The Brooklyn Park City Council session fell into dysfunction May 28 as councilmembers Maria Tran and Boyd Morson interrupted a formal reprimand of Tran’s recent behavior with shouting protests.
Both council members interrupted Councilmember XP Lee’s time for comment, claiming to be under personal attack when Lee called the situation “shameful.”
As Mayor Hollies Winston talked about the item, Tran and Morson then interrupted him.
Much of the councilmembers' interruptions were not audible.
At one point, Tran challenged Winston on why he wasn’t allowing her to speak. At another, she told the mayor to “look in the mirror” when he claimed that the issue at hand was about the protection of a city employee.
Councilmember Nichole Klonowski made a motion to recess the meeting, calling the shouting “embarrassing” to the city. Following the recess, the council returned only to adjourn the meeting and table all items until the next meeting.
An independent investigation by Dyan J. Ebert of Quinlivan & Hughes, P.A., recently found that Tran violated the Code of Conduct for Elected Officials in her treatment of a city employee. The council reviewed the allegations May 20 in a closed session. The formal reprimand was addressed to Tran, dated May 28, and signed by the mayor.
“You have acknowledged that your actions were not consistent with the applicable provisions in the Code of Conduct and Respectful Workplace Policy,” the letter read. “You have also indicated that going forward you will work through the City Manager if you have issues regarding City employees. You appear to now understand how a council member’s conduct can have an adverse impact on employee morale and can create potential liability for the city.
“Based on your self-awareness of the situation, the City Council believes that a written reprimand is the appropriate way to address the matters that gave rise to the employee’s complaint. The other City Council members and I are optimistic that similar incidents will not reoccur.”
Additionally, Morson was formally censured by the City Council in April for making comments against city employees on social media. Morson was found to have violated the city’s Respectful Workplace Policy and Elected Officials Code of Conduct Policy.
Tran doubles down
When given time to speak, Tran appeared to contradict the letter’s summary of her behavior and doubled down on her previous complaints. She stated that the internal investigation against her was brought forward by people she was questioning. She claimed that she discovered an employee using drugs at City Hall and this employee was the one complaining about her.
Tran said the council meeting wasn’t her place to speak and that if she were to speak, that place would be in court. When Winston asked Tran not to punch down when she began to criticize the employee again, Tran said “Corruption… Abuse.”
Morson defended Tran at the meeting.
“We denied her that opportunity to have her right in due process to have her day before this council,” Morson said. “Again, whether or not we agree with it is a totally different story. But we didn’t even give her the due process to listen to what she had to say.”
Morson claimed it had been 18 months since Tran brought concerns to the city. He added that members of the current council hadn’t been in office for that long.
Revisiting the investigation
Klonowski responded, saying she felt like she was reading a very different report than Morson and asked City Attorney Jim Thomson to specify the finding of facts around Tran’s allegations. The attorney said the investigator concluded Tran had broken the City’s Code of Conduct and that the allegations Tran brought to the investigator were unsubstantiated.
Winston said, “People think that is the best spirit of democracy, to punch down on employees … We signed up for this stuff as electeds, but employees do not sign up to be put in a firing squad and then when someone is not happy with it, we say, ‘Well, that’s just democracy.’”
Winston recounted the city’s history of legal liabilities when a former fire chief who was consistently embarrassed by the City Council sued the city of Brooklyn Park.
“We had to pay not my money, not the council’s money. We had to pay taxpayer dollars,” Winston said. “So for those of you watching that are taxpayers, we had to pay taxpayer dollars because an elected official could not conduct themselves in a fashion becoming of an elected official and respect somebody who worked in the city.”
Winston said Tran had her time to speak during the closed meeting, to which she presented her case.
“We went through the process,” Winston said. “Employee made a complaint. We listened. We went through the official process that’s outlined in our rules and procedures.”
Winston went on to say, “The problem is that increasingly, we live in a society where if we don’t get the outcome we want, somebody either ‘lied’ or ‘they didn’t listen to me’ or ‘they’re just a bad person.’ The process was executed. Now, whether we agree with the city manager’s outcome or not, that is literally the government that Brooklyn Park has chosen.”
Councilmember Christian Eriksen said, “The seven people sitting up here have a great deal of power. And when it comes to the city employees, and aside from the 25 employees that we often see at council meetings here, I don’t know who works at the maintenance facility. I don’t know every one of our police officers. I don’t know them all. But they know us and they deserve to expect that when they interact with one of us, they’ll be treated fairly. That they will be given the benefit of the doubt … The seven of us sitting up here, we’re elected. We’re hard to get rid of. You can recall us or we can vacate our position for 90 days. Otherwise, the residents and the employees are stuck with us. We have an obligation to hold this power carefully and responsibly and in such a way that those people who are subjected to what we do up here feel safe and that they will be treated fairly decently 100% of the time.”
During Lee’s time to speak, he said both Tran and Morson’s behavior was shameful to which they both began yelling and interrupting Lee’s time to speak. Shortly after, a motion was made to recess the meeting when neither Tran nor Morson stopped yelling.
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