Corvallis City Council to consider ousting Charlyn Ellis | #citycouncil

In a meeting packet sent ahead of the Monday, Dec. 4, council meeting, a resolution will come before the council declaring the Ward 5 councilor seat vacant and directing the city manager to solicit nominations to fill that position.

According to the single-page resolution, Ward 5 Councilor Charlyn Ellis has forfeited her position by virtue of violating the Corvallis charter. It does not detail why.

In general terms, the resolution says Ellis has interfered in “administration and elections.” It says:

Neither the mayor nor any member of the council shall in any manner, directly or indirectly, by suggestion or otherwise, attempt to influence or coerce the manager in the making of any appointment or removal of any officer or employee or in the purchase of supplies; or attempt to exact any promise relative to any appointment from any candidate for manager, or discuss, directly or indirectly, with the manager the matter of specific appointments to any city office or employment. 

No one’s name is attached to the resolution. It says: “A resolution submitted by Councilor ____________________,” presumably to be filled in by whichever councilor makes the motion Monday. 

Ellis has not resigned her position, she said by phone Thursday, Nov. 30, “because that would mean that I had health reasons or something like that.”

Ellis said she knows from where the allegation stems. She was called to a meeting on Monday, Nov. 27, set up the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, with the City Attorney Jim Brewer, council President Tracey Yee and Mayor Charles Maughan, during which she was informed that she had violated the city charter when she asked the council to direct the city manager to fill an open position.

At the Sept. 18 council meeting, Ellis brought up staffing issues faced by the Climate Action Advisory Board, on which she serves a council liaison and the chair, during the councilors report segment of the meeting. 

In her motion, she said the board was requesting the council direct the city manager to post a full-time job opening for a climate program specialist within two weeks of the meeting and update the council on the hiring process until the position was filled. 

The community side of implementing the Climate Action Plan, adopted in 2016, was in jeopardy without staff to keep meetings going, Ellis said at the meeting. The person who had occupied that position left the city earlier in the year.

Besides assisting with basic meeting operations to adhere to public meeting laws, Ellis said the program specialist was needed for other responsibilities, such as keeping track of state and federal government funding for climate-related initiatives and working on applications to clinch those funds, such as the $300,000 Carbon Reduction Program funding the city received for an electric sweeper.

“My fear is without a dedicated climate program specialist, the climate action board will not meet,” Ellis said at the Sept. 18 council meeting, stressing that “we are in a climate emergency.”

Several councilors raised objections to the motion at the Sept. 18 meeting, stating that it was in violation of the Corvallis charter as it was not the responsibility of the council to direct the city manager to fill open positions. 

“By adding a level of specificity that you want the city manager to appoint a particular officer or employee, I think that’s exactly what the charter says you can’t do,” Brewer said at the meeting. 

The motion did not pass, although a substitute motion simply calling for the advisory board to continue meeting monthly did. 

Ellis said on Thursday that at the time the Nov. 27 meeting, she hadn’t read that section of the charter, and if she was considered to be in violation, it was a mistake. The sense she got from the meeting, she said, was that she had done something egregious by moving that motion. 

“Now, I have questions,” Ellis said. The situation has her “just stunned.” 

She’s not the only one with questions.

“My first reaction to it is confusion,” Ward 5 resident Marjorie Stevens said, citing how the one-page resolution seems insufficient given the ask. 

“I feel like I have lost my elected representative, and as far as democracy goes, there’s something wrong here,” Stevens said. 

Ellis was first elected in November 2016, running unopposed. She was reelected two years later, this time facing a challenger. In the next two races, she ran unopposed.

“My elected representative under threat of being removed through some sort of bureaucratic paperwork, without having any kind of explanation or review or public input, it just feels almost like a coup d’etat in a way. It’s alarming to me,” she said.

In email threads among constituents since the packet was made public, Stevens said Ellis has been receiving praise for being an attentive and effective representative, going as far as to express support for a reelection if one is on the table. 

Stevens is also concerned about the gap of her ward’s representation at the City Council a dismissal might create and what will happen in that time period without Ellis’ voice there. 

“It’s never a good time to be without representation in city government,” said Wendy Byrne, a member of the Climate Action Advisory Board.  

In conversations with other community members, Byrne said residents are raising questions about the elapsed time between the supposed charter violation and the resolution, as well as the levity of Ellis’s September motion compared to what reads like an automatic dismissal.

“What I’m hearing from my friends in the community is just, there’s a lot of frustration that there does not seem to be any due process. It does not seem like there’s any explanation, and people are confused as to what this means,” Byrne said.

According to Byrne, the advisory board was concerned about stalled meetings as a result of inconsistent staff support, hence the push for Ellis to make the Sept. 18 motion. 

