From: Protect TheWomen
To: webCityClerk
Subject: Public Comment Item D.1. Closed Session – May 26, 2026 Date: Monday, May 25, 2026 1:12:39 PM
Attachments: Public Comment Item D.1. Closed Session - From a Male Employee.pdf Dear BW's City Clerk,
Please see my attached public comment regarding Item D.1. Closed Session: Public Employee Performance Evaluation scheduled for May 26, 2026.
Thank you for your time and assistance.
Respectfully,
A Male Employee
Dear Mayor Meyer and Members of the City Council:
I would like to remain anonymous, although I understand that may be difficult I am one of the men working at the City, and this letter concerns Item D.1: Public Employee Performance Evaluation for the Closed Session scheduled on May 26, 2026. I respectfully urge the City Council to place the City Manager on administrative leave pending an independent third-party investigation into the workplace culture concerns and gender-based discrimination that have been raised by multiple employees.
Over the past several weeks, I witnessed multiple incidents involving the treatment of female staff members inside the City Hall. I have already shared those incidents in detail with the Human Resources (HR) Department, the Mayor, and the Vice Mayor. I made the intentional decision not to publicly share those details in written comments because I want to protect the identities and emotional well-being of the women involved. These women are already going through enough. They should not also have to carry the fear of public embarrassment, gossip, retaliation, or becoming “the problem” simply because someone finally decided to speak up for them.
But there is one thing I can publicly say: As a man, I experienced a completely different level of treatment than my female colleagues. Whenever the City Manager needed my attention, he would walk over to my desk and respectfully ask, “Do you have a minute?” or “Can we talk about the projects you are working on?” He treated me professionally and respectfully.
But when it came to female staff members, I witnessed behavior that honestly broke my heart. I witnessed women being summoned over through finger waving and hand gestures that felt degrading and dehumanizing. The employee told me “I felt like I was his dog.” I also witnessed female staff members being expected to organize, pay for, and clean up staff functions and workplace activities while the men around them were not asked or expected to contribute in the same way at all. The full details have already been documented with HR.
What I witnessed was not simply a “management style” or a misunderstanding. I witnessed a pattern where women were treated differently, spoken to differently, and expected to carry burdens that the men around them were not expected to carry. That is not leadership. That is gender-based discrimination. And what if these concerns eventually reach State civil rights agencies or the courts? The cost to the City and its taxpayers could become very significant.
Last night, my father asked me a question I have not been able to stop thinking about: “You know you may be fired for speaking up, right? Why are you willing to risk your job to speak up for the women you have only known for a month?” I spent a lot of time reflecting on that question. And the truth is, I am not doing this because I think I am brave or heroic. I am not heroic at all. I am just an ordinary guy whose life was shaped by women who sacrificed everything for him.
After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, my community back home suffered deeply. Refugee families like mine arrived in America carrying trauma, loss, and uncertainty. The men and women of the United States stood up for us, welcomed us, and gave us opportunities to rebuild our lives. One of those people was a kind and fearless woman with the name Tippi Hedren. She helped refugee women enter the beauty industry.
Because of opportunities like that, the women in my family became nail technicians and later successful business owners. The women in my family worked 10- to 12-hour days, breathing chemicals, keeping their heads down, and sometimes enduring disrespect from customers, all so the younger generation like myself could have a better life.
Because of those women, I was able to earn my bachelor’s degree. Then my master’s degree. Then acceptance into a PhD program. Because of those women, I had the privilege of leaving the private sector, taking a pay cut, and entering public service because I believed government should be about helping and protecting people.
My public service journey eventually brought me to Brentwood, where I met women who remind me so much of those in my own family. Women who keep their heads down.
Women who work hard. Women who quietly carry responsibilities at home while still showing up professionally every single day.
And that is why this has affected me so deeply. Because when I witnessed female staff members being treated with disrespect while I, as a man, was treated professionally and respectfully, something inside me could not accept it. These women are somebody’s daughters. Somebody’s mothers. Somebody’s wife.
Somebody’s entire world. And they deserve better than this.
I know speaking up may come with consequences for me professionally. But silence also has consequences. Silence teaches women to quietly endure disrespect.
Silence teaches employees that fear is safer than honesty. I also think about the young men and boys in my own family and community. I want to set an example for them. I want them to grow up understanding that when women are being disrespected or treated unfairly, we do not stay silent, nor do we look away because the problem is “not ours.” We stand beside the women in our lives. We use our voices when they are afraid to use theirs.
I also do not want Brentwood to become a place where women feel they must stay quiet just to survive professionally. The women inside Brentwood City Hall are watching what happens next. So are the men who work beside them.
Respectfully,
A Male Employee
May 23, 2026
Dear Honorable Mayor and Members of the City Council,
On behalf of concerned members of the various Brentwood Employee Associations, we are writing to express serious concern regarding the recent public reporting involving City Manager G. Harold Duffey, as well as incidents at the City of Brentwood workplace that have been reported to the City’s Human Resources Department relating to gender based discrimination.
Managers and supervisors are responsible for upholding respectful workplace standards and ensuring employees feel safe, supported, and professionally valued. Executive leadership sets the tone for the organization. When conduct of this nature becomes public, it can negatively affect morale, confidence in leadership, and the overall workplace environment across departments.
The City Council recently adopted City Council Administrative Policy No. 20-23 Prohibiting Discrimination, Harassment and Retaliation, which is intended to ensure that all members of the community and workforce are treated with dignity, fairness, and respect.
Members of the Brentwood Employee Associations have expressed discomfort and concern regarding interactions with City Manager Duffey, and its impact on the City organization. Given the seriousness of the matter, we respectfully urge the City Council to consider this information while conducting City Manager Duffey’s performance evaluation, as well as immediately initiate an independent third-party review.
This request is not intended to prejudge any outcome or findings. Rather, it reflects the importance of transparency, accountability, and maintaining employee trust and confidence in City leadership during this process.
We appreciate the Council’s attention to this matter and its commitment to maintaining a respectful and professional workplace environment for all City employees.
Sincerely,
Brentwood Employee’s Association Miscellaneous Office Division Brentwood Employee’s Association Public Works Division
Brentwood Supervisors and Professionals Employee’s Association Brentwood Managers and Confidential Employee’s Association CC: Spencer Shure, Associate Attorney, Mastagni Holstedt Amber Hoiska, Labor Relations Consultant, Mastagni Holstedt
Duffey was still here, so I came forward.
Here are some direct quotes from G. Harold Duffey: "City Council is nothing special, they are just super-citizens", "I don't read reports, I'm an executive", and my personal favorite said to me which a third party can corroborate "You're too truthful and you piss people off is why you won't be successful". We heard the same tired "Plan the work, then work the plan" plagiarized quote from Napoleon Hill that he recycled at the meet and greet over and over, but Duffey just says it he does not operate under the principal. If he tries to make "The Responsibility Virus" required reading there as he did here it will destroy morale as the premise is fine in corporate industry, but fails in unionized civil service environments. Please ask Duffey to provide the specifics about his claimed "accomplishments" as you will discover these just happen to be events that took place while he was breathing. I see he is taking credit for the response I executed to the atmospheric bomb event and the response to the Lake Merritt algae bloom which was lead be Watershed and my team. Were these units under Duffey? Yes.
Did he have anything to do with the response or success? Absolutely not! It is especially ludicrous that Duffey takes any credit for playing any part in the ransomware. Yes he was interim City Administrator but at best he managed to stay out of the way of the adults in the room actually managing the response.
Before you write me off as some crazy stalker you should know that I am the "anonymous" whistleblower that discovered and reported the FLSA overtime overpayment issue in 2020 and was unsuccessful in convincing Oakland City leadership to take action. Audit finds Oakland paid $1.6 million in excessive overtime pay over 6 years to employees in several departments - ABC7 San Francisco I also discovered and corrected a massive after-hours standby callback scheme whereby City employees generated 2 out 3 after-hours "emergency" calls to selfcreate a minimum 2.5 overtime callback. I am also the whistleblower that identified the falsehoods and manipulations with the Oakland Equipment Fund Balance which led to Finance Director Erin Roseman leaving after being caught lying to Council that there was no funding to pay for 37 badly needed undelivered and unpaid for OPD patrol vehicles. Roseman said the fund balance was zero while it had anywhere from $18M to a projected $38M available for vehicle acquisitions. This also made the newspaper, and I was the source who raised the issue to City Council when Duffey and the administration failed to act truthfully and appropriately I prepped and advised councilmember Kaplan live via text during Finance Committee meetings Oakland ordered 37 new police cars. Here’s why they’re sitting idle I have been in California government for over 25 years and 12 years in the United States Army before then. Normally I would celebrate when someone like Duffey moves and I almost let this go. I could not live with myself if I did not share the truth about this guy before he is hired by Brentwood so here I am. I don't want attention and in fact I didn't really know how to share documents on Facebook for goodness sake.
"Got the Old Player Mesmerized": Brentwood's City Manager, Degrading Texts, and a Pattern of Manipulating Women
Brentwood City Manager G. Harold Duffey is at the center of a workplace misconduct scandal that has cost the City of Oakland its top administrator, prompted a federal EEOC complaint, and left Brentwood officials scrambling for a response they have yet to deliver. The scandal involves degrading text messages about female colleagues, a documented pattern of manipulating the hiring process to surround himself with female subordinates he privately objectified, and a city council that has responded with little more than silence and stalling.
The Texts
This latest Duffey scandal broke in mid-May 2026 when thousands of text messages from Oakland City Administrator Jestin Johnson were released on Oakland's public records portal. Among them were exchanges between Johnson and Duffey — then serving as Oakland's Assistant City Administrator — that Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee called "degrading and unprofessional." The messages showed the two men evaluating female colleagues they directly supervised in explicitly sexualized terms. In one exchange, Duffey texted Johnson about a female employee identified in the messages only as Holly: "Got the old player mesmerized." Johnson replied that he had to force himself to look only into a woman's eyes (identified as "Mailee") when near her and that she made him "a little giddy." In another exchange, Duffey described a high-ranking female city official as his "kryptonite." Johnson commented that her deputy had a "helluva walk." These were not text messages between two men gossiping about strangers. These were the city's two most senior non-elected officials privately reducing their female subordinates — women whose careers, advancement, and daily working conditions were subject to their authority — to objects of personal attraction.
