Bacon, Gregg, Kuhnmuench, Edsall Speak to Ongoing Controversy at City Council

East Lansing’s City Council convened on Tuesday, May 2, chiefly to continue talking with staff about next year’s budget. But before Council got to that, two people came forward at public comment to speak about the ongoing controversy troubling City Hall, and the mayor and mayor pro tem also made remarks on the subject.

The controversy stems from an anonymous complaint to Council that alleged political overreach, particularly by Mayor Ron Bacon and the city’s DEI Director, Elaine Hardy. On April 25, Council voted 5-0 to issue a joint statement on the matter and to hire an independent attorney to investigate the complaint’s allegations. 

Since then, one document referred to in the complaint – an eight-page draft plan to reorganize substantial portions of city government – has surfaced, along with documents showing Bacon brought that plan to then City Manager George Lahanas. 

Swirling through all this is the question – raised by the anonymous complaint – of whether Bacon and other members of Council have violated the City Charter’s prohibition on Council members interfering with day-to-day operations of the government. One email obtained by ELi through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) shows Lahanas said in January that unnamed members of Council were doing just that. 

The anonymous complaint suggests this interference and overreach has been behind many of the top-staff resignations, effectively laying the blame of the resignations at the feet of Bacon and Hardy in particular, although it also names Mayor Pro Tem Jessy Gregg, Councilmember Dana Watson and Interim City Manager Randy Talifarro.

At public comment Tuesday night, Whitehills resident and former East Lansing School Board member Nell Kuhnmuench strenuously objected to Council voting to spend up to $30,000 of taxpayer dollars to investigate the complaint, calling the move “imprudent.”

“To do so implies someone believes strongly there is something very much awry,” she said, suggesting the complaint is baseless.

She noted Council’s decision to hire the external lawyer did not specify who or what exactly would be investigated or what would happen with the results. She said the matter involves “crazy rumors that have developed since ELi posted the so-called plan on a publicly available site.”

“The letter and the fallout from publishing it,” Kuhnmuench said, “and giving it so much credibility appears on its face to be racially motivated and that is most disappointing and disturbing.”

She called the anonymous complainant(s) cowardly and said there are whistleblower protections for those who speak out. 

By way of providing context, ELi notes the City of East Lansing has in its recent past the well-known case of whistleblower Troy Williams being fired after his speaking-out against health and safety problems at the city’s wastewater treatment plant. Past and present employees of the city who speak to ELi on the condition of anonymity sometimes mention Williams when they say they cannot afford to be named or otherwise identified.

Kath Edsall spoke next at public comment. Edsall is a Council-appointed member of the city’s Independent Police Oversight Commission and an elected school board member. She was briefly, in January, president of the school board before resigning that position following public outcry to remarks she had made in response to parents’ and students’ school safety fears. (The board re-elected her treasurer shortly after.)

“This anonymous complaint is clearly written by a white person or people terrified of losing their power and control over this city,” Edsall told Council. “A Black mayor, a Black city manager, a Black DEI director, a Black council woman, a proposed restructuring of city departments that includes words like ‘equity lens,’ ‘marginalized populations,’ ‘diversity of representation,’ ‘remove barriers toward attainable housing’ and ‘economic development opportunities.’ These are scary to people who have dug their heels in on rethinking East Lansing to be more inclusive.”

Like Kuhnmuench, who has also spoken out in support of Edsall, Edsall called the complainant(s) cowardly and said they used “racial tropes” like “the scary Black man.” She said the author “clings to” former city attorney Tom Yeadon, former police chief Chad Connolly, and former city manager Lahanas “because these men are the dinosaurs who maintain the hierarchy that kept the author and other white people at the top” and kept East Lansing “hostile to non-residents, students, and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color] people.”

“What is the scope of this investigation?” Edsall asked. “Is it limited to the Charter violations or is it a witch hunt?”

She also said she was “disappointed to learn that [Councilmember] George Brookover…who, by the author’s admission aligned with the author, advised going through this investigation, creating unnecessary chaos.”

While Brookover, Watson and Noel Garcia made no comments during the period set aside for council member remarks, Gregg and Bacon addressed the matter.

Gregg focused on the issue of the eight-page draft reorganization plan, saying she had just recently learned that former staff member Adam Cummins has taken credit for writing it. She said the plan never had any weight behind it, adding, “I don’t know anything about how or why it was put together, but I can reassure everyone that we don’t have any plans of implementing it.

“We all float sometimes very radical ideas, sometimes frankly idiotic ideas, and they don’t go anywhere,” Gregg said. “And thankfully we have the privacy to not necessarily share those terrible ideas. But this one for some reason got out there and has achieved a life of its own.” 

“We do ask staff to collaborate with us on our plans sometimes,” she said, without elaborating or speaking specifically to ongoing questions of possible Charter violations.

Bacon then spoke for about 13 minutes, covering a wide variety of topics and making many unexplained allusions. 

He suggested the reorganization plan – which he did not credit to Cummins in his remarks – came out of a meeting held on Sept. 2, 2022, with Lahanas, Cummins, and various people from Michigan State University and local agencies. He said that meeting was openly posted on city calendars, although ELi has been unable to locate it on any public calendars. 

Speaking of that meeting, Bacon read a long list of names and topics, saying, “I’m in a real mood on this one and I’m trying to be professional” and objecting to the perception that there was “some kind of massive coup” in the works.

The mayor also alluded to a request made last fall by the young owner of More Than Vintage for a street closure for a vintage clothing festival. Bacon seemed to be saying the inability of that business to obtain a street closure led him to try to change how the city operates on placemaking issues. (Read about that Council discussion here.)

In his remarks, he talked about “deterioration of relationships” among staff in the Planning Department, the challenges of getting food trucks introduced in East Lansing, and denials of sidewalk dining permit requests. 

He said he has never been to the homes of the DEI director or interim city manager “to avoid appearance of impropriety,” but said he believes “some things have occurred here among people who do hang out and do things with each other on the weekends. And I’m very disappointed with how clearly this was structured.” (The “this” seemed to be referring to the anonymous complaint.)

“We will do DEI here in this city,” he concluded. “We will have a diverse city. We will participate and everyone will have an equal hand in our city. There are no covenants of power here where you get to dictate and determine who sits in the seats of elected officers and just kind of wield power from outside. It’s not happening.”

ELi has excerpted the video of Bacon’s complete remarks here, to make it easier for readers to hear his full statement: