By Mark Gutglueck
Former Upland Police Chief Martin Thouvenell engaged in orchestrating the attempted firing of Upland’s current police chief, Darren Goodman, after Goodman proved unamenable to a power sharing arrangement suspending normal municipal protocol that would have made Thouvenell the de facto commander of the police department, information surfacing in the wake of Goodman’s suspension has revealed.
Thouvenell had lain in wait for Goodman for more than 20 months, at which point a Trojan horse whom Thouvenell had planted in the police chief’s office recently unleashed a key element of the plan to effectuate Goodman’s removal as chief, information provided to the city council this week indicates.
While the stratagem, once fully hatched by Thouvenell earlier this month, failed to fully persuade three of the city council’s members that there were adequate grounds to terminate Goodman, Mayor Debbie Stone was convinced by Thouvenell that she could use her authority to unilaterally direct City Manager Rosemary Hoerning to suspend Goodman. On Monday, Stone and Hoerning did so.
The power alliance binding Stone with Thouvenell is a curious one. Thouvenell was Upland’s police chief from 1994 until 2005, during which time he had been called upon to briefly serve in the capacities of acting city manager and acting fire chief when those top tier administrative posts had been vacated. In 2011, he sought political empowerment in the city as well. That year, a special election to fill a void on the city council was held after the resignation and indictment of then-Mayor John Pomierski resulted in then-Councilman Ray Musser leaving his council post to move into the mayoralty, to which his council colleagues had appointed him. Eleven candidates vied for the open position that Musser had resigned from. Those eleven included Stone and Thouvenell. Stone, who was backed by the city’s firefighters union, whose members were willing to walk precincts on her behalf, captured first place in the race with 3,589, or 34.92 percent of the 10,278 votes cast. Thouvenell, who was backed by the city’s police officers’ union, whose members were generous with political donations but reluctant to go door-to-door to advocate on behalf of the former police chief, ran in second place with 2,897 votes or 28.19 percent. Nearly five years later, in the summer of 2016 when a bare-3-to-2 majority of the city council resolved to terminate then-City Manager Rod Butler, Stone went along with the council majority to bring in Thouvenell to serve as acting or interim city manager. Thouvenell was originally supposed to remain in that capacity for only a brief interlude while a full-fledged city manager was being recruited, but as it turned out, he remained in that post for 18 months, a duration in place that was actually longer than the tenures of the two city managers who served before him and the two who served after him.
Thouvenell was thus city manager during what turned out to be Stone’s successful campaign for mayor in 2016 and beyond that. Indeed, Thouvenell would remain in the role of city manager throughout all of 2017, leaving that position only when Bill Manis took on the role of city manager on January 2, 2018. Thouvenell’s managerial authority did not end at that point, however, as the council which Stone then headed as mayor had conferred upon Thouvenell a one-year duration contract as a management consultant that was to go into effect upon Manis becoming city manager.
Indeed, very early in Thouvenell’s tenure as acting city manager in 2016, prior to Stone being elected mayor, it was apparent to all that the two had buried the political hatchet from 2011, and that Thouvenell was exercising a Svengali-like hold on Stone. After she became mayor, Stone grew absolutely dependent on Thouvenell not only for guidance with regard to how she was to comport herself in her mayoral duties, but in how the city was to be run.
There were a bevy of challenges facing Upland at that juncture, the foremost of which were financial ones, as the city was still struggling to generate sufficient revenue to cover the cost of providing the standard range of municipal services and meet its ballooning pension debt obligations, a legacy of generous commitments that former Mayor Pomierski had made in the past to the city’s municipal employees in employment contract negotiations. These were coupled with managerial issues, as the city was experiencing a continual drain of its department heads. One such issue that came to a crisis point during Stone’s second year as mayor was that relating to its police chief, one-time Los Angeles Police Captain Brian Johnson, who had been hired in 2015, at which time he was hailed as someone who would improve what was widely considered to be an incestuous culture in the Upland Police Department, which had been promoting from within to fill its police chief position for decades. After two years in the position, however, Johnson was finding it impossible to bend the department’s personnel to his will, and he was faced with a near mutiny in May 2017. That convulsion came about when Johnson suspended Sergeant Marc Simpson, who was the president of the Upland Police Management Association, and Captain Anthony Yoakum, then the department’s second-highest ranking officer, after Simpson and Yoakum moved to back Detective Lon Teague when Johnson called Teague on the carpet for having sought to redress concerns he and other officers had with regard to department policy. Teague had done so by going outside the confines of the department’s senior staff. A 21-year department veteran and then the Upland Police Officers Association president, Teague approached staff at City Hall, including the city’s human resources director, with those concerns rather than seeking to have the matter discussed up the immediate department chain of command, which ultimately would have meant it would reach Johnson. As the issue Teague was seeking to address had originated with Johnson, Teague calculated that approach would have little chance of succeeding.
