East Lansing Mayor Ron Bacon and DEI Director Elaine Hardy have been targeted in an anonymous complaint that will now be investigated. (Dylan Lees for ELi)

Council Releases Anonymous Complaint Targeting Mayor and DEI Director for Overreach; Investigation to Follow

The East Lansing City Council has released a six-page complaint from a person identifying him- or herself only as “Anonymous Public Servant” and has vowed to order an independent investigation of the complaint’s allegations. 

The complainant focuses on what is described as overreach by the City Council – particularly Mayor Ron Bacon – and Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Elaine Hardy. It describes the actions of the two as significantly contributing to bad morale, resulting in the recent wave of resignations at the city.

Council has also released a joint statement responding to the complaint. At Tuesday’s Council meeting (April 25), set to begin at 4 p.m., Council will formally vote to approve the just-released public statement and to hire attorney J. Randall Secontine as an independent investigator of the complaint’s allegations.

ELi broke the news Sunday that this was coming, but the complaint and Council’s statement were not released until this evening when they were posted to tomorrow’s agenda. The complaint and Council’s statement can be seen here. 

Having been tipped off by the complainant on April 12 that this complaint was sent to city leaders some time ago, using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), ELi requested on April 12 all recent anonymous complaints to the city manager’s office. (The City has yet to give ELi this complaint via our FOIA request, having informed us the City needs more time to locate what we requested.)

The complaint appears to have been originally submitted to Interim Human Resources Director Emily Kenney and Interim City Clerk Marie Wicks, and came with a request to have it passed on to the city attorney to give to the City Council. It isn’t clear when any of these people received it.

The complaint focuses on “clear overreach of the current Mayor (only made possible by complicit acceptance and support by Council members [Dana] Watson and [Jessy] Gregg) in what is tantamount to illegally ignoring the Charter and influencing the day-today [sic] operations of the City.”

East Lansing has what is called a “strong manager” form of city government, with the city manager tasked with the job of running the day-to-day operations of the city. This contrasts with the “strong mayor” form of government used in cities like Lansing.

Section 7.1(e) of East Lansing’s City Charter states this: “Except as otherwise required in subsection 7.1.a, neither the Council nor any of its members or committees shall in any manner interfere with the City Manager in the exercising of his or her judgment in the appointment or assignment of administrative officers and employees in the administrative service. Neither the Council nor any member thereof shall give orders to any of the subordinates of the City Manager.”

The complaint alleges numerous instances where Bacon is said to have violated this Charter provision, including, for example, when Bacon allegedly tried to get an unnamed director to consider letting an employee rescind a resignation. Bacon also allegedly presented a plan to the city manager for how personnel and placemaking projects should be handled.

“I believe this kind of behavior, on the part of Council, led the (then) City Manager [George Lahanas] to write a formal notice/complaint to Council concerned that their actions could have City Charter implications,” the anonymous complaint said.

ELi obtained, through an earlier Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the message to which the complainant alludes. Lahanas wrote it to Council on Jan. 2, 2023, with the subject line, “City Charter Issue.”

Lahanas told Council in that email, “I want to express a significant concern that has occurred a number of times over the prior several months where I have objected to City Council members becoming directly involved in personnel management. As I have stated, such involvement violates the City Charter, which prohibits Council or its members from directing or interfering with my management of City staff.”

A screenshot of Lahanas’ Jan. 2 message to City Council about alleged overreach.

It was just two weeks later that Council announced they were terminating the contract with Lahanas.

The anonymous complaint also alleges, “It is the belief of many that much of the internal personnel conflict in the City can be attributed to intentional behavior on the part of Elaine Hardy, the City’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and her connections to Council. Elaine and Mayor Bacon, as well as other members of Council, appear to have long standing friendships, which is fine in principle. However, the impression for City staff is those friendships are being used as a false pretext for the Mayor to ignore the Charter and go around the City Manager to try to influence personnel decisions in the City.”

Hardy is also accused, in the complaint, of “usurping functions of the Human Resources (HR) Department” and issuing “a veiled threat in the guise of career advice” to an unnamed departmental director. 

“The work of DEI is very important,” the complainant writes, “but DEI should empower organizations through education and raising awareness to overcoming impediments to inclusivity as a unified group toward our goals as a community. Progress in DEI should be made without resorting to tactics of manipulation and bullying.”

The complaint also objects to Council’s firing of Tom Yeadon as the city attorney (although in fact only Gregg remains on Council from that era) and objects to the termination of Lahanas’s contract with no explanation beyond Bacon’s statement that “We want to go a different direction.”

The statement issued tonight by City Council in conjunction with the complaint states, “Unfortunately, because of the anonymity of the submitted complaint and lack of accompanying evidence, we are limited in our ability to come to a judgment on these accusations.

“While we have no reason to believe these allegations are accurate, we feel this is an appropriate time to pursue a transparent, outside, third-party review of these allegations in a confidential manner for current and former employees as we continue our work to modernize our City of East Lansing government.”

The plan is to hire Secontine, whose background is in criminal defense, and to ask for a status of his investigation 90 days after it starts, if a final report has not already been received. 

“The final report will be shared with the public in the most transparent way allowed,” according to the Council statement.

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