LaTonda Simmons, a 23-year Oakland city employee who had served as Assistant City Administrator — the same rank as Duffey — until Johnson fired her in 2025, was specifically named in the texts. Johnson and Duffey discussed her in dismissive and demeaning terms, suggesting she used her femininity to manipulate powerful men and labeling her "emotional." In one exchange, Duffey wrote: "You think a black man — I mean a black man, highly educated and very successful — would fall for LaTonda's Game.
She is becoming more emotional and he deals with facts." Simmons did not stay silent. She issued a public statement calling Johnson's forced resignation "critical to mitigate further damage to the women of Oakland." Her words were pointed: "Reducing women to sexualized functions and labeling women as emotional undermines and delegitimizes their value. Given his references to me and what his text shows, it comes as no surprise. I reported to then-Interim Mayor, now City Council President, Kevin Jenkins, and others that Jestin was disparaging me and interfering with my work, but I received no support."
Simmons's statement lays bare what the texts actually represent. She had raised complaints. She was fired. She was then mocked by the men who fired her in private messages that characterize her legitimate grievances as emotional manipulation. The texts were not just offensive language — they were part of a documented campaign to marginalize and retaliate against a woman who had tried to hold her superiors accountable.
Mayor Lee accepted Johnson's resignation within days, saying his conduct was "wholly incompatible with the values of this administration." Duffey, having left Oakland months earlier for Brentwood, faced no immediate consequences.
The Hiring Pattern: Manipulating Women for Personal Proximity The texts are not the full story — they are the window into it. A formal complaint filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC Case #555-2025-00522, October 2025) by Richard Battersby, a senior Oakland Public Works Assistant Director, provides extensive documented evidence that Duffey's attitude toward his female colleagues translated directly into a manipulated, biased, and illegal hiring scheme — one that served his personal interests at the expense of the women themselves and the more qualified men he systematically excluded.
Battersby's complaint, supported by City of Oakland records, CPRA responses, and the City's own internal investigation documents, alleges that Duffey used his authority as Public Works Director and later Assistant City Administrator to deliberately install female candidates into leadership roles they were not qualified for — while blocking male candidates who were objectively better suited. The women Duffey elevated in this way were, by the complaint's account, women he found personally appealing and whose proximity he was positioned to engineer. The men he shut out were the people most likely to recognize what he was doing and hold him accountable.
The methods Duffey allegedly used were systematic. He conducted one-on-one interviews with preferred female candidates in violation of existing practices, industry best practices, and civil service rules mirrored for civil service rule exempt positions requiring neutral hiring panels. He altered job classification minimum qualifications without consulting HR or the union representing those positions — in one case removing the requirement for a California Professional Engineer license — to lower the bar for candidates he had already pre-selected. He publicly told staff in department meetings that positions were already spoken for, discouraging qualified male candidates from applying. He held vacancies open for months to prevent eligible male employees from acting in them, then filled those vacancies with female candidates pulled from other departments who lacked relevant experience.
The financial favoritism extended beyond the hiring process. Duffey preferentially granted an incoming female assistant director 20 years of service credit toward vacation accrual at the time of hiring — in violation the position’s union MOU and denied to male counterparts with significantly more actual service. He approved overtime pay for a salaried female assistant director who was simultaneously accruing management leave — a double benefit denied to others who worked more overtime hours and which others have received discipline for performing. He allowed two female employees to split a single acting assignment and collect acting pay simultaneously, in violation of MOU provisions and at double the cost to taxpayers.
The EEOC complaint also addresses emergency duty assignments. Of 31 Emergency Operations Center activations from January 2020 onward — including COVID-19, the George Floyd protests, multiple civil unrest events, the Derek Chauvin trial, elections, a cyber-attack, a wildfire, a tsunami warning, and an NBA All-Star weekend — only three involved weather events that might fall within Battersby's operational portfolio. He was assigned 95% of all EOC duty across all 31 activations. The four female assistant directors participated in almost none. The City's own internal investigator acknowledged in writing in November 2024 that Battersby received the majority of EOC assignments because he had "more experience in emergency management than your peers" — a concession that simultaneously validated his complaint and contradicted the City's subsequent EEOC defense.
The official Oakland job classification for the OPW Director — Duffey's own position — explicitly assigns EOC leadership to the Director. Duffey shirked this duty entirely, offloading it onto Battersby while remaining unavailable himself after-hours and on weekends. EOC leadership was Duffey's job. He unfairly assigned it to the one male assistant director while the four female assistant directors he had installed around him were spared.
Beyond the formal complaint, accounts from within Oakland city government indicate that both of Duffey's female executive assistants resigned abruptly during his tenure, with complaints filed against Duffey that city leadership did not act upon. The City of Oakland has not publicly confirmed or commented on those complaints. What is clear is that women who worked in closest proximity to Duffey — whether the managers and assistant directors he elevated or the assistants in his own office — appear to have experienced a workplace he controlled in ways that served himself, not them.
The picture that emerges from the texts and the documented complaint together is coherent and troubling: a man who privately reduced female colleagues to objects of personal attraction, and who used institutional power to fill the professional space around him with women he found personally compelling — at the expense of both those women's more qualified male peers, and ultimately at the expense of the women themselves, several of whom departed in circumstances that remain unexplained. There were numerous complaints and allegations made against Duffey since 2021 at City of Oakland, but his fellow text conspirator Jestin Johnson took no action and chose to protect Duffey.
However, Duffey’s ineptness and incompetence eventually caught up to him and Duffey's Oakland position was quietly eliminated from the Oakland budget on July 1, 2025 but he somehow remained on the Oakland payroll until he arrived in Brentwood two months later. Duffey’s text co-conspirator Jestin Johnson apparently covered for Duffey in this respect as well.
Brentwood's Response: "Discussing Options"
The Brentwood City Council hired Duffey in October 2025 following a national search. When community members raised concerns about Duffey's record prior to the vote — and TruthAboutDuffey.com sent the council direct documentation of its concerns — the council's response was to scold the public for asking questions.
Mayor Susannah Meyer, who had been threatened with recall three times in the preceding weeks, told the public at a council meeting: "I hope you can tell not one of us up here is stupid. I am just putting it out there that we are not stupid, we are not blind, people are sending us things we have already seen. In fact, Mr. Duffey shared these things with us before anyone did." Vice Mayor Pa'tanisha Pierson framed community skepticism in racial terms, saying criticism of the hire amounted to prejudice against Black excellence, and that the council's credentials made any questioning of its vetting process "an insult to the professionalism and integrity of the entire body."
Now, months later, that confidence has curdled into silence. When The Press, Brentwood's local newspaper, reported on May 21 that Duffey "faces uncertainty in his role" following the Oakland texting scandal, Mayor Meyer told the paper only that the city is "discussing options" and "following protocols" — without explaining what those options or protocols are. As of the time of reporting, the City Attorney's office had not responded to The Press's request for comment.
The day before Meyer's statement — the day after the scandal broke — Duffey appeared front and center at Brentwood's State of the City address at the Delta Theater on May 18. His presence was not welcome to everyone in attendance. Resident David Cruz addressed the room directly: "I'm shocked that the City Manager is in this theater today. He has no business being here. It is very clear from the evidence that came out, that had the Oakland City Manager resign earlier this weekend, Mr. Duffey is in those text messages, and has no business being here after that conduct and his behavior toward women. [He] absolutely should not be part of our city, and he should not be in this room today." The council said nothing.
The council's silence is harder to explain in light of the broader context of Duffey's first months in the role. Five senior Brentwood leaders have departed since his arrival: Assistant City Manager Darin Gale left the month Duffey was confirmed; City Attorney Katherine Wisinski left in February 2026; HR Director Sukari Beshears announced her departure in April 2026; Economic Development Manager Ricardo Noguera — who had led work on the city's 300-acre Innovation Center and new Costco — left for Stockton in May 2026; and the city has been without a permanent police chief since September 2025. Whether these departures are connected to Duffey's management is a question the council has not publicly addressed.
What Brentwood's residents are entitled to know is this: their city manager was privately describing female colleagues in sexualized terms while simultaneously engineering a workplace in which those same women were given positions above men who were more qualified — for reasons that a federal EEOC complaint alleges had more to do with Duffey's personal appetites than any legitimate professional judgment. His counterpart in that behavior, Oakland City Administrator Jestin Johnson, lost his job. Duffey did not. He moved to Brentwood.
Mayor Meyer told the public last October that the council was "not stupid" and "not blind." Brentwood's residents are now watching to see whether that claim extends to the evidence in front of them.
Sources: The Oaklandside, The Press (Brentwood), Contra Costa News, KTVU Fox 2, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee statement (May 17, 2026), LaTonda Simmons public statement (May 18, 2026), formal EEO and civil service complaints filed with the City of Oakland by Richard Battersby, Statement of Facts and Additional Evidence submitted by Richard Battersby to the EEOC (Case #555-2025-00522, October 16, 2025), EEOC attachments including EOC activation log, City of Oakland EICRC investigation letter (November 15, 2024), OPW Director job classification, Assistant Director roster, and CPRA responses #25- 9706 and #25-9707. Allegations from internal complaints and the EEOC filing represent the claims of their authors. Duffey has denied misconduct allegations and has not been charged with any crime.
A Pattern of Problems: The Misconduct Allegations Trailing G. Harold Duffey G. Harold Duffey has spent years ascending the ranks of California municipal government — from city administrator of Oroville to city manager of Compton, then to senior roles in Oakland, and most recently to city manager of Brentwood. But at nearly every turn, controversy has followed. The latest scandal — degrading text messages about female colleagues surfacing in a public records dump — is only the most recent chapter in a troubling story that internal whistleblowers, citizen investigators, journalists, and independent media creators have been documenting for years.
The Texts: Degrading Messages and What They Reveal
This most recent Duffey scandal broke in mid-May 2026 when thousands of text messages from Oakland City Administrator Jestin Johnson were published on the city's public records portal in response to an anonymous public records request. Buried within them were exchanges between Johnson and Duffey — then serving as Oakland's Assistant City Administrator — that drew immediate condemnation.