In October 2017, after the Upland Police Officers Association called for a referendum on the police chief’s performance and competence, 78 percent of the association indicated they had “no confidence” in Johnson. Ten percent voted that they yet had “confidence” in Johnson’s leadership of the department. The balance, some 12 percent, rendered a verdict of “undecided.” Johnson tendered his resignation as of October 30, 2017.
Thouvenell, as city manager, headed the effort to find Johnson’s replacement, convincing 70-year-old Douglas Millmore to take the temporary chief’s assignment in Upland while the search was ongoing. Millmore, as a captain with the Upland Police Department, had served as second-in-command during Thouvenell’s first year as chief. In 1995, Millmore had departed Upland to become police chief in Murrieta, where he concluded his career in law enforcement at the age of 50 in 1998. The recruitment effort lasted several months, into Manis’s tenure as city manager. Thouvenell, as the city’s managerial consultant, continued to head that search effort, which in June 2018 ended with the decision to hire Goodman, who at that point had been with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department for 27 years, most recently in the capacity of the captain overseeing the Chino Hills station.
Goodman moved into the police chief’s position with Upland, effective July 16, 2018, the first African-American to achieve the rank of police chief in Upland, and one of only a handful of African-American officers to have ever served with the department. Goodman qualifies as the most highly educated police chief in Upland’s 114-year history. In addition to holding a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Southern California, Goodman has also attained a doctorate at USC’s Rossier School of Education. In addition, he had graduated from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 2015, where he studied local and state government executive management.
Despite Thouvenell’s recognition that Goodman had both extensive operational experience in an executive capacity as well as a level of education and training that fully familiarized him with the standard protocol of local governmental operations, he pressed Goodman to accept the suspension of the standard arrangement of administrative lines of authority at City Hall in which the city council functions in the capacity of the city’s elected leadership that sets policy and delegates the authority to execute that policy to the city manager, who is responsible then for directing the city’s various department heads to implement that policy. In a California general law city such as Upland, the authority of the mayor and city council members extends solely from their capacity to act as collective body, and no single member of the city council, including the mayor, is empowered to dictate policy unilaterally and without a consensus vote of his or her council colleagues.
Thouvenell, however, was intent on establishing Stone as an executive mayor, having her assume what was essentially dictatorial power she did not possess, expanding her political status to that of an administrator, making her a co-regent of the city, equal to or in some respects preempting the city manager. Stone would then defer to him, Thouvenell knew, for direction on how she should use the sway she possessed. As Stone’s vicar, Thouvenell in this way was seeking to extend his own authority, expropriating the power of the city manager for himself, as well.
According to Stephen Larson, a former federal judge who is representing Goodman, “Bill Manis was the city manager at the time that Chief Goodman became chief of police. Almost immediately, however, Marty Thouvenell directed Chief Goodman not to communicate with Manis and to report only to Thouvenell and Jeannette Vagnozzi, who was deputy city manager at the time. Thouvenell directed Chief Goodman to break the chain of command and call Mayor Stone every day to keep her informed as to what happened in the city and in the department. To be clear, the chief’s job is to report to the city manager and keep him/her informed. Chief Goodman maintained the chain of command, rather than report behind the city manager’s back.”
Simultaneous with his efforts to cut Manis out of the line of authority and communication between the mayor and the police department, Thouvenell further overstepped his authority as the city’s managerial consultant to himself encroach on Goodman’s function as the head of the police department, according to Larson.
