The initial Concord City Council meeting of their first term didn’t go as Mark Davie and Aislinn Kalob expected.
Both knew they were taking their seats at a table full of strong personalities, some of whom have years, even decades, of history with one another. They didn’t know the first meeting would end with accusations about a financial conflict of interest, a hastily called closed-door meeting, abrupt adjournment, and a call by Mayor Byron Champlin for the removal of a city councilor, Stacey Brown.
For her part, Brown continues to defend her actions as well-intentioned oversight of city spending, while other councilors argue she has gone too far.
Both newcomers used the same word to describe the meeting’s events: disappointing.
“I came into it having prepared to get some work done,” Kalob said. “But everything happened very, very fast.”
At the same time, neither sees an overly complicated path forward.
On the one hand, they worry about the ability of the council to make progress on the issues they’re passionate about – addressing root-causes to homelessness for Kalob and a meaningful update to the master plan and zoning rules for Davie – under the status quo. A council with this much bad blood, in their view, would be unlikely to hash out hard decisions productively.
“Are we not going to be able to have good conversation at the table if this person is still there?” Davie wondered, referencing Brown.
“[Brown] comes in guns blazing at all times, and the thing I wish for her is that she could maybe pick her battles,” Kalob agreed. “In order to get anything done, you have to have tact and be able to build coalitions and speak respectfully at the table, and I did not see that respectful tone on Monday.”
Their unease about dialogue and asking tough questions, however, goes deeper.
Both before and after the January meeting, Davie and Kalob had worried about being labeled as difficult if they probed too deeply or too publicly on an issue they care about. While they said they saw no merit to Brown’s implications of malfeasance by city staff, they also said the council table must be a place where they can raise sensitive concerns openly. Removing Brown wouldn’t make that any easier.
“It would put me in a tight spot… I will have a lot of questions. I’m not afraid to ask questions. I think it’s my job to ask questions at the table,” Kalob said. “I don’t want actions [against Brown] to send the message that discussion, conversation, questioning is discouraged. And I think this would send quite a message.”
Come budget season, Davie said, “if I ask too many questions about city accounts, am I going to be seen as, I don’t know, pushing a conspiracy theory?”
The new councilors cautioned that removing the Ward Five councilor could further fracture trust in the city among people who feel she represents their concerns.
Brown, now in her third term on the council, didn’t face a substantial challenge in city elections this fall and was decisively returned to her seat. Her posts are popular on social media platforms with residents from across the city.
Davie and Kalob, who grew up in a digital world, warned against dismissing online discourse, even if only among a select group.
“What is online lives forever and does contribute to legacy,” Kalob said. “If we are in a situation where we’re taking one direct punitive action against a councilor who’s been portrayed online as the only one standing up for taxpayers, I think it’s going to backfire.”
Some people may gravitate towards Brown, with her persistent inquisitiveness, Kalob continued, because they don’t feel they understand how their local government is operating lately, especially when it comes to major capital projects.
“I have full faith that things are transparent. They’re just not accessible,” Kalob said. “The public, they just want information. We’re dealing with their money, and this is a terrible economic time. It should not surprise anyone on the council that we’re in this position.”
Davie agreed. Making information not only available to the public but easily found and able to be shared is something they think the council could do better, regardless of how it proceeds.
The two new councilors have already taken steps to translate council business into colorful social media posts, hoping to meet constituents where they’re at.
Brown has argued that the pushback she’s received from city staff and from others on the council is retaliation for asking uncomfortable questions about how taxpayer money is managed and spent.
Where Brown’s questions have become an issue, in Davie’s view, is in not accepting the responses she’s received. Brown’s dialogue with city staff weighs on him as a public employee himself, with the Strafford Regional Planning Commission.
“Now, more than ever, we need the transparency. We need people asking questions when they don’t understand,” he said. “But, I think, it’s been demonstrated that she’s gotten answers many times on many issues.”
Regardless of the council’s next steps, both newcomers have been studying to get up to speed, meeting with staff from multiple departments and with other councilors, poring over agendas and past council priorities, and getting a handle on Robert’s Rules of Order, which govern how meetings function.
Not only as the new voices on the board but also ones with relatively unique backgrounds at the table, they are looking forward to approaching issues with a fresh take. Davie, 27, and Kalob, 31, are a decade younger than the next youngest councilor. They are renters and residents who came to the city within the last few years.
“I’ve always rented, and I work a service industry job, like so many of the people in my area. I feel like a good representative of who lives there,” Kalob said. She’s thinking of holding “office hours” at the laundromat next to her apartment to engage other renters on local matters.
On the housing issue, Davie brings not just his professional expertise as a planner and experience on Concord’s zoning board, but the real frustration of young adults looking to make Concord home.
“I’ve said it before,” Davie said, “I haven’t known a fair housing market in my adult life.”
On Monday, the council will reconvene to set its priorities for the coming two years.