The messages, sent during 2024, showed the two men discussing female colleagues in terms that Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee called "degrading and unprofessional." In one exchange, Duffey texted Johnson about a female employee identified in the messages only as Holly: "Got the old player mesmerized." Johnson replied that he had to force himself to look only into a woman's eyes (identified as "Mailee") when near her and that she made him "a little giddy." In a separate exchange in June of that year, Duffey described a different high-ranking woman in the city as his "kryptonite" — using the Superman metaphor to suggest she had a powerful effect on him — while Johnson commented on her deputy's walk. "My goodness, [she] has a helluva walk," Johnson wrote.
At least one of the women referenced in the messages declined to be interviewed. But one woman named in the texts spoke out publicly: LaTonda Simmons, a 23-year city employee who had served as an Assistant City Administrator — the same position as Duffey — until Johnson fired her in 2025. The texts revealed multiple exchanges in which Johnson and Duffey discussed Simmons in dismissive and demeaning terms. In one, Johnson wrote that another city official "may be in his ear" — referring to Simmons as a behind-the-scenes manipulator — and Duffey replied that while she might be influencing him, the man was "very sophisticated" and her scheming wasn't working. In another exchange it was Duffey who wrote dismissively about Simmons directly: "You think a black man — I mean a black man, highly educated and very successful — would fall for LaTonda's Game. She is becoming more emotional and he deals with facts."
Simmons did not stay silent. On Sunday evening after the texts became public, she issued a statement calling Johnson's resignation "critical to mitigate further damage to the women of Oakland." Her words were pointed and personal: "Reducing women to sexualized functions and labeling women as emotional undermines and delegitimizes their value. Given his references to me and what his text shows, it comes as no surprise. I reported to then-Interim Mayor, now City Council President, Kevin Jenkins, and others that Jestin was disparaging me and interfering with my work, but I received no support." Simmons's statement carries particular weight given what the full record now shows. She was not a passive subject of locker-room talk between two men. She was a senior official who had raised concerns, been dismissed, and was then publicly described in terms designed to undermine her credibility. The texts weren't just about how Johnson and Duffey viewed women in the abstract — they were tools used to rationalize the marginalization of and retaliation against a specific, named colleague who had tried to hold Johnson accountable.
Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee accepted Johnson's resignation almost immediately, saying the communications were "wholly incompatible with the values of this administration and those of the people of Oakland." Duffey, however, had already left Oakland months earlier — making him insulated from immediate official accountability in that city.
As of publication, Duffey had not publicly addressed the messages. Brentwood officials said they expected to release a statement, but had not yet done so, even as Duffey appeared front and center at Brentwood's State of the City event the following day.
Bypassing Qualified Men: Duffey's Documented Hiring Bias — and What the Texts Reveal The inappropriate texts Duffey exchanged with City Administrator Jestin Johnson are more than an embarrassing side story. Read alongside the formal EEO and civil service complaints filed internally at Oakland Public Works (OPW) by Richard Battersby — a senior Assistant Director who also founded TruthAboutDuffey.com — they illuminate a troubling through-line: Duffey was privately sizing up his female colleagues as objects of attraction while simultaneously positioning them in leadership roles above far more qualified men. The texts are not separate from the hiring misconduct. They are a window into the mindset driving it.
In one exchange, Duffey told Johnson that a high-ranking female official in Oakland "got the old player mesmerized." In another, he described a different woman as his "kryptonite" — a figure of overwhelming personal appeal. Johnson, for his part, wrote about a female official that he had to "force myself to look into her eyes," that she made him "a little giddy," and that her deputy had a "helluva walk." These were not casual observations between peers about strangers. These were senior city officials trading assessments of the women they directly supervised — women whose careers, advancement opportunities, and daily working conditions were subject to those same men's decisions.
That context makes Battersby's formal complaints all the more significant. Those complaints, citing specific violations of Oakland Municipal Code Section 2.08.060, the CMEA Memorandum of Understanding, Oakland Civil Service Rules, and EEO non-discrimination provisions, allege that Duffey deliberately excluded more qualified male candidates from leadership roles in order to surround himself with female subordinates who were less experienced, less credentialed, and — by design — less likely to challenge him. The picture is of a man who viewed the women around him through a personal lens, and who shaped the organizational structure to put more of them within his reach.
The core allegation is straightforward: Duffey used his authority as Public Works Director and later Assistant City Administrator to install female candidates into assistant director and management roles while shutting out male employees who were objectively better qualified for those positions. He did this through a series of documented methods — bypassing competitive hiring processes, conducting one-on- one interviews with preferred female candidates against industry best practice, inconsistent with past practices, and in violation of civil service rules mirrored for civil service exempt positions which require neutral panels, holding positions vacant for months to prevent qualified males from acting in them, altering job classification minimum qualifications without consulting HR or the relevant union, and publicly announcing in staff meetings that positions were already spoken for to discourage internal male candidates from applying at all.
The consequences for male staff — particularly senior Asian engineers with California Professional Engineer licenses and years of OPW experience — were concrete and documented. Battersby's complaints name specific engineers who were passed over for acting and interim roles in the Bureau of Design and Construction: licensed professionals with extensive supervisory experience who were entitled under the MOU to be offered acting opportunities that Duffey never posted or rotated. Instead, those opportunities went to female candidates who in some cases had fewer than two years of basic supervisory experience, lacked engineering qualifications, and were pulled from entirely different departments. One such appointment bypassed all 26 individuals on an existing certified hiring list. In other words- the female had not even applied for the position Duffey promoted her into. Another involved a candidate brought in from outside the bureau with no experience in project delivery or contracting — the two functions most critically deficient in that division.
When Duffey told Johnson in a text that a particular woman was his "kryptonite," or described another as having "got the old player mesmerized," he was talking about colleagues at the highest levels of Oakland city government — women whose career trajectories he had direct influence over. And when Johnson wrote that LaTonda Simmons, the Assistant City Administrator he would later fire, was playing "games" and was "becoming more emotional," while he "deals with facts," the two men were not venting in a vacuum. They were constructing a narrative to justify the sidelining of a senior woman who had already reported to city leadership that Johnson was disparaging her and interfering with her work — and who received no support in response.
The financial dimensions of Duffey's preferential treatment were equally one-sided. He undeniably granted an incoming female assistant director 20 years of service credit toward vacation accrual at hiring — a violation of position’s MOU and which Duffey denied to male counterparts with far longer actual service records. He approved overtime pay for a salaried female assistant director who was simultaneously accruing management leave, a dual benefit he withheld from other assistant directors who worked significantly more overtime hours, and an action for which others were disciplined. He allowed two female employees to split a single acting assignment and receive acting pay simultaneously — an arrangement that violated MOU language requiring the acting employee to perform all duties of the higher classification, and that came at double the taxpayer cost compared to allowing one qualified male engineer to act as the contract required.
Meanwhile, Battersby alleges that he personally shouldered the vast majority of after-hours emergency operations center duty across a four-year period — assignments the OPW Director is expected to fulfill — while Duffey's four female assistant directors performed only token shifts. When Battersby discovered and reported Duffey for improperly paying overtime to a salaried female assistant director who was accruing management leave simultaneously, his own acting opportunities were cut off entirely.
Less experienced, less senior female employees were then permitted to act in his place.
The picture that emerges is one of deliberate, systematic exclusion of qualified male employees — and a corresponding elevation of female employees who lacked the credentials, seniority, and operational knowledge of the men they competed against or replaced. Battersby's complaint explicitly argues that Duffey engineered this arrangement to surround himself with subordinates who would be unlikely to recognize or challenge his own deficiencies as a public works leader and allowed Duffey to control awarding of lucrative Public Contracts. The texts with Johnson suggest an additional dimension: that at least some of the women Duffey elevated were women he was personally drawn to, and whose proximity he was in a position to engineer. Those who might have known enough to hold him accountable were the very people he most aggressively kept out.
The complaints explicitly allege violations of Oakland City Charter Section 900 non-discrimination provisions, CMEA MOU Articles 1, 2.1, 5.7, and 10.1, Oakland Civil Service Rule 11 Section 11.01 (Frauds Prohibited), and EEO policy AI-71. Duffey's response to these internal complaints is not known publicly.
Battersby ultimately escalated his case to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. His Statement of Facts and Additional Evidence, submitted to the EEOC as Case #555-2025-00522 on October 16, 2025, responded point by point to the City of Oakland's defense — and found it riddled with inconsistencies, fabrications, and outright falsehoods.
The City had argued that Battersby was assigned the majority of after-hours Emergency Operations Center duty because it fell within his portfolio as head of the Bureau of Maintenance and Internal Services, which oversees sewers and storm drains. Battersby's EEOC submission demolished this defense with the City's own records. Attachment A to his EEOC filing is the complete log of all 31 EOC activations from January 2020 onward — a documented list that includes COVID-19, the George Floyd protests, multiple civil unrest events, the Derek Chauvin trial, the 2020 and 2024 elections, a cyber-attack, a public safety power shutoff, an NBA All-Star weekend, a tsunami warning, a wildfire, and multiple 4th of July events. Of these 31 activations, only three — three winter storm events highlighted in yellow on the document — involved storm drains or sewers that might logically fall within Battersby's bureau. The other 28 had nothing whatsoever to do with his operational portfolio. Yet he was assigned 95% of all EOC duty across all 31 activations, while the four female assistant directors participated in almost none.
Attachment C further undermines the City's position: the official Oakland job classification for the Director of Public Works position — Duffey's role — explicitly states the Director "serves as an Operations Section Chief in the City's Emergency Operations Center, responsible for managing emergency responses to events affecting the City's public infrastructure." EOC leadership was Duffey's assigned duty. He shirked it entirely, offloading it onto Battersby while staying home comfortably on weekends and holidays.
Attachment D is the City of Oakland's own official roster of all five Assistant Director, Public Works Agency incumbents: Richard Battersby, Kristin Hathaway, Siew Chin Yeong, Megan Lynn Weir, and Ariel Espiritu Santo McGinnis. Battersby is the only male. Four of the five are female. It is indisputable from the City's own records that among five Assistant Directors sharing the same classification, the lone male was assigned the vast majority of onerous after-hours emergency duty while the four female assistant directors were not equally assigned.