“Thouvenell would consistently come into the Upland Police Department using a key card that he was not authorized to have and had no reason to possess,” according to Larson. “Thouvenell would then interfere with the various officers’ and staffs’ daily tasks and assignments, asking them for information about police department activities. Thouvenell even went so far as to call police department personnel directly and request or order them to send patrol units to various locations, including to remove campaign signs. Upon learning about this interference with the police department’s operations, Chief Goodman requested that Thouvenell refrain from acting as if he was still the chief of police. Chief Goodman then took possession of Thouvenell’s keycard.”
According to Larson, Thouvenell tried to usurp Goodman’s management of the department by inserting himself into the personnel decisions that are normally the exclusive province of the police chief, who exercises autonomy with regard to hirings, discipline of employees and firings.
“Thouvenell also attempted to interfere with personnel decisions within the department,” Larson maintains. “For example, he directed Chief Goodman not to promote Lieutenant Cliff Matthews because he was ‘lazy’ and ‘worthless.’”
Larson said Thouvenell’s estimation of Matthews clashed with the police chief’s observations of Matthews’ performance and “Chief Goodman refused to be swayed by this attempted interference; instead, he promoted Matthews to captain, finding him to be intelligent, professional, and someone who consistently went beyond what was required.”
At this point, as a consequence of Goodman’s suspension, Matthews is running the department as the interim police chief.
From shortly after her election as mayor in 2016 and over the next two years, Stone headed a solid ruling coalition on the city council that consisted of herself; Councilman Gino Filippi, who was first elected in 2010 and reelected to the council in 2014; Carol Timm, a longtime member of the city’s planning commission who had been elected to the city council in 2014; and Sid Robinson, who narrowly lost in his bid for the city council in 2016 against Janice Elliott and was then appointed to the council to complete the two years remaining on the council term to which Stone had been reelected in 2014 after she was obliged to resign that position to assume the mayoralty upon her 2016 victory. With Thouvenell in place as acting city manager at the close of 2016 and throughout 2017, the four-to-one voting block on the city council consisting of Stone, Filippi, Timm and Robinson consistently politically outmuscled Elliott, who represented the lone dissident on the panel. The Stone/Thouvenell team dominated Upland for two years, having its way on virtually every substantive as well as the routine matters that were the purview of City Hall.
The already drawn-out process of settling on a permanent replacement for Butler as city manager continued to languish throughout 2017, at least partially by design as Thouvenell quarterbacked the city’s move to shutter its then 111-year old municipal fire department and transfer responsibility for the provision of fire-prevention, fire-safety, firefighting and emergency medical response to the County of San Bernardino’s fire department. That takeover proved less than popular with a significant cross section of the city’s residents, but the council majority and the San Benardino County Local Formation Commission fashioned a process to have the city’s voters “approve” the move by utilizing a “protest vote” to have the city’s residents sign off on the change. The city’s voters and landowners were invited to lodge a protest against the county’s appropriation of the Upland Fire Department. Those who sent in such a letter were registered as a vote against the takeover. All those who did not send a letter were deemed to have voted in support of the city’s annexation into the county’s fire protection district. In this way, a majority of the city’s residents were consigned to accepting the municipal fire department closure without even knowing it was occurring. Only Elliott among the members of the council opposed the plan, which garnered her the enmity of her colleagues and especially Stone and Thouvenell. Together, in May 2017, just five months into Elliott’s tenure as councilwoman, Thouvenell orchestrated a vote of censure by the council against Elliott.
The closure of Upland’s municipal fire department, a move in large measure formulated by Thouvenell and done with Stone’s support, illustrated the degree to which Stone had reoriented herself politically and into a power-sharing alliance with Thouvenell. The firefighters union which had backed Stone in her original 2011 run for the council was opposed to the shuttering of the fire department and the county takeover. Yet Stone, at that point highly dependent upon Thouvenell’s guidance, was willing to break with what had been her political base in going along with the game plan Thouvenell was intent upon executing.
