Lynchburg council censures 2 members, strips their seniority, bans them from some proceedings

The Lynchburg City Council put on a civics lesson Tuesday.

It wasn’t necessarily the kind you’d find in a school textbook, but it was educational nonetheless.

The immediate business was a special meeting in which, at the end, the council voted 4-3 to censure council members Jeff Helgeson and Marty Misjuns for “disorderly behavior and misconduct” for breaking attorney-client privilege by releasing an email that the city attorney sent to all council members, the argument being that only a majority of council has the right to waive that attorney-client privilage.

This was no mere reprimand. This particular censure stripped both Helgeson and Misjuns of their council seniority — Misjuns is a first-termer but Helgeson is currently Lynchburg’s longest-serving council member, with 20 years of service. Unlike the General Assembly, where seniority confers certain privileges, it’s unclear that this really means anything, but it does carry symbolic weight. The censure also reshuffles the seating on the dais, relegating Helgeson to the far right end (Misjuns already sits at the far end on the left side). It imposes fines, which will be lifted if the two agree to undergo training through the Virginia Municipal League or some similar organization — and, in what seemed to cause the most ire, it bans the two from participating in performance reviews of the city attorney, with whom they have often clashed. That performance review, by the way, was set for later Tuesday. (The full resolution is below.)

Even that account sounds rather prosaic compared to the drama that preceded it, and took up nearly two hours.

Council member Larry Taylor (who later joined Helgeson and Misjuns in voting against the censure) begged for “a peaceful solution” and asked the two to apologize:  “Are you sorry for the attitudes and behavior you’ve displayed?”

Both did, but not in ways sufficient for the majority. “I”m sorry if I offended folks,” Helgeson said.

“I can apologize for being too forceful,” Misjuns said.

That wasn’t enough for Vice Mayor Chris Faraldi. “Saying ‘I apologize if I offended you’ is not an apology,” he said. “I’ve been down this road with Jeff before. It’s nothing more than a submission tactic. Larry, you’re being played.”

“I agree,” said Mayor Stephanie Reed. “Two of our elected officials violated attorney-client privilege. They defamed the character and reputation of our city attorney. … We do hold our members to a standard.” She said the censure was necessary: “We do have to send a message.”

Helgeson and Misjuns protested that they hadn’t done anything wrong, that Reed and others had discussed the email in question (more on that shortly) before they had, and that springing the censure resolution on them was a violation of their constitutional right to due process.

Later, Misjuns accused Reed of being a liar. Faraldi called Misjuns and Helgeson “weasels” (echoing a word that someone in the audience had just called him) who would probably sue regardless and said that if the two really cared about the city attorney’s performance review, they wouldn’t have walked out of his review session a year ago. Helgeson called the censure “a public lynching” and Misjuns likened it to “middle school girls’ locker room petty stuff.” Faraldi called Misjuns “a piece of work” who is “causing chaos.” Audience members cheered and sometimes hooted for their favored side. One audience member held up a cardboard sign that, among other things, said Misjuns “has no business on Lynchburg city council.” At least one wore a button that read “(Heart) Helgeson and Misjuns.” Religion was invoked. “Some of y’all take Communion in the same church,” Taylor said in his failed bid to be a mediator. “You’re brothers and sisters in Christ.” To quell one particularly tense moment, Reed started singing a popular Christian music song, “Goodness of God.”

All my life you have been faithful
And all my life you have been so, so good

The mayor has a lovely singing voice, but Lynchburg did not look so good Tuesday — or, perhaps, anytime since a new majority took over after the November 2022 elections. Taylor bemoaned the reputation that the council is getting. “They call us idiots,” he said. “Promise us that this insane stuff is going to stop.”

For those not familiar with Lynchburg politics, the remarkable thing is that all the council members I’ve cited so far are Republicans. The party swept the 2022 elections to win a 5-2 majority on the council — and then promptly broke into two seemingly irreconcilable factions. Or maybe those factions were already there and the election simply amplified their differences, which began, at least in public, when the two sides split over who to elect as mayor. (Reed won that vote, Helgeson lost.) Ever since then, the quarreling has continued, culminating first in a censure vote against Misjuns last year, and now Tuesday’s double censure resolution.

The two non-Republicans on the council sat quietly as this spectacle raged on.

“I really am experiencing PTSD,” said council member Maryjane Dolan, when it was finally her turn to speak. Dolan, who was elected as an independent but is often identified as a Democrat, said of Helgeson and Misjuns: “You sit up here and apologize and then turn around and your behavior is the same. I sit here watching this in utter disbelief.”

Sterling Wilder, a Democrat, concurred: “We have received so many comments from all over the country because of this dysfunctional unit. We need to be praying that we can get back to some normalcy.”