More damaging still, Attachment B to Battersby's EEOC filing is the City of Oakland's own EICRC investigation letter dated November 15, 2024 — signed by City Equal Opportunity Specialist Blake Wu — which explicitly states: "The evidence indicates that your allegation you had too many emergency management assignments was more likely than not due to your having more experience in emergency management than your peers, not because of sex discrimination." This is the City's own internal investigator, in writing, conceding that Battersby was loaded with EOC duty because he was the most experienced person there. Having made that concession in November 2024 to dismiss his sex discrimination claim, the City then turned that same admission on its head in its EEOC defense — arguing he was passed over for acting and promotion opportunities not because of bias, but because he supposedly lacked qualifications. The EEOC filing calls this out as a direct contradiction the City cannot reconcile: a man cannot simultaneously be "most experienced" enough to justify being given all the onerous and challenging assignments, but not experienced enough to be considered for advancement.
The filing also alleges that Duffey orchestrated the issuance of formal discipline against Battersby during the interview process for the OPW Director position in 2025 — timing Battersby describes as "extremely suspicious" and designed specifically to sabotage his candidacy for the role he was most qualified to fill.
Battersby contends there was never any genuine intent to fill the Public Works Director position through a fair process: Duffey intended either to land in the role himself if he failed as Assistant City Administrator, or to ensure the position remained frozen if he succeeded — keeping Battersby permanently blocked from advancement either way.
Duffey's Oakland position was quietly eliminated from the Oakland budget on July 1, 2025 but he somehow remained on the payroll until he departed for Brentwood in September of that year. It seems Duffey’s text scandal co-conspirator was watching “the old player’s” back likely to maintain Duffey’s silence.
The formal EEO complaints were not the only signal that working directly for Duffey came at a personal cost. According to accounts from within Oakland city government, both of Duffey's female executive assistants resigned abruptly and left city employment during his tenure — departures that, according to those same accounts, were accompanied by complaints filed against Duffey that city leadership did not act upon. The nature of those complaints has not been publicly disclosed, and the City of Oakland has not confirmed or commented on them. What is known is that the pattern of women in Duffey's immediate professional orbit resigning without explanation, and complaints against him going unaddressed, is consistent with the broader picture of a workplace in which accountability mechanisms were systematically bypassed or ignored.
Brentwood: The Pattern Continues — Hiring Terrance Davis If any lingering doubt remained that Duffey's habit of reaching back to old associates when filling senior positions was confined to his Oakland years, his first major hire as Brentwood City Manager put it to rest. In February 2026, just months after taking the Brentwood job, Duffey announced the appointment of Terrance Davis as the city's new Assistant City Manager.
The relationship between Duffey and Davis stretches back more than two decades across multiple employers. According to documentation compiled by Battersby and confirmed by public records, Davis worked alongside Duffey in the City of Sacramento's waste division between 2000 and 2006 — during precisely the period when Duffey served as Sacramento's Integrated Waste General Manager. Davis later became Duffey's Assistant City Manager in Compton from 2012 to 2013, when Duffey was City Manager. Their career paths then diverged: Davis moved to Vallejo, where he served as Public Works Director and then Assistant City Manager from 2017 to 2024, before being recruited to lead Berkeley's Public Works Department in April 2024.
Davis's Berkeley tenure lasted less than two years. Berkeley's City Manager praised Davis's "calm and steady hand" and his work to address department vacancies and implement a voter-approved parcel tax for street repairs and safety projects. His last day at Berkeley was March 20, 2026. Just one day earlier, the City of Brentwood announced Davis's appointment as Assistant City Manager, with Duffey quoted in the press release saying Davis's "expertise will help us sharpen our operations and meet the changing needs of our residents," adding that the hire would allow Duffey himself to "focus on Brentwood's longterm growth, infrastructure buildout, and responsible scaling." The circumstances deserve scrutiny. Berkeley had hired Davis at a fraught moment for its public works office, filling a role that had been vacant since November 2023 following the resignation of his predecessor under unclear circumstances. (Oddly enough, Duffey himself was to hire into Oakland the Berkeley PW Director into who resigned and created the opportunity for Davis in Berkeley) Davis was brought in to stabilize a department that had experienced months of turbulence and a city investigation.
Having spent less than two years doing that stabilization work — and with Berkeley now needing to conduct yet another search for a permanent Public Works Director — Davis departed for a role in a city of Brentwood, under a city manager he had worked for twice before.
What makes the Davis hire notable is not simply that Duffey recruited an old associate, but the specificity and depth of their shared history. Sacramento waste division, 2000–2006. Compton City Hall, 2012–2013. And now Brentwood, 2026. Davis's resume also confirms an overlap with other figures in the Duffey network: his Berkeley appointment documents show he served as Assistant City Manager in Compton in 2012–2013, the same period Butler served as Duffey's Building and Safety Director there.
Three of Duffey's closest professional allies — Kashiwagi, Butler, and now Davis — all have documented ties to Duffey that trace back to Sacramento or Compton.
Battersby's documentation also raises a forward-looking concern: in addition to Interwest, he notes that Duffey has historically brought in specific vendors — including US Security Lines, Marinship, Cooper Construction, California Waste Solutions, and Waste Management — across multiple employers where he has held executive authority. Some of these vendors, particularly US Security Lines, were reportedly installed almost immediately after Duffey's arrivals at new jurisdictions. With Davis now in place as Brentwood's Assistant City Manager, and Duffey controlling the city's contracting and administrative agenda, residents and council members would be well-advised to watch closely which outside vendors begin appearing in city contracts.
The Interwest Network: Cronies, Contractors, and a No-Bid Contract Among the most detailed allegations in Battersby's documentation concerns what he describes as a deliberate effort by Duffey to install personal associates — many of them connected to a private government services firm called Interwest Consulting Group — into high-ranking Oakland city positions, in what Battersby characterizes as a scheme to fulfill commitments made within the Thao administration to deliver "ringers" to key departments.
Interwest is a company that provides outsourced, privatized replacements for government employees, primarily in building, planning, and public works functions. It was founded by Mike Kashiwagi — the same former Sacramento colleague whom Duffey hired as Interim OPW Director in May 2024 at a topstep salary of over $300,000 per year, bypassing all qualified internal candidates and the OPW leadership team entirely. Duffey had worked under Kashiwagi in Sacramento two decades earlier, when Kashiwagi was Public Works Director and Duffey was Solid Waste Manager. By the time Duffey brought him to Oakland, Kashiwagi had not worked in active public civil service for over 20 years.
The hiring raised immediate questions, documented in a formal email chain sent by Battersby to Oakland HR in February and March 2025. The core problem: Kashiwagi's temporary employment agreement with the City of Oakland had an end date of June 30, 2024 — yet Kashiwagi continued working through December 2024 at his $300,000-per-year rate. Public Records Act requests filed by Battersby returned no second contract covering the period from July to December 2024. The City's HR department acknowledged that Kashiwagi's work history had been "inadvertently missed" when pulling hiring records — an admission that the standard qualification-screening process for temporary contract hires had failed. A subsequent CPRA request for the missing contracts was closed without producing any additional documentation.
Battersby's emails also flagged that Kashiwagi was incorrectly designated as a non-filer of Form 700 — the state-mandated financial disclosure form required of government officials who make or influence contracting decisions. As Interim OPW Director with contract signatory authority, Kashiwagi was a mandatory Form 700 filer and was required to disclose upon taking and leaving office. No such filing appears to have been made. Duffey's own Form 700 filings were also raised as an outstanding concern in Battersby's correspondence.
The Interwest connection does not end with Kashiwagi. Lonell Butler — who was hired as Oakland's Chief Building Official and Deputy Director of the Building Bureau in late 2024 — also worked for Interwest during a consulting stint from 2019 to 2020. Butler previously worked as a direct report to Duffey at the City of Compton, where Duffey served as City Manager from 2012 to 2014 and Butler served as Director of Building and Safety. Before that, both Butler and Duffey were at Yolo County at the same time — Butler as Chief Building Official from 2005 to 2013, Duffey as Chief Assistant Director. Their careers have overlapped across three separate employers spanning nearly two decades.
In June 2024 — the same month Kashiwagi's contract nominally expired — the Oakland City Council approved a $3 million no-bid contract with Interwest. Although Kashiwagi reportedly sold his ownership stake in Interwest in 2020, Battersby's documentation notes that prior City of Oakland planning support contracts had already included Interwest among external service providers, and raises the question of whether Kashiwagi retained any financial interest in the firm after the reported sale. Crucially, Battersby's complaint notes that Interwest staff would likely have been involved in plan check and approvals for Evolutionary Home projects — one of the Duong family enterprises at the center of the Thao corruption indictment.
Battersby's analysis maps the four city positions the FBI indictment's alleged pay-to-play scheme promised to deliver — Public Works, Building and Permits, Housing, and the City Administrator's office — directly onto four individuals connected to Duffey: Kashiwagi (Interwest founder, placed in Public Works), Butler (Interwest alum and Duffey's Compton subordinate, placed in Building and Permits), Larry Gallegos (placed in Housing by Duffey's own admission), and Duffey himself (placed as Assistant City Administrator in a position of broad influence). Two of those four — Kashiwagi and Butler — worked for Interwest. Those same two both worked directly for or with Duffey at previous employers.
Duffey has not been charged with any crime in connection with these allegations. The theory connecting these hires to the indictment is Battersby's own analysis and has not been independently verified or adopted by prosecutors.
The EEOC filing adds several additional layers to the Kashiwagi picture. The City, in its defense of Duffey, claimed it was City Administrator Jestin Johnson — not Duffey — who made the decision to hire Kashiwagi. Battersby's EEOC submission flatly disproves this: a copy of Kashiwagi's employment contract obtained via CPRA request shows that Duffey himself offered Kashiwagi the position, negotiated the conditions of employment, and signed the contract. The hiring decision was Duffey's, documented in his own signature.