In the fall of 2017, more than a year had elapsed since the search for a city manager replacement had begun in earnest. Among those aspiring to the post all along had been Jeannette Vagnozzi, who in August of 2015 had been persuaded by Butler to leave the position she held as the assistant to the city manager of La Verne to come to Upland and serve in the capacities of assistant city manager, city clerk, administrative services director, human resources director and risk manager. Thouvenell, however, felt Vagnozzi, if empowered as city manager, might prove unwilling to defer to the direction he had in mind, and he continued the search.
In December 2017, Thouvenell at last made a recommendation that the city hire Manis, then the city manager in Rosemead, to move into the city manager’s position. Thouvenell was satisfied that Manis’s experience, which included a stint as deputy city manager in San Bernardino where he had overseen the economic development, community development, public works and housing departments, time in the City of Banning as the economic development and redevelopment director, and his tenure as the economic development director in the City of Cypress prior to his work in Banning, together with previous municipal experience with the cities of Corona, Santa Ana, and Cerritos provided him with the adequate background and expertise to serve as Upland city manager.
Unstated was that Thouvenell figured that the 57-year old Manis, who at that point had 30 years invested in being a public employee and 30 years in the public employees retirement system, would be content to serve three more years as a caretaker city manager in Upland at an annual salary before benefits beginning at $238,000 per year, which would boost the annual pension he would be eligible to receive at age 60 to $196,350 per year. By accepting his role as a caretaker manager, Manis would essentially surrender his authority to Thouvenell, who would remain as Upland’s shot caller.
Once in place, Manis acted as the city’s official top administrator, though in reality, Thouvenell yet remained in charge. Virtually all of the major decisions that took place while Manis was city manager were ones in which he had only limited input, such as the city’s move to sell 3.631 acres of Memorial Park to San Antonio Hospital for use as a parking lot, arranging a trade of the entirety of Cabrillo Park to Lewis Homes in exchange for property in a gravel quarry near the 210 Freeway and the hiring of Goodwin as police chief. Placated by the prospect of seeing his annual pension zoom to near $200,000 per year, Manis acquiesced in Thouvenell maintaining control over the city, at least initially. But as city residents registered increasingly strident protests over the city’s surrendering of parkland and Thouvenell’s treatment of Goodman drove home that Thouvenells megalomaniacal designs on the city included not just serving as the city’s shadow city manager but its shadow police chief and shadow community development director as well, Manis began to rethink the wisdom of allowing Thouvenell and Stone, who had no formal training or experience in municipal management, commit the city to courses of action that might rebound to its detriment and to that of the city’s residents and taxpayers, while the responsibility for those decisions was being ascribed to him, potentially tarnishing whatever reputation and legacy he had. Late that summer, the 2018 Annual Conference & Expo of the League of California Cities was held in Long Beach, spanning three days from September 12 to September 14. Manis, who was there ostensibly in his capacity as Upland city manager to take in as many of the seminars and expositions on current municipal governance issues, new legislation and what are considered “best practices” in running a city as time and the crush and conflict of the schedule would permit, visited those booths where recruitment for other municipal positions throughout the state was ongoing, and he picked up applications for some of those positions. A few weeks later, with the 2018 election approaching, it was announced that he was departing as city manager, officially as of November 2. In fact, by the end of September Manis departed Upland City Hall, never to return. Put into his place as acting city manager was Vagnozzi, conditional upon her recognition that she was to consult with Thouvenell before taking action on anything.
In the November 2018 election, the first in the city’s then-112-year history to feature by-district elections, Elliott, despite having two years remaining on her at-large term to which she had been elected in 2016, vied for election to represent District Two covering that fourth of the city to the northeast, wherein she resided. She was victorious. Robinson, Timm and Filippi, who had provided three of the four votes needed to perpetuate the Thouvenell/Stone program, did not fare as well. Robinson, sensing the voters’ growing hostility, opted against seeking reelection. Filippi, in southwest-lying District Three, was defeated, as was Timm in the city’s southeastern electoral ward, District Four. Stone, who was not up for election in 2018, remained in office. But her hold on the city, as was Thouvenell’s, had been significantly attenuated with the election of Ricky Felix in Filippi’s stead and Rudy Zuniga over Timm.