At one point Helgeson likened the council to “Game of Thrones,” where royal family members who have fallen into disfavor are paraded through the streets in a public shaming. “Maybe I should take off my shirt, put blood on myself and hit myself,” he said. Since Helgeson brought up the George R.R. Martin fantasy universe, so will I: This feud between the two Republican factions on Lynchburg council reminds me of the feud between the Blackwoods and Brackens , two neighboring families in the Riverlands of fictional Westeros who have been fighting for so long no one can really remember why. There are certainly stylistic differences here — the Helgeson-Misjuns faction being more hardline than the Faraldi-Reed faction — but it’s difficult to identify substantive policy differences that aren’t really personality conflicts (although the former think the latter are not particularly good conservatives while the latter think the former are simply bullies who like being disruptive.) This certainly does not appear to be your typical moderate-vs.-conservative fight; Faraldi and Reed both backed John McGuire in his recent Republican primary victory over Rep. Bob Good, so that means they were on the side of the candidate who faulted Good for not being 100% in line with Donald Trump.

The conflicts first surfaced as soon as the new Republican majority took office in early 2023. Helgeson had hoped, as the senior Republican on council, that he’d be elected mayor — and Good tried to line up votes for Helgeson (an unusual thing for a congressman to do). Instead, Faraldi intimated to Good in a recorded conversation that Helgeson would present such a bad image for the party that he’d cost Republicans the majority in the next election. In the end, Dolan and Wilder joined with Faraldi and Reed to make Reed the mayor and Faraldi the vice mayor by the same 4-3 vote as Tuesday’s double censure. Not long after that mayoral vote, Helgeson was heard to mutter that Reed was “the stupidest person on earth.” Earlier this summer, Reed told Lynchburg’s WLNI-FM that Helgeson and Misjuns were intent on “terrorizing” her.

The immediate source of controversy was the June 18 Republican primary in Ward IV, where Helgeson and Misjuns backed a challenger to Faraldi. That challenger lost, narrowly, but still outside the margin that allowed for a recount. Instead, the challenger, Peter Alexander, filed a lawsuit to declare the election void, alleging that not all the votes may have been counted. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the city attorney polled council members about how the city should respond. In the course of that, Helgeson and Misjuns released part of that email, accusing the city attorney of trying to take Faraldi’s side. That lawsuit later went away; Alexander’s attorney said an investigation allayed his concerns (although in a subsequent news conference, Alexander appeared to dispute that). You can read about it in some of our previous stories by Cardinal’s Matt Busse or my columns , because who did what to whom is not really my focus today.

Instead, it’s that civics lesson.

What can Lynchburg do about all this factionalism on the council? The one thing — maybe the only thing — that united council members Tuesday was agreement that the current situation is not good, although they all had different ideas as to whose fault it is. “I cannot go anywhere that I am not stopped by someone, Democrat, Republican, independent, and asked, ‘Why can’t you do anything about your members?’” Dolan said. “The city is really suffering as a result.”

Dolan did not offer an answer about what can be done, but I will: For the time being, absolutely nothing. And that’s why Lynchburg’s city council is such a good civics lesson. The current dysfunction on the council highlights both the importance of elections and the way government is organized.

Lynchburg’s seven-member council consists of four members elected from wards and three elected at-large.

Those four ward seats are on the ballot in November, but if Lynchburg voters are unhappy — be it with the Helgeson-Misjuns faction or the Faraldi-Reed faction — there is little that most of them can do about it for two reasons.

Both are structural.

First, a ward system, or even a hybrid ward system, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to replace all council members. Three-fourths of Lynchburg voters have no say in who three of the ward members are because they don’t live in those other wards. That’s the downside of a ward system. The upside is that minority interests are better represented, be those racial minorities or ideological minorities. (Roanoke is unusual for a city its size because it has a council elected entirely at-large; the minorities who get left out in Democratic-voting Roanoke are Republicans. If the Star City had a system like the Hill City, there’d be at least one, maybe two, Republicans on the city council.)

The second reason Lynchburg voters can’t do much about the conflicts on the council is also related to the hybrid ward system: Most wards aren’t competitive because they’re either strongly Democratic or strongly Republican. That has nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with residential patterns.

I am now about to speak in very practical terms, which sometimes offends those who prefer something more noble and inspirational, but I consider myself a realist when it comes to politics.

If some voters don’t like Faraldi, there is nothing that most of them can do about that. He just won his Republican primary and is running for reelection in a ward that’s 60%-plus Republican. Yes, he has an opponent, but you have to go back a long way to find a Democrat winning in that ward — and this year’s council election coincides with a presidential election and a growing trend toward straight-ticket voting. To envision a Democrat winning that ward, you have to either imagine a tectonic shift among Republican voters toward Kamala Harris in the presidential race or try to compute how many voters would split their tickets between Donald Trump and a Democratic candidate for the council. Yes, all voters are free agents who can do whatever they want, but nothing in electoral history suggests anything other than a Faraldi reelection.