Whether specific targets– like “new police station” – or thematic aims – such as “community communication” – the goals serve as a direction for how much attention different issues should get from city staff and are one yardstick against which the council’s work can be measured over the next two years. Councilors get periodic updates on progress towards the priorities from city administration.
Brown responds
In an interview this week, Brown stood by her comments at the January meeting and underlined that she feels that she is being punished politically for taking an aggressive oversight role on city finances.
“I think the reaction to my questions about where taxpayer dollars are going is a disproportionate reaction to asking questions,” she said. Especially when it came to her concerns that the city had been improperly spending money from its reserve accounts, she did not understand why her peers found her inquiries transgressive.” I found that strange, in that other councilors – who are on the Fiscal Policy Advisory Committee – weren’t interested in learning more about that.”
Brown’s removal from her major committee positions this term were a clear point of frustration. To Brown, it is objectionable that she would be taken off posts when others who are less available to attend meetings or have what Brown sees as real ethical conflicts are given more prominent assignments.
“There was no justification for pulling me off of these committees,” she said.
When asked what prompted her to bring accusations against At-Large Councilor Amanda Grady Sexton of a conflict of interest, Brown pointed to a December council meeting where she was cut off and her removal from her past committees at the start of this term.
A consideration of term limits for a city committee on homelessness, she said, highlighted in her view that current committee assignments were more rooted in politics than track record. “If we’re considering term limits, we should absolutely be looking at if councilors have conflicts.”
Grady Sexton has said that her employment with the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence in no way presents a conflict of interest with her role as chair of the city’s Public Safety Advisory Board and that accusations presented in a recent ethics complaint and by Brown are defamatory.
Brown also defended her interactions with city staff.
The council agenda is typically released the Thursday before Monday council meetings, though most public hearings are noticed the previous month. Brown described her frequent pull of consent agenda items and long lines of questioning for the city manager’s office as the result of tight timetables and informational keep-away.
“I like to do my research. I don’t want to vote on anything that I don’t understand,” she said. “Not being allowed to ask questions, not being given the time to get the information early enough that we can raise questions with staff, that’s a concern, and that is strange to me.”
Brown’s found statements by Mayor Byron Champlin supporting her removal “very surprising.”
“I’m clearly being punished for asking questions,” she said.
What other councilors are saying
With the embittered dissolution of the January meeting, the council as a body asked the city solicitor to explore options for sanctioning or removing Brown. There has been no update, multiple councilors said this week.
Ward One Councilor Brent Todd favors some kind of action against Brown, but said he awaits more information. He described Brown’s accusations towards Grady Sexton as “unacceptable, and an unwarranted distraction from the business at hand.”
“I’m concerned this kind of behavior will continue,” he said.
When it comes to interacting with staff, “I believe councilor Brown has been courteous,” he continued. “But answers have been provided, and they don’t seem to have been accepted.”
Michele Horne, of Ward Two, saw the dynamic differently. The responses Brown receives from the city manager’s office, typically shared with the full council, aren’t always clear-cut, she said. If Brown asks questions repeatedly, she said, it is sometimes because responses aren’t forthright the first time.
Often, she said, a response to Brown will be to tell her to check the minutes of a specific meeting. But the minutes don’t always spell out a clear answer, Horne said, meaning Brown has to circle back.
While she’s mindful of staff workloads, Horne said, “I don’t think it’s fair to remove someone for asking too many questions.”
Horne added that Brown wasn’t the only one who had levied personal jabs at fellow councilors, though she declined to be more specific.
“Everybody needs to be held to the same standard,” she said.
Horne also said that interpersonal friction on the council was inhibiting its ability to be productive and find compromises – but she didn’t lay that only at Brown’s feet.
“A lot of the councilors are frustrated with Councilor Brown,” Horne said, “and therefore anything that other councilors, including myself, bring up that she might agree with is struck down just to spite her.”
Judith Kurtz, a citywide representative, sits between Brown and Grady Sexton at the council table. She felt both Brown’s claims about Grady Sexton and about city administration had gone beyond the bounds of financial oversight.
“Asking questions to understand and to be able to explain the function of the city to constituents is an incredibly important part of our jobs,” Kurtz said. “Asking questions as a veil for accusations is detrimental to the council as a whole, the function of the city and public trust, and I think there’s been many months of crossing that line.”
Kurtz also described Brown’s demeanor as making it harder for some other councilors to engage on tough or controversial topics. When Brown raises questions about, for example, the golf course and its relationship with the New Hampshire Golf Association, Kurtz shares the desire for clarity. But she is increasingly uncomfortable asking staff about it at the council table, she said, and more likely to reach out later.
“I feel in those moments that I want to be very careful about my tone,” Kurtz said. “I don’t think we get anywhere in attack mode, and I think there definitely is a reluctance on my part to be part of that discourse.”
Kurtz isn’t sure what next steps she supports but, like Todd and Horne, she framed the turmoil as pulling the council away from its mission.
“I’m determined to get us back on track,” she said. “At the moment, I’m curious about all pathways to restoring the council to function.”
Monday’s priority-setting session will take place at 6 p.m. in city council chambers.