Before losing election, Clawson mayor sought secret deal to hurt opponent

Bill Laitner | Detroit Free Press

It’s a sobering story from Clawson City Hall — how the former mayor, ousted by voters last month, was stymied in maintaining the council's cult of secrecy after some embarrassing city emails went public.

With the election looming, ex-mayor Deborah Wooley ordered the recently hired city manager to secretly hire a digital-detective firm, with an open purchase order for up to $5,000, and threatened to fire him if word got out.

Wooley’s goal? According to the city manager, it was to dig up digital dirt on her political opponent, Reese Scripture, who’d been a plague to Wooley throughout Wooley’s two-year term, first filing an Open Meetings Act lawsuit, then running against Wooley for mayor. Wooley wanted to see whether Scripture had leaked the emails.

But the secret dirt-digging agreement turned up nothing improper about Scripture’s email contacts with the city. In fact, no one had hacked the city's email system. The emails, which should have been public information under Michigan law, evidently surfaced some other way, possibly from an employee's leak to residents, who then shared the emails around the city. Ultimately, they became part of a City Council packet of public documents, for a meeting that exposed the scheme — after the election.

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Now that Scripture has ousted Wooley with 61.3% of the vote, and now that she's leading a largely new city council toward reforms, City Manager Erin Irwin has revealed the deal that he feared would get him fired if he'd blown the whistle.

“There was nowhere to turn, no one I could tell this to,” Irwin said.

Irwin knew full well that Wooley had led the council to ax his predecessor, orchestrating a behind-the-scenes firing a year earlier of Clawson’s longtime city manager, Mark Pollock, in what has since been noted by city officials and legal experts to be one of many violations of the Michigan Open Meetings Act during Wooley's two-year term.

Wooley, reached by phone at her home last week, took issue with how Irwin and others described the secret deal with the digital private-eye firm.

“That’s not correct. That is all I’ll say,” she said, adding: “There was a lot of that kind of thing that went on.”

The story has been unraveling ever since the incumbent Wooley lost at the polls last month. She isn't accused of criminal acts, nothing like the dirty tricks unleashed in the Watergate scandal or, closer to home, the abusive reigns of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick or former Troy City Manager Brian Kischnick.

But Wooley violated civil law and Clawson's city charter in hiring the email detective firm, according to city documents, Clawson officials and experts on the Open Meetings Act. At the time, though, Irwin had no idea that Wooley would lose her power.

His predicament is typical of the big risks that threaten those who blow the whistle on improper or illegal activity in government, chronicled in the new book "Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump." The risks include being fired, being sued or, in the case of many federal employees in sensitive jobs, being charged with breaking laws on government secrecy.

On Monday, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives tried, but failed, to require public testimony from the anonymous whistle blower who set the Ukraine scandal in motion.

Yet, even in small-town city halls, the fear and career damage can be just as real, writes author Allison Stanger. And Irwin experienced it. Scripture and her lawyer documented multiple violations of the state Open Meetings Act, involving Wooley and other former council members, in a lawsuit that Scripture filed against the city before she ever dreamed of running for mayor.

“I should not have had to sue my own city and run for mayor to clean up this mess,” Scripture said last week, shrugging in wonder at the turn of events. Now that she’s mayor, she said, she hoped to settle her lawsuit, not for money but for a deal that requires the city council’s “commitment to obey the Open Meetings Act — because, hey, I can’t be suing myself.”

Her broader goal? To bake ethics into city practices and procedures, “so we don’t have any city employee placed in this position ever again,” Scripture said. By “this position” she means being ordered, as Irwin was, to sidestep the city council and normal purchasing rules. Ex-mayor Wooley seemed to know exactly what she wanted, irwin said.

“She told me there was some kind of a breach of our internal email system. She said, ‘Erin, there’s a mole.’ And the mayor was clear. She wanted this particular company hired. I was told I had spending authority up to $5,000, and it was grounds for termination if anything got out about this,” he said.

Getting fired would’ve been especially problematic. Irwin was hired in March with no severance pay in his employment agreement, he said. That’s in contrast to most city managers. They're typically subject to firing "without cause" by a simple majority of council members. So they usually have at least a few months of severance pay tucked into their employment agreements to protect them from political whim.

