City Government

Did Mayor Schaaf Intimidate Council Members to Vote to Enhance Her Power?

Published

10 years ago

July 29, 2016

Only two members of the City Council – Desley Brooks and Rebecca Kaplan – were willing to stand up for a motion to deprive the mayor of the power to appoint three members of the seven-member Police Commission that will go on the ballot in November.

This lack of support for removing the mayoral appointments may have been in part due to pressure exerted on council members by Mayor Libby Schaaf, the Post has learned.

Multiple sources have told the Post that Mayor Schaaf privately threatened one or more council members, saying that if they did not support the version of the measure that the mayor wanted, she would back candidates against them in upcoming elections.

“This leads one to wonder what pressures were brought to bear against council members, since only Brooks and Kaplan were the only ones who were immune to the pressures,” according to a City Hall observer.

“The mayor’s backroom- muscle-type threats to get council votes can back re and threaten her recently passed $600 million housing bond ballot measure, which she has loaded with more than $150 million of bailout monies for her developer friends under the guise of affordable housing,” said Post Publisher Paul Cobb.

Responding to the allegations, Erica Derryck, the mayor’s director of communications, said, “This ridiculous assertion is totally false.”

“In fact, well before the proposed police commission’s structure was finalized, Mayor Schaaf had the foresight to propose that $1 million in city budget savings be designated to support the commission should voters pass the measure this fall,” said Derryck.

Noel Gallo spoke at Tuesday night’s council meeting about another type of pressure he had faced as someone who spearheaded efforts to work with the community to produce a proposal that would gain enough support on the council to go on the ballot.

“I have been called all kinds of things,” he said. “I have been called a cop killer. I am not a cop killer. I have been called that several times,” Gallo said.

Gallo said he ignores this kind of name-calling and remains dedicated to passing the charter amendment in November.

The Post inadvertently failed to publish the response from the Mayor’s office in its print version of this article.