Less than a month after the election, in what would come to be seen as a desperate ploy by Thouvenell and Stone to structure some form of continuing leverage over city operations, Thouvenell induced the lame duck members of the council – Timm, Filippi and Robinson – to join with Stone to approve the hiring of Vagnozzi as city manager on a three-year contract. That action was taken at the council’s November 26, 2018 meeting, the last opportunity for Timm, Robinson and Filippi to act in their official capacities in elected office.
Elliott voted against the eleventh hour hiring of Vagnozzi, and sought to convince her colleagues that saddling their successors with Vagnozzi without knowing whether the new members of the council would be favorably disposed to her was shortsighted and vindictive.
Behind the scenes, Thouvenell and Stone were seeking to line up support for Vagnozzi, hopeful that she would remain grateful for them helping her achieve the city manager’s post she had long coveted, and would evince loyalty to them down the road.
According to Larson, “Thouvenell directed Chief Goodman to publicly vocalize support for Vagnozzi as acting city manager solely because Mayor Stone liked Vagnozzi. In other words, if Chief Goodman wanted to remain on the mayor’s good side, he needed to publicly support her friends in city positions. Chief Goodman refused to voice support simply because it would please the mayor. In short, Thouvenell has repeatedly sought to pressure Chief Goodman into supporting the political agenda of Thouvenell and his allies, including Mayor Stone, and to do Thouvenell’s bidding rather than independently serving the city as chief of police. To his credit, Chief Goodman has consistently resisted this pressure, as he was and is adamant that he remain uninfluenced by city politics and instead continue to operate independently from the well-known Thouvenell crew. This independence is critical to Chief Goodman’s ability to adhere to his oath to serve all citizens of the City of Upland. Unfortunately, true to both Thouvenell’s and Vagnozzi’s warnings, because of Chief Goodman’s unwillingness to play Thouvenell’s political games and simply be a figurehead, he has not ‘won favor,’ and instead a campaign to undermine him has been launched.”
Thouvenell’s and Stone’s plan to maintain a degree of control over City Hall by having Vagnozzi installed as city manager was dashed in May 2019, slightly less than six months into her tenure as city manager. At that point, Elliott, Zuniga, Felix and the council’s newest member, Bill Velto, who had been appointed to assume the at-large council position Elliott had resigned from to take on representation of the city’s District Two, formed a consensus that Vagnozzi had to go. This development created a circumstance wherein the municipal areas into which Thouvenell yet had reach were diminishing. There were still vestiges of Thouvenell’s presence and clout within city operations. The most significant of these was that municipal department from which he had arisen to such prominence in the city originally, and within which he still had contact and some degree of influence. In a power play that took more than a year to fully effectuate, he was yet able to place a shot that would shake the city and demonstrate he is yet a force in Upland to be reckoned with.
According to Larson, Thouvenell and Stone manipulated a circumstance within the police department that had been in part set in place by Thouvenell to bring about Goodman’s current suspension and what Thouvenell and Stone hope will be seen by the remainder of the council as adequate grounds to cashier Goodman. Present within Goodman’s office was a police department civilian employee whose loyalty to Thouvenell had been formerly tapped into by both Stone and Thouvenell to monitor the police department. That employee now is the prime mover in the scheme to remove Goodman from the department, Larson maintains.