The City also claimed Kashiwagi had performed "free" consulting work for Oakland prior to being hired — a narrative offered to justify why he was selected without a competitive process. Attachment F to Battersby's EEOC filing is CPRA Request #25-9707, which sought all records of consultancy and consulting work performed by Kashiwagi for Oakland prior to his hiring as Interim OPW Director. The Finance Department — Procurement, Contracts & Purchasing — responded: "No records of a contract awarded to Michael Kashiwagi for consultancy services were found." The City Administrator's Office response was equally definitive: "no records were found relating to this request." The documents do not exist because the consulting, in all likelihood, never happened.
Attachment G clinches it: a screenshot of a text exchange with Fred Kelley, then-DOT Director — one of the departments the City specifically named as a beneficiary of Kashiwagi's alleged free consultation.
Kelley's message is unambiguous: "I can assure you he did no work for DOT. Harold brought him in to do a pitch for our Executive team. We were considering setting up a contracting team within DOT. He made his pitch and my team said Nope. You don't get paid for a presentation. And that was it." A failed sales pitch does not constitute consulting work. The free consulting story was, as Battersby's EEOC submission concludes, fabricated.
Attachment E is equally probative: CPRA Request #25-9706 sought all records identifying candidates considered to act as Interim OPW Director after Duffey left the post in May 2024. The City had claimed in its EEOC defense that "several candidates were considered." The CPRA response: zero documents. "Public Works does not have records for this." No candidates were ever seriously considered. Duffey installed his crony Kashiwagi and there is no paper trail of any alternative because no alternative was ever genuinely explored.
The EEOC filing also adds new detail to the $45 million security contract manipulation allegation.
According to Battersby, Kashiwagi — acting as Duffey's surrogate once installed as Interim OPW Director — hired unqualified staff to oversee the Capital Improvement Project unit, then directed that the security contract RFP be administered by that group despite their expertise being in capital projects and construction, not security services procurement which is a professional services agreement. Duffey directed hat the $45M security contract be administered by the females Duffey had appointed to positions in Projects and Grants Management unit, under the Bureau of Design and Construction. Duffey orchestrated hirings to allow him direct influence through his appointees and cronies over lucrative Oakland Public Works contracts from his Assistant City Administrator position. Kashiwagi subsequently directed that the security contract scoring be altered after the fact using different criteria than those originally applied — a manipulation of the procurement process designed to steer the contract outcome. Kashiwagi, the filing alleges, also continued to need Duffey's approval before making any major decisions, confirming he was functioning as Duffey's placeholder rather than an independent director.
The Compton History: Duffey, Butler, and Allegations of Working Developers Duffey's time as City Manager of Compton from 2012 to 2014 has drawn scrutiny beyond his hiring relationship with Butler. A PBS SoCal investigation during his tenure found him unaware of a longstanding $3.5 million settlement owed to the city by a major developer — a debt on which no payments had been made since the agreement was signed years earlier. Duffey told investigators he didn't even know about the deal until they brought it up.
More serious allegations arise from events documented in connection with Richland Farms, a small agricultural community within Compton whose residents were subjected to what observers described as a coordinated pressure campaign by city administrators on behalf of developers seeking to acquire and redevelop the area. A PBS SoCal report, video footage, and related documentation referenced in Battersby's Interwest complaint describe residents and property owners being harassed, fined, and cited in ways that critics alleged were designed to force them out and clear the terrain for developers.
During that same period, Butler served under Duffey as Director of Building and Safety — the official responsible for code enforcement, inspections, permits, and citations — for approximately five months before departing for Southern California. Battersby's documentation alleges that Duffey and Butler were "likely shaking down residents in Compton together on behalf of developers" during this period, citing the Richland Farms situation. This is a serious allegation made by Battersby in his complaint documents and has not been independently confirmed by mainstream reporting.
What the public documents do confirm, however, is that Duffey misrepresented the circumstances of his Compton departure on subsequent job applications and resumes — repeatedly and provably. His signed employment contract with the City of Compton, Resolution No. 23580, established a fixed term of service from July 23, 2012 through June 30, 2015. Yet Duffey's own application for the Oakland Public Works Director position — submitted in 2021 and obtained via public records request — lists his Compton tenure as ending in December 2014, six months before his contract was set to expire, and gives the reason for leaving as "Contract ended." His attached resume likewise lists the Compton period as July 2012 to December 2014.
A contract with a fixed end date of June 30, 2015 did not "end" in December 2014. The employment agreement itself includes an explicit termination clause (Section 4.1) allowing the Compton City Council to terminate Duffey's services with or without cause at any time during the agreement's term, by motion of at least three affirmative council votes. The documents establish that Duffey left six months before his contracted end date. The only mechanism in his agreement for departure before June 30, 2015 was either council termination or voluntary resignation with 90 days' written notice. His characterization of this departure as his "contract ended" is contradicted by the contract itself. On each subsequent job application and resume — at Grand Terrace, at Oakland, and elsewhere — Duffey repeated this same false explanation, submitting it under oath on applications that explicitly warned that incomplete or false information could result in disqualification.
Lonell Butler in Oakland: A Brief Tenure and an Abrupt Exit Lonell Butler's stint as Oakland's Chief Building Official lasted approximately nine months — from September 2024 to May 2025. It ended with an abrupt resignation that drew attention from both mainstream outlets and Gotham Oakland, Seneca Scott's independent media channel, which dedicated an episode to the departure under the title "The Departed: Dysfunction at Oakland City Hall," describing Butler as having "dropped a truth bomb on the way out." Butler's resignation came as part of a wave of high-level departures from Oakland City Hall during a period of intense institutional turbulence following the Thao indictment and subsequent recall. The Finance Director and a top revenue official also departed around the same period, and interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins had fired multiple remaining Thao administration staffers. Butler did not publicly explain his reasons for leaving, and no official statement detailing the circumstances of his departure has been made public.
What makes Butler's brief Oakland tenure notable in the context of the Duffey allegations is the combination of factors surrounding his hiring: his documented prior relationship with Duffey at Yolo County and Compton; his prior work for Interwest, the firm founded by Duffey's Sacramento crony Kashiwagi; his daughter's employment as an HR Analyst with the City of Oakland (disclosed on his own application under the city's conflict-of-interest provisions); and the allegation that Duffey played a behind-the-scenes role in steering his selection despite the position not being directly under Duffey's authority. Butler's application also shows he listed his highest level of education as "some college" — a notably minimal credential for a Deputy Director-level position in a major city government.
Duffey's Interwest Playbook: From Grand Terrace to Oakland Before arriving at Oakland, Duffey's use of Interwest was already well established. According to Battersby's documentation and Duffey's own resume, during his six years as City Manager of Grand Terrace (2015–2021), Duffey systematically reduced the city's staffing from more than 30 full-time employees down to approximately 6, replacing many of them with Interwest contract staff. He also replaced other vendors providing similar services with Interwest workers, and brought Steven Weiss — Grand Terrace's Planning and Development Director — with him to Oakland as one of his first hires in his new role.
The pattern, as described by Battersby, is consistent across multiple cities: Duffey arrives, reduces inhouse capacity, and routes work to private contractors with whom he has prior personal and professional relationships — in particular, Interwest. The financial and oversight implications of this approach are significant. Interwest staff operating under outsourcing contracts may face different accountability structures than civil service employees, and the contracting relationships that fund them create ongoing potential for conflicts of interest, particularly where the same officials who approve contracts have personal ties to the firm's founders or alumni.
Gotham Oakland: "The Duffey Dossier"
Long before the text messages surfaced, political activist and independent journalist Seneca Scott had been sounding the alarm about Duffey through his YouTube channel, Gotham Oakland. In June 2025, Scott published a multi-part investigative series he called "The Duffey Dossier," laying out a sweeping set of allegations against the then-Assistant City Administrator.
In the videos, Scott accused Duffey of taking a $250,000 bribe from a security services company to steer a city contract, making false statements on his resume and job applications, hiring cronies into government positions, engaging in "shakedowns" of contractors, and receiving federal immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony in the Sheng Thao investigation. Scott also dedicated a separate episode to Butler's abrupt Oakland departure, suggesting the circumstances pointed to deeper dysfunction in city leadership.
Duffey flatly denied the accusations. In court filings, he wrote that the bribery allegation is "false" and that the videos contained "at least 26 false claims" amounting to "defamatory and untrue libelous statements."
It is important to note that Duffey has not been charged with any crime. Federal prosecutors have not accused him of wrongdoing.
TruthAboutDuffey.com: A Citizen Dossier
Operating in parallel with Gotham Oakland, TruthAboutDuffey.com — founded by Battersby — has compiled public records, formal complaints, job applications, hiring documents, contracts, and community accounts into what it calls the "Blue Folder." Among the allegations documented with supporting records: that Duffey made false statements on job applications and resumes across multiple cities; that he "illegally manipulated" a $45 million security contract; that he inappropriately solicited "donations" from vendors under contract and directed those funds to a nonprofit rather than through city treasury; and that he modified civil service classifications to enable favored hires.
The site also raised what might seem like a minor detail but is significant in background-check contexts:
Duffey appears in official documents under multiple variations of his name — "Duffey," "Duffy," and similar spellings — and his official Oakland application lists his legal first name as "Glenn," a name he does not appear to use publicly in any professional capacity.
The site emailed warnings to the Brentwood City Council prior to the vote confirming Duffey's hire in October 2025. Those warnings did not change the outcome.
The Restraining Order: An Attempt to Silence a Critic
In response to Scott's Gotham Oakland videos, Duffey filed for a civil harassment restraining order against Scott in Alameda County Superior Court in mid-2025, accusing the activist of making "false, defamatory, and harassing" statements damaging his career. He told the court that Scott was "ruining my reputation and impacting my ability to gain employment," citing active job applications in Davis, Sacramento, and with a Los Angeles public agency.
The effort backfired. A judge denied an initial temporary restraining order in June 2025. At a full hearing in September 2025, Judge Maria Morga ruled that Duffey had not met the legal standard for civil harassment, finding no proof that Scott had threatened or physically harmed him, and directing him toward defamation litigation if he believed he had been wrongly accused.
Scott framed his victory as a defense of free speech and whistleblower protection, saying the restraining order attempt was designed "to criminalize speech, to weaponize the courts against dissent, and to silence whistleblowers who expose corruption."
