City Councilor Ellis Wins Lawsuit Against… The City

We’re going to let Charlyn Ellis’ attorney tell you what the court decided last Friday and what it means, but first we’ll summarize: Ward 5 City Councilor Ellis straight-up won; the City of Corvallis lost.

Over a year ago, high ranking city officials said she had violated the City Charter and had therefore forfeited her councillorship. All of us in local media reviewed the City’s evidence alongside the language of the Charter and came to the same conclusion – Ellis hadn’t violated anything.

Eventually, seventeen former city councilors and a former mayor issued an open letter saying the same thing.

How it all started

This whole kerfuffle ostensibly centered on Ellis asking the council to ask the city manager to hire someone, anyone really, to please work as a support staffer for Corvallis’ Climate Action Advisory Board, or CAAB. The council instead directed the city manager to make sure CAAB had the support it needed, whether he hired someone, or used existing staff, or a temp, or whatever he wanted. Ellis was happy enough with that.

Matter handled? Nope.

Some weeks later a committee made of the mayor, city manager, and now replaced city attorney, and also now replaced city council president and vice-president cried foul because they had decided that Ellis’ actions were an attempt to coerce the city manager to make a hire, and that would have, of course, been a City Charter no-no.

Like we said at the time, we weren’t buying it. And as it turned out, neither was the general public.

To most folks it looked like Ellis was just being a city councilor, and had acted, well, councilor-ish. So questions swirled over the City’s motivations. The scuttlebutt was that Ellis could be… well… a little strident, and that she’d rankled just a few too many colleagues over the years.

In the end, Ellis filed a federal lawsuit to put a stop to this whole thing – and while awaiting judgement she also ran for another term. She was already reasonably popular with voters, and the City’s actions had the effect of skyrocketing that popularity even more, so she wound up running unopposed.

Now serving her fifth term, the new council has elected her as their vice-president.

Ellis’ attorney, what the court decided

In finding for Ellis, the court concluded the City and some of its officials had acted both unconstitutionally, and wait for it… retaliatorily.

We asked Oregon City attorney Jesse Buss, who represented Ellis, for comment.

“What Judge Aiken did today is strike down most of Section 23(f) of the Corvallis City Charter as unconstitutional under both Article 1, section 8 of the Oregon Constitution and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Judge Aiken also found that the City unconstitutionally retaliated against Councilor Ellis for exercising her protected First Amendment rights.

The judge agreed with Councilor Ellis that the purpose of Section 23(f) is to combat cronyism and patronage—in other words, corruption. But Section 23(f) was worded way too broadly so that it prohibited totally innocent speech. That’s what happened here; Councilor Ellis didn’t say or do anything that was corrupt — for example she didn’t try to get the City Manager to hire a family member, or award a city sewer or paving contract to a friend.

No, Councilor Ellis was prosecuted under Section 23(f) only because she discussed the City’s need to hire a Climate Program Specialist, and asked the City Council to have the City Manager get going on that hiring process. The City Council had already decided to dedicate funding to climate work. So Councilor Ellis was just doing her job. And for doing her job, she almost lost it.”

What’s next

At last count, last year, our city leaders had racked up $200,000 in legal fees on this case, and now they will almost certainly be asked to pay Ellis’ attorney’s fees. As for Ellis, she wasn’t seeking a big payout, asking for only ‘nominal’ damages, and that’s what the court awarded – $1.00, and that’s not a typo. When plaintiffs and courts do this, they’re generally just seeking to assert there is a clear winner, and not insignificantly, the award offers a legal peg on which to hang the attorney’s fees that someone should be paying.

And now, we’ll editorialize just a little: City officials should simply and quickly pay Ellis’ attorney fees, it’s the right thing to do.

For more details about the events that led to all of this, click here. To see Judge Ann Aiken’s ruling, click here.

Correction: A prior version of this story identified Jesse Buss as a Salem attorney, when in fact, he is based in Oregon City.

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