A cult of secrecy

In Clawson, the internal emails that riled former Mayor Wooley actually were public information under Michigan law, and thus subject to the Freedom of Information Act — as are virtually all written documents produced by local governments in Michigan. In other words, any reporter as well as ordinary residents of Clawson could request to see them.

But in the cult of secrecy pursued by Wooley and her council allies, elected officials had become accustomed to exchanging emails they considered confidential. So the mayor, now ex-mayor, demanded to know how certain emails had become public, and whether Scripture was somehow involved, Irwin said.

Those emails had revealed that some council members unsuccessfully pressured Irwin to give special treatment to one council member's friend — namely, a $1,500 discount on the cost of a new water-service line, installed by Clawson's public service workers as part of an addition that the resident was building on her house.

The emails raised a ruckus, although it turned out that Scripture had no role in leaking them. The secret investigation by the digital detectives pinpointed every recent contact her computer had with the city’s email system but found nothing unusual, Irwin said.

“We found no breaches in our system. There was no smoking gun. All the audit showed was that two old email accounts for ex-employees were still open, so we just closed those out,” he said.

At the time he ordered the audit, Irwin said, he knew it was wrong, yet he had nowhere to turn as a whistleblower.

“I couldn’t tell a soul in the world, not even our legal counsel," because of the city attorney's close tie to the ex-mayor. "I said to myself, 'I can hire these people but eventually this has to come out in the open. I’ll eventually have to bring this to council,'” he said.

So he did, right after Wooley was defeated. First, Irwin confided the situation to Scripture, just as the election dust settled, when she visited his office to introduce herself. She was aghast.

“I immediately told him, ‘I’m just one person on the council. I certainly can’t tell you what to do,’" she said.

“But I did say he should consider notifying this firm that they stop all work on this contract and they should just bill us for whatever they’ve done and submit their report. And he did that,” she said.

She also told him to consult with Clawson's new city attorney, who had no tie to Wooley.

On the improper contract, the digital detectives had accrued about $2,200 in billings, Irwin said. He paid that bill, ended the contract and then — at the Nov. 19 council meeting, two weeks after the election — he reported to the council the jarring saga. Irwin did so with kid-glove discretion, not naming Wooley as the instigator.

“It was at the behest of a lone council member,” he told council members and an audience at City Hall. Nor did Scripture "out" the ex-mayor that night.

Oddly, Wooley was fingered in the discussion by a council member who'd often sided with the former mayor, City Councilwoman Susan Moffitt. She'd learned from Wooley about the secret push for an email investigation some time after Wooley arranged it, Moffitt said.

“So, there was an investigation done and the council was informed of it after the fact,” said Scripture, looking over at the new city attorney, Renis Nushaj. “Is that the way it’s supposed to happen?” Scripture asked Nushaj.

“No, that’s not. A council vote needs to take place,” he said.

Return to transparency

Scripture’s decisive win not only broomed the former mayor but it also helped sweep in two other newcomers to the council. The new council members quickly turned hostile to the idea of a secret purchase order inked at the behest of a mayor feeling political pressure.

“Sounds to me like someone directed this to save their own butt,” newly elected Councilwoman Kathy Phillips said at the Nov. 19 meeting.

Councilwoman Paula Milan, an incumbent who'd often sided with Wooley, differed with that, saying: "There are situations that make serving unpleasant (and) I would just hope we could move on."

The new mayor wasn't ready to do that. Instead, Scripture zeroed in on what she tried to achieve as an outsider suing the city: that is, nailing down the city's need for a whistle blower policy, to protect employees from retaliation, and its need for strong ethics rules.

Scripture soon will lead council members in a workshop to discuss what they want in an ethics policy, reviewing what other communities have on their books before chairing a formal discussion and vote at a city council meeting.

With a mandate from voters, Scripture seems already steeped in the subject.

She told a reporter: “Rochester Hills has the best one I’ve seen. Here, take a look. I have it on my phone.”

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​​​​​​​Contact: blaitner@freepress.com