Brentwood: The Scandal Arrives — and Officials Stall
When Duffey was selected in October 2025 as Brentwood's next city manager, following a national search from a pool of more than 60 candidates, the city council voted unanimously to confirm the hire at a salary of $289,900 — with salary and benefits totaling $417,175. TruthAboutDuffey.com had emailed the council documentation of its concerns prior to the vote, and community members raised pointed questions online and in public meetings. The council's response was to scold the public rather than engage the substance of the concerns.
At a council meeting before the vote, Mayor Susannah Meyer — who said she had been threatened with recall three times in the preceding weeks — addressed the criticism directly. "I hope you can tell not one of us up here is stupid," she told the public. "I am just putting it out there that we are not stupid, we are not blind, people are sending us things we have already seen. In fact, Mr. Duffey shared these things with us before anyone did." Vice Mayor Pa'tanisha Pierson went further, framing community skepticism in racial terms: "When excellence continues to be met with skepticism only when it comes in black skin it is not a coincidence, it is a biased. Mr. Duffey's record speaks for itself. He has decades of public service, fiscal leadership and proven experience guiding cities through growth, recovery and change. To suggest the council did not do its due diligence is not only inaccurate, but as a woman who holds three professional degrees, a bachelors in psychology, a masters in organizational development and yes I am a Doctor, it is an insult to the professionalism and integrity of the entire body of each and every person sitting on the city council."
Now, just months into his role, the texting scandal has followed Duffey across the Bay — and the council that so vigorously defended him is struggling to maintain that posture and their credibility. Brentwood's local newspaper, The Press, reported on May 21 that Duffey "faces uncertainty in his role" following news of his implication in the Oakland scandal. Mayor Meyer told The Press the city is "discussing options" of how to proceed but had not yet reached a decision. "We are following protocols," she said, without elaborating on what those protocols entailed. As of the time of The Press's reporting, the City Attorney's office had not replied to a request for comment detailing what those protocols are.
The day after the scandal broke — before Meyer's statement to The Press — Duffey appeared front and center at Brentwood's State of the City address at the Delta Theater on May 18. His presence did not go unchallenged. Resident David Cruz confronted the situation directly from the audience. "I'm shocked that the City Manager is in this theater today," Cruz said. "He has no business being here. It is very clear from the evidence that came out, that had the Oakland City Manager resign earlier this weekend, Mr.
Duffey is in those text messages, and has no business being here after that conduct and his behavior toward women. [He] absolutely should not be part of our city, and he should not be in this room today." The council said nothing in response.
What makes that silence even harder to justify is a detail that has received insufficient attention: since Duffey's arrival as city manager, Brentwood has experienced a mass exodus of senior leadership that mirrors the organizational destabilization documented at his previous employers. Assistant City Manager Darin Gale left Brentwood in November 2025 — the same month Duffey was confirmed — to become city manager for the City of Pittsburg. City Attorney Katherine Wisinski left in February 2026. HR Director Sukari Beshears announced her departure in April 2026. Economic Development Manager Ricardo Noguera, who had worked on major projects including Brentwood's 300-acre Innovation Center and the city's new Costco location, left in May 2026 for a role with the City of Stockton. And the city has been operating without a permanent police chief since September 2025. Five key leadership positions — city attorney, HR director, assistant city manager, economic development manager, and police chief — either vacant or turned over within months of Duffey taking the helm.
This is not an unfamiliar pattern. At Oakland, Battersby's complaints document how Duffey's management style drove out experienced, qualified staff, created a hostile and demoralized workplace, and caused capable employees to leave rather than continue working under conditions they viewed as biased and illegitimate. At Grand Terrace, Duffey systematically hollowed out city staff before his own departure. At Compton, his tenure ended abruptly and under circumstances he misrepresented for years. The mass departure of institutional knowledge and experienced leadership from a city shortly after Duffey's arrival is not a coincidence — it is a symptom. And it is one that Brentwood residents, now watching their city attorney, HR director, economic development manager, assistant city manager, and police chief all exit within the span of Duffey's first six months, are entitled to name for what it is.
The pattern is now complete. At every stage where Duffey's record has been surfaced — by citizen watchdogs before the hiring, by TruthAboutDuffey.com in direct correspondence to council members, by community members at public meetings, and now by newsrooms covering the texting scandal — Brentwood's elected officials have oscillated between loud defensiveness and conspicuous silence. "Discussing options" is not accountability. It is the sound of a city council hoping the problem goes away on its own.
A Career That Keeps Generating Questions
The pattern across Duffey's career resists easy dismissal. At Compton, he oversaw a building department later alleged to have been used to pressure residents on behalf of developers, departed six months before his contract's expiration date under the council's termination provision, and then lied on every subsequent job application and resume by claiming his "contract ended" — a claim directly contradicted by the contract itself, which ran through June 30, 2015. At Grand Terrace, he systematically dismantled in-house government capacity and replaced it with Interwest contractors before abruptly departing. At Oakland, he installed a network of personal associates into critical positions — several of them connected to Interwest — bypassed civil service rules, may have employed a city contractor without a valid contract for months, systematically excluded more qualified male candidates from leadership roles to surround himself with less experienced female subordinates, and privately reduced those same colleagues to objects in text messages sent to his supervisor. A court rejected his attempt to suppress a public critic through a harassment order. And he arrived at Brentwood carrying all of this before the latest scandal broke.
The allegations against Duffey range from the documented (the inappropriate texts, the failed restraining order, the formal EEO and civil service complaints, the missing Kashiwagi contracts) to the serious-but-unproven (the bribery claims, the Compton developer allegations, the resume fraud). He has denied the most serious accusations and has not been charged with any crime.
But what the documentary record now shows — across a federal EEOC filing, formal EEO complaints, civil service grievances, internal emails, CPRA records, public records releases, court filings, hiring applications, and investigative reporting — is a consistent style of leadership: one in which personal relationships drive hiring decisions, institutional rules are bent to accommodate favored outcomes, private contractors with personal ties to the decision-maker receive no-bid city contracts, procurement processes are manipulated, the City fabricates justifications when challenged, and critics are met with legal pressure rather than transparency. Duffey's Oakland position was eliminated for good cause on July 1, 2025. He was in Brentwood two months later.
Whether Brentwood officials will finally reckon with this record — or continue to look away — remains to be seen.
Sources: The Oaklandside, KTVU Fox 2, Press Democrat, Contra Costa News, The Press (Brentwood), PBS SoCal, TruthAboutDuffey.com, Gotham Oakland (YouTube), public records released by the City of Oakland, formal internal EEO and civil service complaints filed with the City of Oakland by Richard Battersby, Statement of Facts and Additional Evidence submitted by Richard Battersby to the EEOC (Case #555-2025-00522, October 16, 2025), formal email correspondence between Battersby and Oakland Human Resources (February–March 2025), City of Oakland hiring records and CPRA responses, City of Oakland Temporary Employment Agreement for Michael Kashiwagi, job applications and resume of G.
Harold Duffey obtained via CPRA, job application of Lonell Butler obtained via CPRA, City of Compton Employment Agreement with Glenn Harold Duffey (Resolution No. 23,580, effective July 23, 2012), City of Berkeley appointment memo for Terrance Davis (March 26, 2024), Contra Costa News reporting on Brentwood leadership departures (April–May 2026). Allegations from TruthAboutDuffey.com, Gotham Oakland, and internal complaints represent the claims of their publishers and authors and have not all been independently verified. Duffey has denied the most serious allegations and has not been charged with any crime.
FORMAL ETHICS COMPLAINT
Subject: Harold Duffey, Assistant City Administrator (former Public Works Director) Violations: Coercion of contracted vendors; unauthorized solicitation of donations; failure to deposit funds into the City Treasury; personal acceptance of a gift from a contracted vendor; use of City staff to identify and solicit donors; absence of any written agreement; CPRA non-compliance; violation of City Purchasing Policy and Oakland Municipal Code (OMC) 2.04.160 / Ordinance 12634
Event: Fairyland Family Day, Saturday, May 25, 2024 (National Public Works Week) I. Origin of the Scheme — May 2, 2024 Internal Planning Email A critical document has been obtained: an internal email sent by Duffey on Thursday, May 2, 2024 at 5:07 PM from his City account ([email protected]), under his title “Director of Public Works,” to eight City staff members:
To: Morgan, Tom; Battersby, Richard; Minor, Derin; Jackson, Tyree A; Garland, Liam; Hathaway, Kristin; Mach, Jimmy; Celso Ortiz
Subject: Public Works Week – Fairyland
The email contained a draft donor solicitation and explicitly asked City staff to help identify targets:
"Draft Email – I want to send to donors – please review and let me know if you have organizations that you deal with that want to be a part of our celebration of Public Works week."
This single email establishes facts critical to this complaint that were previously undocumented:
• Premeditation: The scheme was planned at least 23 days before the May 25 event and 8 days before the first vendor solicitation (May 10). This was not an improvised or informal arrangement.
• City staff involvement: Duffey directed at least eight City employees to assist in identifying donor targets from their own vendor relationships. Beyond the May 2 planning email recipients, subsequent records confirm that additional City staff were actively involved in executing the scheme once vendors were secured.
Three staff members are specifically identified in CPRA-produced records:
Aracely Garza (Executive Management Assistant to City Administrator Jestin D.
Johnson) — sent all four vendor acknowledgment emails, managed ticket allocations for each donor, coordinated event logistics with vendor contacts, and was CC’d alongside Duffey on vendor correspondence. Garza was the primary City point of contact through whom donations were operationally managed.
Shamie Sahandy (Community Engagement Coordinator, OPW) — drafted the citywide NPWW email announcements on May 14, 2024, coordinating with colleagues Tanisha Thomas and Jasmine Zamora. Sahandy submitted the draft to Duffey for approval, noting it would be sent to the Mayor, Council, CAO, and all OPW/DOT staff.
Tanisha Thomas and Jasmine Zamora (OPW) — co-drafted the NPWW email announcements with Sahandy per Sahandy’s May 14 email to Duffey.
