.
This prospect drew the attention of Elrich’s staff.
The documents show correspondence between two of Elrich’s taxpayer-paid special assistants – Dale Tibbitts and Debbie Spielberg – and Jim Michaels, who chaired the charter review commission. On April 24, Michaels told Tibbitts:
Dale,
I did’t notice whether you stayed for the entire meeting this morning or whether you needed to drop off the call before we discussed our summer schedule. But I wanted to let you know that I am planning on having commission meetings on June 12 and July 10. Those potentially would be meetings at which we could discuss term limits if it seemed like the right thing to do. But it would help to set any strategy on that way in advance, depending on the status of Sullivan’s petition drive. I would want to do an advance private head count before raising it in an open meeting.
The Commission is only skipping the May meeting (which would have been 14 says from today). And Council staff tells me the Commission never meets during the August recess although I don’t understand why that needs to be the case.
Tibbitts then asked Michaels, “Do you know when the first batch of petition signatures must be submitted to the Board of Elections for verification?”
Michaels replied with several points of process information.
Michaels sent the same information to Spielberg, another of Elrich’s special assistants.
Note the time stamps on these emails. Some of them were sent during county working hours. All of them used the county government’s email system. This is a usage of county government resources by county employees to discuss whether their boss will be eligible to run for reelection.
We will have more in Part Three.