Watertown City Council members argue about handling of ethics case
In a 10-minute tirade, Olney contended that the city failed to follow the City Charter in the way that the ethics complaint was handled against him, maintaining that only council members can bring about charges against one of their own.
The city conducted an "improper" ethics complaint against him because the Ethics Board overstepped its responsibility by recommending that he should be removed from office, he said.
"That was not supposed to happen," Olney told his colleagues during the business portion of Monday's meeting and after a resolution associated with the ethics investigation was defeated by a 2-2 vote.
He also declared that the $72,000 in legal bills that the city piled up regarding the ethics complaint was a waste of money.
"None of that money would have been spent," he said.
Olney also proclaimed the Ethics Board never gave him a chance to answer to their charges because he was not called to testify.
On Sept. 18, 2023, the Ethics Board recommended that the city hold a hearing to determine whether Olney engaged in a pattern of ethics violations and that he should be removed from office.
After listening to Olney's assertion about what transpired during the past two years, Councilman Robert O. Kimball did not sit quietly. In a rare move for new business, he asked to respond to Olney's comments, saying that Olney "was flat wrong" about how it was handled.
Kimball said his colleague's diatribe contained "a raft of misinformation."
The Ethics Board conducted a hearing, heard evidence and came back with a recommendation, Kimball pointed out. The next step would be City Council holding a hearing to determine whether Olney violated city ethics.
For months, Kimball pushed for the council to see the ethics complaint to its rightful conclusion. The public deserved that and so did the Ethics Board, he maintained.
By going through with the process, Olney also would have ended up with the "transparency" he had been wanting, Kimball said. Olney's side of the story would have come out, he explained.
After the meeting, City Attorney Kristen Smith asserted that the matter of the council holding an ethics board hearing hasn't quite been resolved.
Last year, council members authorized going through with a hearing and "nothing has changed with it," she said. The hearing could still be scheduled, she said.
Council members could also just let the hearing "linger" and take no action. Or they could vote to rescind it, she said. It was unclear on Monday night what the council might do.
Council members have spent a good portion of the past nearly two years dealing with the saga of the ethics complaint.
It was then Mayor Jeffrey M. Smith, a political adversary of the councilman, who filed the ethics complaint accusing Olney of releasing confidential information, having a conflict of interest and breaching his fiduciary duty involving the city's purchase of the former Watertown Golf Club in January 2023.
But Olney said the ethics complaint was filed to discredit him and was biased in the way it was handled.
As for Monday's 2-2 vote, council members defeated a resolution authorizing a limited waiver of attorney-client privilege and testimony from Harris Beach attorneys H. Todd Bullard and Justin Miller, whose law firm represented the city at the time when the ethics complaint first came up 23 months ago. The two attorneys were involved in drafting the ethics complaint.
Without the waiver, the two attorneys would probably not testify.
Councilwoman Lisa A. Ruggiero was joined by Olney to vote against the resolution, while Councilman Benjamin P. Shoen and Kimball voted for it. Mayor Sarah V.C. Pierce was absent.
Neither Ruggiero nor Shoen commented about their vote.
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