Davenport City Council ousts one of its own

But will the move withstand scrutiny?

Davenport City Hall. (Photo: Ed Tibbetts)

Last week, the Davenport City Council took the extraordinary step of removing one of its own from office.

City officials accused Alderman Derek Cornette of the 7^th Ward of being intoxicated at meetings as well as harassing female city employees. On a 7-3 vote, he was removed, effective immediately. Cornette and two other aldermen voted against the move.

Mayor Mike Matson said he called the meeting.

Cornette has said he’s the victim of politics and that this is an attempt to interfere with his re-election effort. The primary is Oct. 10 and the general election Nov. 7. Cornette is running for a second term and faces opposition. (Disclosure: As editorial page editor of the Quad-City Times in 2021, I joined the board in endorsing Cornette’s opponent.)

Removal from office is exceedingly rare in Iowa. The closest thing I can think of around here is when the Muscatine City Council voted to oust Mayor Diana Broderson in 2017. A judge later reversed the decision, ruling her due process rights were violated.

Other than that, in my 34 years in the Quad-Cities, I don’t recall an elected official ever being removed from office here.

This case is surely headed to court, too. Mike Meloy, the attorney representing Cornette, said he planned to appeal, according to Iowa Public Radio.

At the council’s hearing last week, Meloy called it a travesty and raised a number of due process issues.

He said Cornette had been given only a day’s notice of the written charges, not enough time to prepare for an adequate defense. Meloy also voiced a number of objections to testimony given during the hearing and said the city’s arguments contained half-truths or were misleading.

If the city can clear the looming procedural challenges, it will be interesting to see how the courts view this case.

The state code lists about a half dozen grounds for removal, including “willful misconduct or maladministration in office,” but the hurdle for removal is pretty high.

In 2018, the Iowa Supreme Court reversed a district court judge’s decision to remove Van Buren County Attorney Abraham Watkins from office over sexual harassment allegations.

According to court documents, Watkins showed a female employee photos of his naked wife, commented on the employee’s breasts, and on more than one occasion, was observed wearing underwear in the office. (The county attorney’s office was in his home office.)

Yet, a plurality on the Supreme Court, citing precedent, said his behavior, while “egregious,” didn’t rise to the level warranting the “drastic” and “penal” step of removal. The justices – again, citing precedent – said they also weren’t convinced the county attorney had deliberately acted “with bad or evil purpose, contrary to known duty.”

A fourth justice, who didn’t join the plurality’s opinion, also said he opposed removal primarily because of the “extraordinarily demanding standard for removal…”

Like Watkins, Cornette also is accused of willful misconduct or maladministration. Both men also were accused of intoxication, though in Watkins’ case the district court didn’t find sufficient evidence to substantiate the allegation. In Davenport, the city presented a video showing a deputy sheriff administering a test of Cornette’s blood alcohol concentration after a city meeting. The city said it was at .072. It is illegal to drive at .08.

Derek Cornette (Photo source: City of Davenport web site)

Much of the city’s case, however, was focused on Cornette’s behavior toward city employees.

Officials say they warned the alderman against calling female employees, “sweetie” and “dear;” that he’d concluded a voice message for Davenport City Administrator Corri Spiegel with the words, “love ya, babe” and that he was flippant when confronted about it; later, the city said, he left another voice message for Spiegel that included the words, “still love you, babe.”

He also was accused of taking a female employee by the hand and referring to her as his “little mama.”

The city’s human resources director testified there were at least 10 to 15 incidents of harassment involving Cornette.

The city also played at the hearing a voice message Cornette left for a male alderman on a phone monitored by female employees in which he called the elected official slang terms for female and male genitalia.

The facts of these two cases are different. In Watkins’ case, a majority of justices said his behavior didn’t rise to the high standard for removal. Would the court find the same in Cornette’s case?

I don’t know the answer, but the aldermen who voted to remove Cornette might find some comfort in the late Chief Justice Mark Cady’s dissent in the Watkins case. Joined by another justice, Cady wrote the verdict of the voters is not absolute; that it is “tempered by the legislature’s authority to prescribe credentials and grounds for removal;” and that, as society matures, the standard for a public official’s worthiness and capability to serve will also mature.

“No employer could possibly believe that creating a workplace atmosphere defined by degrading women is permissible,” Cady wrote, adding that doing so constituted willful misconduct.

Would Cornette’s behavior qualify?

I’m not sure how the courts would rule. I should note the makeup of the Supreme Court has changed substantially since 2018.

Soon, voters in the 7^th Ward will get the chance to have their say.

We’ll have to wait to see how, if at all, this affects Iowa case law in this area.

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