On March 21, the city of Scottsdale fired Mayor Lisa Borowsky’s chief of staff.
Lamar Whitmer had been on suspension during the roughly two-month investigation that led to his firing. His attorney says Whitmer is considering a lawsuit against the city.
This is the latest in a string of controversies involving Scottsdale’s government — including the debate over the plan by Taser-maker Axon to build a new headquarters with apartments in north Scottsdale; and a majority of the City Council voting to take away members of the mayor’s staff.
The Show spoke about all of this with KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky from the Politics Desk, and they started with why the mayor’s now-former chief of staff was suspended in the first place.
Full conversation
WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, this is the mayor’s now-former chief of staff, Lamar Whitmer. She had hired him last year to replace her existing chief of staff, who was kind of reassigned to a different job in her office. And come in, you know, as she’s having a lot of problems with the council to try and, I guess, support her and get her agenda across the line.
Come January, he gets suspended and put basically on house arrest almost, local reporting showed. They said: "You have to be available for your job from home from 9 to 5, you can’t leave without prior permission," all this stuff. So big controversy, but no one was really saying why he was suspended other than that there was this investigation going on about city rules and all that, vagaries. But no specifics.
The mayor at the time was claiming that they weren’t informed, they don’t know why. So nobody knows. So finally we get this investigative report that comes out and sheds a lot of light on all of the allegations and findings that led to this suspicion suspension.
MARK BRODIE: So he was ultimately fired. ... What was he fired for?
SCHUTSKY: Oh boy, where to start? So some of it was some pretty typical kind of like you-can’t-do that-in-the-office type of stuff. Allegations that he was making inappropriate jokes with sexual innuendo, potentially racist remarks.
To run down the list, one employee who wasn’t identified said that after kind of like an anti-human trafficking type of like meeting, he made a joke that maybe some of his ex-girlfriends felt like they had been trafficked. Now, I will say he denied making those comments. Said he said maybe that he felt like he had been groomed or something, I don’t know. But still as a joke, very unclear based on this report,
He made another joke to someone that when one of the assistant city managers closed their office door, maybe they were watching pornography — which, again, very inappropriate in the workplace.
And then also alleged to have made various other comments that could have been offensive to Hispanics, Italians, Germans, Native Americans — a lot of different groups of people.
BRODIE: Is any of this surprising? I mean, I guess the fact that anybody would do this in the workplace is at least somewhat surprising, hopefully. But is it surprising that he was accused of doing some of this stuff?
SCHUTSKY: Not going to speak to the very specifics of that, but I will say he does have a very kind of brash personality. Longtime kind of Scottsdale politico was going as far back as the mid-2000s, involved in a lot of stuff and kind of gained a reputation for — he’d go put ads in the paper or be with groups that were putting ads in the paper, kind of attacking council members. Making fun of them, that kind of thing, when they were going against policies that he didn’t like.
And that also goes to some of the other allegations that he faced. It wasn’t just the offensive remarks. He was accused of engaging in outside employment or working with these kind of nonprofit political groups that he is known to kind of work with that did put ads in the paper attacking council members he didn’t like, including council members that are seen kind of as foils to Mayor Borowski, who was his boss.
So again, city staff in this investigation, they found that he had basically engaged in those activities without prior approval. Any public employee has to get approval to get those outside jobs. And then was also engaging in kind of political antics, which, again, employees of the city are not allowed to cross that line and engage in politics.
BRODIE: Mayor Barowski says that she didn’t know that this was going on. Is that right?
SCHUTSKY: Yeah, she put out a statement shortly after. Previously, she had held press conferences, all this kind of stuff, kind of accusing the city manager and maybe blocks of the City Council that have opposed her on certain things, of this being kind of a coordinated attack. But after the report came out, yeah, she said she never saw any of this behavior and wouldn’t have condoned it had she did.
I will say in the report, at one point, a redacted employee did say that the mayor had at one point told him to knock it off with the comments. So that kind of contradicts a little bit of what she’s saying. But again, that’s a redacted name. So ... we can’t really put those two statements up against each other.
But again, he’s also accused of using his office to do the mayor’s bidding on the political side. There’s allegations in there that the NAACP was considering a recall petition against the mayor. This is after there was a vote by the City Council, which was supported by the mayor, to get rid of DEI programs that included funding for an event hosted by the NAACP.
It also led to the cancellation of a Juneteenth event. So they were going to the city clerk’s office to explore that possibility. Whitmer ended up meeting with them, according to this report, and maybe offering to help reinstate Juneteenth celebrations to run interference, basically for the mayor here.
And then that recall never happened. And so the report again alleges that that was him kind of taking on a political act, which is the recall, and trying to help the mayor avoid that.
BRODIE: Has Whitmer himself said anything in response to this report and his firing?
SCHUTSKY: I haven’t heard from him. I have not yet seen any comments from him on any of this other than what’s in the report. Which is, by and large, he either denies most of the allegations, the brunt of them, or says some of the comments, like some of the offensive comments, were either misconstrued or they were just jokes and they were maybe taken out of context.
BRODIE: OK. How are people looking at this incident sort of in light of everything else going on in Scottsdale, where the mayor and some members of the City Council and even within some members of the council don’t really seem to be getting along that well?
SCHUTSKY: No, this council has really just kind of been a chaos council, we’ll call it, since the start of last year, since they all took office. You know, councils, they’re all nonpartisan technically, but everyone knows what your political affiliation is. And most of this council — not all, but most of this council — they are Republicans. But even the Republicans on the council aren’t getting along.
And the mayor is facing kind of this group called the Bloc, and that’s a group that continues to vote against her priorities, push their own agenda. And sometimes those two things aren’t aligned. And that that was one of the reasons, I think, that Whitmer maybe was brought in, this kind of political dude who had been around for a long time to really try and help the mayor get her agenda across the finish line with this group of council members that were so opposed. But it did not seem to work.
And again, this report even accuses him of taking out newspaper ads with this one group he was affiliated with to attack them in the local newspaper.
BRODIE: So does any of this have any bearing on city business going forward, do you think? Or do folks in the city think it will?
SCHUTSKY: In terms of city business, if we’re talking about the day to day operations, I don’t think so. When I used to cover Scottsdale back in the day, occasionally employees had ethics reports filed against them or had these type of investigations. And the mayor’s going to have to find another chief of staff. But bigger, broader policy issues when it comes to how the council is interacting with one another and they’re the ones who are voting on those bigger issues.
Like I mentioned, it doesn’t bode well. It shows there’s still just a lot of dysfunction at the top. So is it going to affect the trash getting picked up? No. But all of the issues that the City Council takes on and setting the budget, setting policies and all that good stuff, they’re not on the same page, and there’s still a lot of dysfunction.
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