Liam Dillon spoke at length with Mayor Bob Filner’s former chief of staff, Vince Hall. The discussion was extraordinary. When Hall got the job last year, I asked him about the fact that Filner doesn’t have the best reputation as a boss.
Hall said then that he was prepared for what was coming.
Turns out, he now says, it was “dehumanizing.” At one point, he said there was an intervention with the mayor. In came well-known pastor Miles McPherson, from The Rock Church, to help. Hall also says there’s no merit to the claim that the city canceled sexual harassment trainings. It’s all on the mayor.
Finally, he said that Irene McCormack’s recounting of an intense meeting in which she and former deputy chief of staff Allen Jones walked out on Filner was accurate. There’s a lot more.
• It was a public records request from a reporter at San Diego 6 that has caused a fascinating charter crisis for the city. As U-T San Diego describes, reporter Derek Staahl asked for any communication among staffers about sexual harassment allegations.
• New Chief of Staff Lee Burdick says handwritten notes are not something she’s going to release because they are protected under attorney-client privilege. That agitated the city attorney’s office, which says it will sue because she’s not authorized an authorized legal representative for anyone at the city.
• Here’s something interesting. While the two nascent efforts to recall the mayor combined into one Friday, T.J. Zane, who leads the Lincoln Club, claims that there’s one big problem with trying to get a recall done here: The signature-gatherers have to be registered voters of the city of San Diego.
Normally, many paid signature-gatherers come in from out of town.
• NBC 7 San Diego airs complaints that some city services are suffering.
• Slate has posted the a parody of the online course for sexual harassment prevention the mayor completed after the scandal broke. The Wall Street Journal has more serious guidance.
• Filner will not give a deposition before he goes into his two-week behavioral corrections rehab.
• Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian appears to now be deployed in San Diego. She spent Friday looking for Filner’s remaining supporters and could not find many.
• David Little argues in a commentary that the city not paying the mayor’s legal bill sets a bad precedent.
• The L.A. Times also says there’s a push to explore a state law that could force Filner out without a recall. We explained earlier that this appears to be contradicted by the city’s own charter.
Quote of the Week
“While, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, many might argue that ‘you don’t need a weatherperson to tell you which way the wind blows,’ and an adult male should not need sexual harassment training, I would point out that in his decades of public service for the people of San Diego as a U.S. Representative, Mayor Filner has never received sexual harassment training.” — Filner’s attorney Harvey Berger.
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