“We still have those same concerns. We have one person who does support us now, who’s sort of filing in after work, and that seems like a lot to ask of her,” Byrne said. 

City Council positions have opened up before the expiration of a tenure for various reasons in the past, mostly because of health or departures from town. Longtime council watchers can’t recall a similar circumstance.

“We had a city councilor who was arrested and charged with a crime who still maintained their office,” Stevens said. 

“I have seen a few different things over the years, but this is the first time I’ve seen something like invoking the city charter to declare a position vacant,” she said.

Former Ward 5 councilor Mike Beilstein, who served just before Ellis, said it was not unusual to have councilor liaisons bring back requests to the council, especially since the recent citywide consolidation of advisory boards. 

“I don’t see that Charlyn Ellis has done anything unusual for a councilor, especially in her role as liaison to the advisory board,” Beilstein said.

But council President Yee said by email that because Ellis also serves as chair, her situation is different. The Climate Action Advisory Board is the only advisory committee where a council liaison also chairs the board. According to Yee, ”the responsibilities and accountability of a chair is different than just a liaison.”

Beilstein argued that because there are no supporting documents in the packet, he would suggest the councilors remove the item from the agenda. He also said it appears as if someone has a “vendetta” against Ellis, calling the controversy an “embarrassment.”

Yee said the deliberation’s procedure will be pretty standard: A councilor will move the motion to pass the resolution and it will be seconded before members can consider it.

Ward 4 resident Dave Eckert said the resolution’s wording raises confusions about the meaning of the term “forfeiture.” 

“The question really centers on ‘did Charlyn resign?’ And did she do that verbally or in writing as an official resignation? Or did somebody decide that she violated the charter and that automatically forfeits her seat? And if someone decided that, on what authority?” Eckert said.

The resolution presents the matter as an already forgone conclusion, he said, and this was a concern he’s heard from several community members. 

“According to people that I’ve talked with or who have contacted me, nobody remembers anything like this ever happening before,” Eckert said. The closest was in ’94 when the then city manager asked the council to resolve a situation where it was believed a line had been crossed with the city charter. 

Eckert said his feeling as well as that of several others he’s been in conversation with is that “the process seems so wrong.”

After reviewing video of the meeting and reading the agenda resolution, Eckert said the motion moved by Ellis was to fill an opening; it was not a request to fill it with a specific person. 

While everyone he has talked to agrees that this may not be a violation of the letter of the charter, Eckert acknowledged that a lawyer or judge might interpret it differently. Still, that does not change the impression that the dismissal seems to be pushing through quickly and without due process, he said. 

“Another question is, who made that decision? And what is their authority to have done that?” Eckert said. 

“I’ve never experienced forfeiture of a council on account of the charter,” former city councilor Tony Howell said by phone. 

As the board’s liaison, Howell said Ellis was in the right to advocate for a vacant position to be filled. The charter language, he said, was aimed at preventing councilors from directing the hiring (or firing) of a specific candidate. 

“Making a motion in front of council puts it on the council, so it’s not even directly to the city manager,” Howell said. 

Even if the budgetary allocation for the role were unavailable or the job responsibilities were changing, as some councilors raised during the Sept. 18 meeting, asking for its filling to be expedited was still an appropriate council issue, Howell said. 

“It’s a very big step we’ve never taken before in terms of modifying the votes of a ward, and it should be taken seriously,” Howell said. 

The fact that the resolution in the packet did not even present the charges, provide a report or supporting documents, or how the charter is being interpreted should be concerning, Howell added. 

Ellis is unclear how the conversation will go at the Monday meeting. She said she planned to meet with the city attorney before then to better understand. 

At the time of her meeting with the mayor, city attorney and council president, she said she was too astonished to raise all the questions that she now has about the charter and her Sept. 18 motion. 

“As I read it, … it looks to me like it is trying to prevent cronyism,” Ellis said of the charter language. 

“But this is my interpretation; I’m an English teacher. I’m familiar with words, I’m not a lawyer,” she said. “It looks to me like you cannot say, ‘You need to hire my brother-in-law to resurface the street.’ That’s what it reads like to me.”

Whether this is a personal attack is a question Ellis is not interested in discussing, as it takes the focus away from the question of whether she violated the charter, she said. 

“And that is the question for me, if I actually deliberately violated the charter. I do not believe I did. I might have inadvertently, but I do not believe I did it deliberately,” Ellis said.

Attempts to reach other ward councilors, the city manager and city attorney to understand the scope of the council meeting on Monday, Dec. 4 and if constituents have a say in the outright dismissal of their elected official have been unsuccessful.