The involvement of Garza — who serves in the City Administrator’s office, not OPW — is particularly significant. Her role as the operational conduit for vendor acknowledgments and donation management extended the scheme beyond OPW into the City Administrator’s office, implicating resources and personnel from that office in the execution of a solicitation that violated City policy. Investigators should determine the scope of direction Garza received, whether she raised any concerns, and what, if anything, City Administrator Jestin D. Johnson knew about her involvement. • Explicit contractor targeting: The draft email defined “Community Partners” — the intended donor pool — as:
"Community Partners are those companies which help OPW/DOT with the maintenance and repair of our infrastructure."
This definition is significant on its face: it explicitly restricts the donor pool to active City contractors — companies with existing contractual relationships with OPW and OakDOT. It is not a general charitable appeal to the public or the broader business community. It is a targeted solicitation of entities over which Duffey, as Director of Public Works, exercised direct contractual authority.
• Formal tiered sponsorship structure: The draft set out three named giving levels with specific dollar amounts:
• Title Sponsors will make a $6,000 Donation to Fairland • Gold Sponsors will make a $3,000 Donation to Fairland • Silver Sponsors will make a $1,000 Donation to Fairland (Note: “Fairland” appears to be a typo for “Fairyland” consistent throughout the draft) These tiers correspond directly to the amounts ultimately paid by each vendor, though the tier names changed between this draft and the final solicitations (Title → Bridge; Gold → Helmut; Silver → Hammer). The existence of renamed tiers confirms that additional versions of this solicitation document were prepared — none of which have been produced in response to CPRA.
• Donations directed to Fairyland, not the City: The draft explicitly stated:
“Donations can be sent directly to: Fairyland ———” followed by Fairyland’s address. The Treasury bypass was planned from the outset, not an oversight. • Duffey’s personal target list: The email included a handwritten “My potential List” of intended targets:
EBMUD
WMAC
CWS
Beautification Council
US Security Lines
PG&E
The Beautification Council — A City-Contracted Nonprofit Whose Leader Subsequently Won a City Council Seat
Among the six entities on Duffey’s personal target list, one stands apart from the others:
the Beautification Council, an Oakland-based nonprofit. Unlike EBMUD and PG&E, the Beautification Council genuinely fits Duffey’s own “Community Partners” definition — it held active OPW contracts for encampment cleanup and blight removal at the time of the solicitation. Unlike the for-profit vendors, however, its leader was a private individual with active political ambitions who subsequently won election to the Oakland City Council. The combination of an active City contract, a politically connected nonprofit leader, and Duffey’s personal targeting creates a set of concerns that are independent of, and additional to, the vendor coercion analysis.
A. The Beautification Council’s Contract History — Documented The Beautification Council’s City contract originated as an emergency COVID-19 solesource award and was subsequently extended and expanded four times, reaching a total capped value of $4,530,000. The full documented history is:
• Original Contract — May 5, 2021: $1,600,000. Awarded pursuant to City Council Resolution No. 88079, which expressly waived competitive advertising and bidding requirements as an emergency COVID-19 measure. The contract was for emergency waste removal and micro-cleaning/sanitization services at homeless encampments.
• First Amendment — Effective August 1, 2022: increased to $2,880,000, extended to June 30, 2024.
• Second Amendment — April 8, 2024. The Department Head signature on this amendment is that of Harold Duffey, dated February 15, 2024 — exactly 76 days before his May 2, 2024 email listing the Beautification Council as a personal donation target.
• Third Amendment — September 17, 2024: increased to $3,930,000, extended to June 30, 2025. Executed five months after Duffey’s solicitation email and just weeks before Ken Houston won election to the City Council. • Fourth Amendment — June 9, 2025: increased to $4,530,000, extended further. Executed after Houston had already resigned from the Beautification Council and taken office as a City Councilmember.
Every amendment to this contract after the original was executed under the same emergency sole-source authority — competitive bidding was never conducted. The original emergency COVID rationale was invoked to justify five years of non-competitive contract extensions. Investigators should examine whether this extended sole-source relationship was legally justified throughout its duration, or whether it should have been subjected to competitive procurement at some earlier point.
B. Duffey Signed the Active Contract 76 Days Before Targeting the Beautification Council
Why EBMUD and PG&E Do Not Fit the “Community Partners” Definition Duffey defined “Community Partners” as companies that “help OPW/DOT with the maintenance and repair of our infrastructure.” EBMUD and PG&E do not meet that definition by any reasonable reading:
• EBMUD is a publicly chartered regional water and wastewater utility governed by an independently elected board. It does not hold contracts with OPW or OakDOT for infrastructure maintenance or repair. Its relationship with the City of Oakland is that of a regulated utility providing water and wastewater services under public law — not a discretionary vendor relationship subject to the Director of Public Works’s authority.
• PG&E is an investor-owned gas and electric utility regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). Like EBMUD, it does not hold OPW/DOT maintenance or repair contracts. Its financial relationship with Oakland is governed by franchise agreements, rate structures, and CPUC regulation — not by procurement decisions made by the Director of Public Works. In 2024 alone, PG&E paid over $43 million in franchise fees and property taxes to fund Oakland city services, and provided more than $3.5 million in charitable grants to local nonprofits. PG&E’s charitable giving program distributed more than $36 million to nonprofits across its service territory in 2024.
• The entities that genuinely fit the “Community Partners” definition are the vendors that ultimately donated: WMAC (waste collection contractor), Marinship (construction and sewer maintenance contractor), USSL (security services contractor), and CWS (waste and recycling contractor). Each holds active OPW/DOT service contracts. EBMUD and PG&E do not.
What EBMUD and PG&E’s Inclusion Actually Reveals
The presence of two regulated utilities — which are definitionally outside the “Community Partners” category Duffey himself wrote — on his personal target list reveals that the stated definition was never the true criterion. The actual selection principle was simpler and broader: entities with deep financial resources and significant financial relationships with the City of Oakland that Duffey, as a senior City official, believed he could leverage.
PG&E in particular fits the profile of a “deep pocket” target with well-documented reasons to maintain favorable relationships with City officials:
• PG&E’s charitable giving and political contributions to Oakland are substantial and documented. In 2024, PG&E paid over $43 million in franchise fees and taxes to fund Oakland city services, and distributed more than $3.5 million in charitable grants to local nonprofits. PG&E’s grant program distributed over $36 million to nonprofits across its service territory in 2024 alone. PG&E has also made direct political contributions in Oakland: it contributed to the “Supporters of Barbara Lee for Oakland Mayor 2025” PAC during the April 2025 special election, contributed to Mayor Lee’s inauguration committee, and separately contributed $25,000 to “Revitalize,” a political advocacy committee active in the 2025 Oakland election cycle. While these contributions post-date the May 2024 Fairyland event, they confirm what was already apparent in May 2024:
PG&E is a well-resourced entity with an established practice of making financial contributions — both charitable and political — to cultivate relationships with Oakland officials and institutions.
• PG&E’s charitable giving has been used as political leverage in Oakland. In July 2025, an Oakland city councilmember publicly alleged that PG&E representatives threatened to withhold nonprofit grants to pressure councilmembers to oppose state utility accountability legislation. This documented pattern of using charitable contributions as political currency makes PG&E’s inclusion on a City official’s donation solicitation list particularly concerning.
• PG&E pays substantial franchise fees to Oakland. PG&E pays franchise fees to cities and counties for the use of public streets for its gas and electric infrastructure — fees that fund City services. This financial dependency gives Oakland officials regulatory and political leverage over PG&E that is separate from and broader than any specific contract relationship. • EBMUD similarly has institutional incentives to maintain favorable City relationships. As a regional utility whose service territory includes Oakland, EBMUD has ongoing interactions with City government on planning, infrastructure coordination, and permitting matters. Its inclusion suggests Duffey viewed any entity with regular City dealings as a potential source of donations.
Taken together, the inclusion of EBMUD and PG&E reveals that Duffey’s solicitation was not bounded by any principled criterion. The “Community Partners” framing was a rhetorical device to make a targeted shakedown of City-connected entities appear to be a routine community engagement effort. The real criterion was: which organizations have enough money and enough at stake in their City relationships to pay when asked by a senior City official?
This is material to the broader investigation for two reasons:
• The coercive potential of the solicitation was broader than the four confirmed donors suggest. If Duffey was willing to target regulated utilities with no contracting relationship to OPW, and if he asked eight City staff members to identify additional targets from their own relationships, the total pool of entities solicited — or considered for solicitation — may be substantially larger than currently documented.
• Whether EBMUD or PG&E were actually solicited is unknown and unresolved. Neither appears as a confirmed donor. Whether either was contacted, whether either declined, and how any such communication was handled are questions that cannot be answered from existing CPRA production.
All City employee communications with EBMUD and PG&E in April–June 2024 should be subject to immediate targeted CPRA requests or subpoena.
preserve records, or undisclosed withholding. The City is also required by CPRA to provide an exemption log for any withheld records; none has been provided.
C. The Sponsorship Solicitation Document — Confirmed to Exist, Not Produced The May 2 internal email confirms that a draft donor solicitation document existed as of that date, with named giving tiers and dollar amounts. The tier names changed between May 2 (Title/Gold/Silver) and the final solicitation emails (Bridge/Helmut/Hammer), confirming that at least one additional version was prepared.
Neither version has been produced in response to CPRA. CPRA 25-8087 specifically sought correspondence referencing the final tier names. The City produced nothing. The May 2 draft — using the original tier names — was obtained independently. Investigators should formally demand all versions of this document from both the City and Fairyland.
IV. Documentary Evidence — Key Email Records
A. Solicitation Emails from Duffey (May 10 and May 23, 2024) Duffey sent solicitation emails to WMAC and USSL on May 10, and to CWS on May 23, each directing the vendor to:
"Please send your donation … directly to Fairyland for the sponsorship of Employee and Family Day at Fairyland on May 25, 2024."
No City Treasury routing was provided. All donations were structured as direct payments to a private nonprofit at the direction of a City official using his official title and City email.
B. Duffey Confirms $10,000 in Commitments (May 13, 2024) In a May 13 email to Fairyland, Duffey wrote:
"I have commitments for the $10,000. I have sent everyone your charitable information and address to mail."