“This retaliatory campaign has now come to a head with the city’s response to the recent complaint submitted by Executive Assistant Luz Barrett,” Larson wrote in a letter to the city council dated June 24. “Barrett began working for the police department when Thouvenell was chief of police. It is well-known that Barrett maintains a close relationship with Thouvenell – or, the ‘Godfather,’ as she calls him – and provides information to him about what is going on within the department. Shortly after his arrival to the department, Chief Goodman promoted Barrett to executive assistant at the insistence of certain colleagues who felt that the length of her time with the department warranted her promotion. Barrett’s probationary period expires in July 2020. After working closely with Barrett, however, Chief Goodman quickly realized that Barrett lacked necessary skills to fulfill the role. As a result, Chief Goodman took it upon himself to encourage better performance and provide constructive criticism because that is the role of a manager. Recognizing that Barrett was not improving, Chief Goodman began working with the human resources department in March 2020 to return Barrett to her former classification upon the termination of her probationary period. Barrett’s performance issues are well documented. The day before Chief Goodman was to inform Barrett about her return to her former classification, Barrett went out, unexpectedly, on leave. Chief Goodman believes that Barrett overheard his conversation with the human resources representative about the final plans to implement the demotion and may have gone through papers for her demotion that were left out on his desk – the papers had been shuffled through even though the chief locked his office, and Barrett has the only other key. Two weeks later, Barrett submitted a draft civil complaint to the city, threatening to file it in state court. This draft complaint includes a litany of false accusations of misconduct against Chief Goodman.”
Larson’s letter states, “To be clear, not one allegation would hold any water in a fair and impartial investigation, let alone warrant a finding that Chief Goodman has subjected Barrett to a hostile work environment under the law. Given the city’s swift conduct against Chief Goodman after his initial interview, in which he was ambushed with different and new information not previously provided to him, and given that a second interview has not been scheduled, as required under the Government Code, only one conclusion can be drawn – the city’s goal is not to vet the truth of the allegations, but create a narrative that allows it to terminate Chief Goodman. This conclusion is further supported by the fact that the city is apparently ignoring that Ms. Barrett’s credibility has been undermined in ongoing litigation between the city and other police officers for wrongful discharge.”
Larson thereupon dealt directly with the accusation of misappropriation of department assets that forms the basis of Goodman’s current suspension and which Thouvenell and Stone are hopeful will convince the city council it has grounds to terminate the police chief.
“Apart from the baseless allegations of harassment, there is a lone allegation that Chief Goodman sent Barrett on a personal errand on department time,” Larson’s letter states. “It is important to note that since Barrett worked as the chief’s executive assistant, Chief Goodman recognized the benefit in developing a friendly relationship with Barrett. A friendly relationship assists in ensuring that constructive criticism is interpreted as just that, and it is important that the chief of police develops trust with his executive assistant for obvious reasons. To that end, Chief Goodman and his family assisted Barrett with certain personal matters on numerous occasions, including giving her money to help her when she was surprised with unexpected expenses. We will not disclose all these instances here. This friendly relationship appeared to be reciprocal. On one occasion, Barrett even offered to assist the chief in translating what Chief Goodman was trying to convey to his Spanish-speaking housekeeper. Barrett told the chief that she would be willing to help out and translate whenever he needed it. Seeing this as friendly and generous offer, Chief Goodman did in fact ask Barrett to translate a number of times over the phone. Barrett’s conversations with Chief Goodman’s housekeeper occurred sparingly over only four months of Barrett’s and Chief Goodman’s working relationship. To avoid any perception of impropriety or a violation of department policy, Chief Goodman compensated Barrett via Zelle payments for her telephonic translations.”
Zelle is a digital payment network owned and operated jointly by Bank of America, BB&T, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Bank, US Bank and Wells Fargo. It enables bank customers to electronically transfer money from their bank account to another registered user’s bank account using a mobile device or the website of a participating banking institution.
“At no time did Chief Goodman indicate that Barrett was required to translate as a condition of her employment,” according to Larson. “Barrett’s complaint submitted to the city, however, alleges that Barrett was required to travel to San Diego on department time to translate with the housekeeper in person. The date identified in the complaint was a Sunday. Chief Goodman does recall a Sunday in which he asked Barrett to meet him down in San Diego to meet with the housekeeper and translate for him. As a thank you, Chief Goodman provided her a week-stay at his vacation home free of charge.”
That arrangement, Larson said, obviates the contention that Goodman allowed the city to pay for the translation service that Barrett provided him and his family. Further, Larson stated, the suggestion in Barrett’s complaint that the police chief evinced guilt by seeking to keep her translation work for him a secret misrepresents the circumstance.
“Chief Goodman asked Barrett not to tell anyone at the department about this because he did not want others to know that he was allowing anyone to use his vacation home free of charge; Chief Goodman does not even let family members stay free of charge,” Larson asserted. “He also wanted to protect Barrett from coworkers becoming jealous.”