If some voters don’t like Helgeson, there is nothing that most of them can do about that for the same reason. He’s once again the Republican nominee in a ward that’s likewise 60%-plus Republican. All the same logic above applies in this ward, as well.

Barring some political upheaval the likes of which I have never seen, both Faraldi and Helgeson will be reelected to the council — and will still be at odds with each other. For the same reasons, we can expect to see Wilder reelected in Ward II; that’s a 60%-plus Democratic ward.

The only voters in Lynchburg who can influence the direction of city council this fall are in Ward I — where Dolan is retiring and three candidates are seeking to replace her — and even their influence is quite limited. Here’s why.

If Democrat Randy Smith wins, the partisan line-up on the council will stay the same as it is now — the only difference is that he’d formally have a “D” after his name whereas Dolan doesn’t.

If independent Cameron Howe wins over two major party nominees, that would certainly send a signal of some sort, but that doesn’t really change the Republican split between Helgeson/Misjuns and Faraldi/Reed. (Taylor is also a Republican but has avoided being identified with either camp.)

If Republican Jacqueline Timmer wins — and right now she’s raised more money than her two opponents put together — the question is where she would fit factionally? Would she join the Misjuns/Helgeson faction and enhance their power? Since Taylor sometimes votes with Helgeson and Misjuns (but avoids the heated rhetoric on council), it’s possible that Timmer could give that faction a majority — and install Helgeson as mayor. However, even if Timmer were to come down somewhere else, would anything really change? Council would be more conservative — 6-1 Republican instead of functionally 5-2 Republican — but the dynamics between Helgeson/Misjuns and Faraldi/Reed might remain exactly the same regardless of who is mayor. ( See our voter guide for a full list of candidates .)

That brings us to another key structural point: All four of the main Republican combatants will be back on the council next year — two of them aren’t up for reelection (Misjuns and Reed) and the reelections of the other two (Faraldi and Helgeson) are little more than formalities, because of the electoral realities I cited above.

If our Founding Fathers had adopted a parliamentary system of government, perhaps things would be different. Perhaps the Lynchburg council could hold a vote of no confidence, or perhaps the mayor could dissolve the council and call for new elections, and Hill City voters would have a chance to decide who should stay and who should go. That’s not how our government works, though. We elect office-holders to set terms, so it’s on voters to make wise choices, because they don’t get a chance to change their minds for four years.

If voters in Lynchburg are really unhappy with the turmoil on the council, they’ll have to wait until 2026 — and then vote out either Misjuns or Reed (or both), depending on their political preferences. Even then, Faraldi and Helgeson will still be around. Voting out either Misjuns or Reed is certainly possible, but remember that elections don’t ask “yes” or “no.” They ask about specific candidates. To vote one or more of those council members out, you have to vote someone else in. We’ve all seen elections where unpopular candidates are reelected because the opposing candidate was considered even more undesirable.

Remember, too, that Misjuns and Reed were elected on the same ticket in 2022. Reed led the balloting, with more voters than any Lynchburg council member had ever received. That’s largely because Lynchburg used to hold its municipal elections in May, and state law now directs them be held in November, but the point remains the same: Reed was a very popular candidate. Taylor came in second and Misjuns came in third. Ultimately, Lynchburg voters have only themselves to blame: If they blame the twice-censured Misjuns for being the source of the problem here, they should ask themselves why they didn’t vote for Treney Tweedy, the only candidate two years ago who came close to him in the balloting.

If their answer is “We didn’t know things would get this bad,” that’s a fair answer. Sometimes things don’t turn out the way we’d like. Lynchburg voters can’t be faulted for not expecting this kind of internal combustion from a Republican majority. Helgeson has been on the Lynchburg council for two decades and may have been an irritant to some (or a champion to others), but the council never descended into the kind of tumult we now see. Faraldi has been on for four years, and his first two years didn’t coincide with any disorder, either. Blame whoever you wish, but that 2022 election produced a more volatile combination of personalities on the council — it’s easy to point to Misjuns as the flashpoint since he’s been at the center of so much controversy, but opinions certainly vary on that and adjudicating who’s right and who’s wrong will have to wait for another day.

My point today is simply this: Government is always likely to produce some dysfunction. City councils are not boards of directors, where everyone is expected to agree on a corporate strategy. They are miniature legislatures, where disagreement is not simply expected but encouraged. Yes, the tenor of the disagreement in Lynchburg may be out of hand and reflect poorly on the city. Voters who don’t like that, though, will just have to be patient, as frustrating as that may be for all sides.

Below is the censure resolution. The resolution adopted excised point 8.

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