Prying loose the secrets of Davenport City Hall

And new developments in a controversial school board race in Scott County

Davenport City Hall (Photo: Ed Tibbetts)

Members of the Davenport City Council may have thought they could bury the controversy over the $1.6 million payment to former City Administrator Corri Spiegel, but a number of developments over the past few weeks have made it clear this isn’t going away.

The most recent development is news of the decision by Rob Sand, the state auditor, to investigate the settlement agreements with Spiegel, as well as two other city employees who were paid about $150,000 apiece. Like Spiegel, the women had lodged claims of harassment by elected officials.

Late last month, a city elected official filed a request with the auditor’s office, and Sand told me yesterday they decided to investigate because of the amount of money involved and the unanswered questions.

“This is a situation where, from the news reports, there’s obviously a substantial amount of money involved and seems to be some unanswered questions as to what happened and whether or not Iowa’s legal obligations and the taxpayers’ right to know what’s going on with their funds were followed,” Sand said.

In addition to Sand's inquiry, Allen Dierckx, a Davenport taxpayer who has tangled with local government officials in the past over open government issues, filed a lawsuit challenging the three settlement agreements in Scott County District Court a couple weeks ago.

Dierckx, through his attorney Mike Meloy, alleges the city council violated the state’s open meetings law, and that the agreements were signed without prior council approval in violation of the law. He also alleges the city’s chief legal attorney at the time, Tom Warner, acted outside his legal authority.

The lawsuit asks a judge to declare the agreements void and order the city to take action to recover the funds.

The Quad-City Times reports that Warner, now-retired, said he obtained the consent of a majority of the council for the agreements—and in Spiegel’s case, unanimous consent. The newspaper said Warner called the lawsuit “meritless,” and that the city attorney’s office said the city would defend its actions in court.

Sand’s investigation and the Dierckx lawsuit raise the odds we’ll find out more about what was behind these deals.

However, they don’t negate the council’s clear obligation to publicly—and promptly—answer the questions they’ve tried to avoid. Among them:

·       What were the incidents that prompted such a large payout to Spiegel? The council has said they were “inappropriate, wrong, and appalling” and directed at her over eight years. The council also said they were documented. Yet, they haven’t given any real accounting of who perpetrated these actions and what they were.

·       They haven’t said whether council members, past or present, knew about these actions at the time.

·       They haven’t said, if they did know, what their response was—if any.

·       They haven’t said how the $1 million payment for emotional pain and suffering for Spiegel was derived—other than to say the money paid was small compared to what a lawsuit and a finding of wrongdoing would have cost. Why did the council think this?

·       They haven’t said why the Spiegel agreement was signed in October, then kept secret until after the election; and why the release of the details didn’t come until the day before the Thanksgiving holiday, when they had to know few people would be paying attention.

It’s possible some of these questions will be answered during the legal proceedings—and in the course of Sand’s investigation. But the city council owes a duty to the public that shouldn’t have to be compelled by a judge or state official.

We elect city leaders to act as stewards of taxpayer money, and even if we don’t always agree with how the funds are spent, we deserve an explanation for the rationale behind those decisions.

In this instance, we have been given hardly any explanation—only a 1-page statement from the council two months ago that left a lot of questions unanswered.

I have high hopes Sand’s inquiry will shed more light on this matter. But I also understand these investigations can take time. It was more than a year after the state auditor undertook an inquiry into the Davenport School District’s controversial sale of Lincoln Elementary School a few years ago before a report was produced.

We also don’t know what will become of Dierckx’s lawsuit.

Frankly, I have thought from the beginning that the onus is on our elected leaders to explain themselves. And while I appreciate the current efforts of some aldermen to draft a code of conduct—and I believe that work should continue—it is no substitute for accountability.

As aldermen think about how to prevent these types of situations from happening in the future, they also ought to dig into why they happened in the past. This shouldn’t just fall upon the shoulders of the auditor’s office or a citizen’s lawsuit.

It’s time to speak up. The attempts to bury this incident have failed.

An update

The Scott County Attorney’s office is objecting to Pleasant Valley school board candidate Tracey Rivera’s request that the district court order the Board of Supervisors to follow the law and accept a recount board’s findings in a disputed board race last year.

As I wrote previously, three of the five supervisors rejected the recount board’s findings that the race between Rivera and Jameson Smith was a tie. This, even though the state code says supervisors “shall” accept a recount board’s findings if they conflict with a previous result. The unofficial Election Day tally said Smith won by six votes.

The close margin prompted Rivera to ask for a recount.

Supervisors complained the recount board broke the law by counting votes that weren’t properly marked, and their rejection of the recount board’s findings effectively declared Smith the winner.

Rivera went to the district court last month asking for the court order.

In a filing this week, the county attorney’s office argues such a court order isn’t proper when there is another “plain, speedy and adequate remedy” at hand. The office points to a separate part of the code pertaining to contesting elections it says was available to Rivera.

We’ll see what the court has to say, and I haven’t seen a response from Rivera yet. But it seems to me the remedy Rivera is seeking wasn’t to go to an election contest procedure, which the county attorney’s office says would take 30 days. Instead, she is asking the court to order the county board to follow the law and accept the recount board’s findings. Which, in the case of a tie, would necessitate a random drawing to determine the winner.

Would a contest procedure be speedier than that?

Would it address the claim the supervisors acted illegally?

One of the reasons I’m so interested in this is the majority on the board willfully disregarded the advice of its own legal advisers, and in their Dec. 4 meeting, some of them even seemed to acknowledge the law gave them no choice. Still, they rejected the recount board’s report, anyway. This is troubling.

Jameson Smith has also made a motion to intervene in this case. His attorney, Alan Ostergren, says that the supervisors were right to declare Smith the winner. He argues the recount board’s report contained a tabulation error and didn’t document “scatterings, overvotes, and undervotes, by precinct.”

State law, he says, allows the supervisors to correct “obvious clerical errors,” but that the recount board’s report didn’t permit them to correct the original canvass and contained an “obvious clerical error.”

In a related matter, the Iowa Secretary of State’s office did issue a finding a few weeks ago that the recount board committed a technical infraction by counting votes that weren’t properly marked. But the Quad-City Times reported that a member of the recount board, retired judge Mark Smith, questioned the state’s inquiry, noting neither he nor the other recount board member who agreed the race was a tie were contacted by the Secretary of State’s office.

Smith had previously said the rules governing recounts appeared to have conflicting language and voter intent is also a consideration.

This battle isn’t settled yet. I’ll keep you posted.

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