Goodman had withstood investigators’ efforts to trip him up by making a factual misrepresentation to him, when he recognized at once the misrepresentation and corrected his interrogators, Larson maintained.
“During his interview, Chief Goodman was provided an incomplete text chain, without a date, and was told that the date of the alleged incident was different than the date alleged in the complaint,” Larson told the city council in the June 24 letter. “Being surprised with and questioned about this information violated Chief Goodman’s rights. Chief Goodman nonetheless insisted that the day that Barrett went down to San Diego was a Sunday, which he based on his review of his wife’s notes regarding the vacation home, and that he did not recall ever asking her to go down during the week to help translate a conversation with his housekeeper. Regardless, Chief Goodman would not have had Barrett go down on department time. And, assuming she did go down during the week upon his request, he would have expected her to ‘schedule adjust,’ which she commonly did.”
Barrett’s contention that she forged a timecard to obtain city payment for her translation work for Goodman at the police chief’s behest is controverted by demonstrable facts and evidence, Larson said.
“Barrett now alleges that she forged a time card for this alleged incident at Chief Goodman’s directive,” Larson wrote. “However, Chief Goodman never once told Barrett to misrepresent her time on her timesheet, and he certainly would not have signed off on such a timesheet. As evidence, Barrett somehow gained possession of her timesheet, and presented it to the investigator. Notably, however, the signature on the timesheet is a stamp of Chief Goodman’s signature – not his physical signature. Chief Goodman has made it his practice to personally review and sign Barrett’s timesheets. The use of his signature stamp demonstrates that he did not review and sign the timesheet in question – which would only be consistent with a scenario in which Barrett avoided showing him the timesheet and instead added his stamped signature so that he would not know that she failed to schedule adjust for the alleged San Diego trip. To be clear, Chief Goodman did not and would never direct a subordinate to violate department policy, nor did he or would he ever violate department policy by requiring his executive assistant to run his personal errands.”
Larson intimated that there are further details to support Goodman’s position that he did not engage in any impropriety in allowing Barrett to facilitate his communication with his housekeeper.
“What is clear based on these facts alone is that the city manager and mayor’s placement of Chief Goodman on administrative leave, and the referral of his file to the district attorney based on the petty and false allegations brought by Barrett, is nothing more than the city using Barrett’s false allegations to retaliate against Chief Goodman for refusing to do the mayor’s and Thouvenell’s political bidding. It is imperative that the city councilmembers closely examine the claims above and root out the corruption that is infesting the city ranks.”
Yesterday, Thursday June 25, the city council held a special meeting, called with only 24 hours notice. The agenda for the meeting referenced a “closed session” discussion of “significant exposure to litigation.” No further description of the matter was given, and the council’s substantive exchanges at the meeting all took place outside the scrutiny of the public.
On a relatively regular basis, the city council undertakes during its regularly scheduled meetings closed session discussion of issues of potential litigation. Because of confidentiality privilege extending to legal matters involving the city, there was no explicit explanation of what prompted the need for yesterday’s special meeting, nor was there confirmation that the substance of Larson’s letter, delivered to the city on Wednesday, prompted the meeting. That, nonetheless, was the widespread assumption of many in the community, and a rally involving over 100 Upland residents was held at City Hall starting roughly a half hour before the special city council meeting commenced at 2:30 p.m. Because of social distancing precautions imposed as a result of the coronavirus crisis, only a limited number of people were allowed into the council chamber at a time. In the public comment portion of the meeting before the council adjourned into its closed session, more than 20 speakers expressed support for Goodman.
Thereafter, the council retreated to an internal City Hall conference room for its discussion, during which some members of the public openly speculated about the likelihood that the council would move to reinstate Goodman as police chief. That expectation was not immediately met, however. Upon the conclusion of the closed session, it was reported that the council had taken no reportable action.
Neither Mayor Stone nor Thouvenell responded to emails sent to them requesting their version of events and a response to Larson’s assertions in his letter to the mayor and city council.
A phone message left at the police department for Barrett had elicited no response by press time.