"I will follow up next week to make sure they have all paid." This confirms Duffey personally managed and tracked donor payments using his City position. The $10,000 figure conflicts with $13,000 in confirmed donations — the $3,000 discrepancy matches exactly the CWS donation, which was solicited ten days later and concealed from public materials.
C. USSL Tickets Transferred to Duffey Personally (May 22, 2024) USSL representative Marcel Corby explicitly directed:
"Please allow Harold Duffey to use the tickets as he sees fit." This transfers 50 admission tickets — with measurable economic value — directly to Duffey personally from a vendor holding an active City contract. This is a separate gift from the $1,000 monetary donation and constitutes an independent ethics violation if Duffey used any tickets for personal benefit.
D. CWS Deliberately Concealed from Public Materials
All City-wide communications listed only three sponsors (WMAC, Marinship, USSL).
The acknowledgment email to CWS’s Kristina Duong — sent the day before the event — quietly added CWS to the sponsor line. This version was never distributed to City employees or the public. CWS’s $3,000 contribution was actively concealed from public disclosure.
E. Transactional Structure — Tickets for Donations
Each donation tier carried a proportional ticket allocation established in Duffey’s May 2 draft: Title Sponsors received employee badge access (effectively unlimited); Gold Sponsors received 100 guest passes; Silver Sponsors received 50 guest passes. This structure functioned as a commercial transaction — City contractor admission access in exchange for cash payments directed to a City-official-selected nonprofit.
F. City Staff Roles in Executing the Scheme
While Duffey designed and directed the solicitation, CPRA-produced records confirm that the scheme was operationally executed using City staff time and resources from two separate City offices. Of particular significance is the role of Aracely Garza, who served as the direct intermediary between Duffey and all four donating vendors.
Aracely Garza — Duffey’s Chosen Intermediary for Donation Management Garza, serving as Executive Management Assistant to City Administrator Jestin D.
Johnson, was the operational hub through which the entire donation scheme was executed. Duffey’s use of Garza — a member of the City Administrator’s office, not OPW — as his intermediary is itself significant: it extended the scheme beyond OPW into the City Administrator’s office, implicating that office’s resources and personnel, and raises the question of whether City Administrator Johnson had any knowledge of or direction over her involvement.
CPRA-produced records document Garza’s central role across every stage of the donation process:
• Sent all four vendor acknowledgment emails. Garza sent donation acknowledgment emails to WMAC (May 22), Marinship (May 22), USSL (May 22), and CWS (May 23) from her City account ([email protected]), with Duffey CC’d on each. All were signed “The City of Oakland National Public Works Week team,” presenting the solicitation scheme as an official City activity. • Managed ticket allocations for each vendor. Garza’s acknowledgment emails confirmed the specific ticket quantities each vendor would receive in exchange for their donation: 200 tickets to WMAC, 100 to Marinship, 50 to USSL, and 100 to CWS. These were not incidental logistics — the ticket allocations were the direct quid pro quo benefit vendors received for donating.
• Josh Rowan — Named in Vendor Correspondence. Rowan (OakDOT Director) was CC’d on Duffey’s May 10 solicitation emails to WMAC and USSL, and is referenced in Sahandy’s May 14 communications email as concurring with Duffey’s direction. His awareness of and participation in the event planning should be specifically examined.
V. Improper Solicitation of Contracted Vendors
The May 2 email eliminates any ambiguity about intent. Duffey explicitly defined his donor pool as “companies which help OPW/DOT with the maintenance and repair of our infrastructure” — that is, City contractors. He then used his official authority and City staff to identify and solicit those contractors. This conduct created multiple independent conflicts of interest:
• No vendor contract authorized payments for City employee events; Duffey’s request constituted an undocumented modification to those relationships. • Vendors solicited by the official overseeing their contracts could reasonably conclude that non-participation risked contract renewal or future work. • The solicitation was not open, advertised, or competitive. Non-invited contractors and nonprofits were excluded without basis.
• Each donation produced a ticket benefit proportional to the payment — a transactional exchange, not charitable giving.
• City staff were directed to identify additional targets from their own vendor relationships, potentially broadening the coercive reach of the solicitation.
VI. Violation of OMC 2.04.160 — City Treasury Deposit Requirement OMC 2.04.160 requires that all accepted gifts and donations be deposited into the City Treasury; that gifts support a Council-approved program; and that gifts not create unbudgeted City costs. None of these conditions were met:
• Fairyland Family Day was not a Council-approved program in any budget or legislation.
• All four vendors paid directly to Fairyland — bypassing the City Treasury.
This was planned from the outset: the May 2 draft solicitation explicitly directed donations to Fairyland’s address, not to the City.
• No written agreement existed — confirmed by the non-production of any contract in response to CPRA 25-9052.
• No evidence exists that the required annual donor report was provided to City Council.
VII. CWS Concealment and FBI/DA Nexus
CWS and the Duong family enterprise are subjects of an FBI indictment and Alameda County DA proceedings involving influence peddling related to Oakland. CWS appeared on Duffey’s personal target list from the outset (May 2) and ultimately donated $3,000:
• CWS was omitted from all public event materials; acknowledged only in a private email to Kristina Duong sent the day before the event.
• Duffey’s May 13 accounting to Fairyland referenced only $10,000, suggesting CWS’s contribution was deliberately excluded from his own records. • The CWS solicitation was sent on May 23 — two days before the event — creating maximum time pressure on a vendor whose City contract Duffey oversaw.
• The combination of deliberate advance targeting of CWS, concealment of their participation, and accounting discrepancy — in the context of active federal and county proceedings involving CWS — warrants serious investigative attention.
VIII. Personal Gift to Duffey — USSL Event Tickets
USSL explicitly directed 50 admission tickets to Harold Duffey personally, to use “as he sees fit.” This is a separate benefit from the $1,000 monetary donation and constitutes a direct gift from a contracted vendor to the City official overseeing their contract. If Duffey used any tickets for personal or family benefit, this is an independent ethics violation. The personal authority conferred on Duffey over those tickets is itself problematic regardless of how they were ultimately used.
IX. Vendor Relationships and Pattern of Directed Contracting The vendors on Duffey’s personal target list were not chosen at random. Each reflects a pre-existing personal relationship, and Duffey directed City staff to engage these same vendors after joining Oakland in mid-2021:
• USSL: Duffey used USSL for camera installations at his prior employer (City of Grand Terrace) and directed City staff to add USSL as an Oakland vendor upon arrival.
• WMAC: Duffey’s relationship with Waste Management dates approximately 20 years to his tenure as Solid Waste Manager, City of Sacramento. • Marinship: Directed by Duffey to OPW staff after his arrival. Marinship was not on Duffey’s May 2 personal target list — it was likely added by one of the eight City staff members Duffey asked to identify additional targets. The growth in Marinship’s City contract value following Duffey’s arrival is documented in official contract records and is striking:
X. Connection to FBI Indictment and Broader Misconduct
Duffey is implicated in an FBI indictment alleging that City officials promised appointment decisions and preferential treatment to projects associated with the Duong family enterprise. Duffey appointed Larry Gallegos, named as a highly placed City official in this context. Duffey also engaged in contracting activity involving ABC Security, which appears in an Alameda County DA filing alongside CWS and the Duong family’s Evolutionary Home enterprise. The conduct described in this complaint — including the specific targeting and concealment of CWS — is part of a broader pattern of alleged corruption under active law enforcement scrutiny.
XI. City Attorney Office Notification — Celso Ortiz
Among the eight City staff members to whom Duffey addressed his May 2, 2024 planning email was Celso Ortiz, an attorney in the Oakland City Attorney’s office. This fact has significant legal and institutional implications that are independent of, and additional to, the underlying violations described in this complaint.
A. The City Had Constructive Legal Notice from Day One
Ortiz received Duffey’s draft donor solicitation — including the tiered sponsorship structure, the explicit targeting of City contractors, and the direction to send donations directly to Fairyland — on May 2, 2024, twenty-three days before the event and eight days before the first vendor was solicited. A City Attorney reviewing this draft had before them all the information necessary to identify its legal deficiencies:
• The donor pool was explicitly defined as active City contractors — vendors with whom the City had existing contractual relationships.
• Donations were to be directed to a private nonprofit, not the City Treasury — on its face inconsistent with OMC 2.04.160.
• No mention was made of City Council approval, City Administrator gift acceptance authority, or any of the procedural requirements governing City gift acceptance.
• The solicitation was to be sent by the Director of Public Works using his official City title and resources.
Whether or not Ortiz reviewed the email carefully, the City Attorney’s office received constructive legal notice of the scheme before any vendor was contacted. The City cannot now credibly claim institutional ignorance of the arrangement.
B. Questions Arising from Ortiz’s Inclusion
Ortiz’s presence on the May 2 email raises questions that investigators must resolve.
Three scenarios are possible, each with distinct implications:
XIII. Conclusion and Requested Actions
The documented conduct constitutes multiple, independent violations of City policy and OMC, each supported by documentary evidence:
• Deliberate, premeditated solicitation of City contractors using official City authority, planned at least 23 days in advance and executed using City staff to identify targets;
• Explicit targeting of vendors defined as “companies which help OPW/DOT with maintenance and repair” — i.e., active City contractors — confirmed by Duffey’s own May 2 draft;
• Direction to route all donations to a private nonprofit in violation of OMC
2.04.160, planned from the outset per the May 2 draft;
• Absence of any written agreement — confirmed by CPRA 25-9052 nonproduction; • Concealment of CWS’s participation from all public-facing materials, with a $3,000 discrepancy in Duffey’s own accounting;
• Personal acceptance of 50 event tickets from USSL, a contracted vendor, with full personal discretionary authority;
• Involvement of City staff from two offices in executing the scheme: Aracely Garza (City Administrator’s office) serving as Duffey’s chosen intermediary for all vendor donation acknowledgments and logistics; Shamie Sahandy, Tanisha Thomas, and Jasmine Zamora (OPW) drafting event announcements; Josh Rowan (OakDOT) CC’d on solicitation emails; and Celso Ortiz (City Attorney’s office) receiving the May 2 planning email;
• Solicitation of the Beautification Council — a nonprofit holding active OPW contracts — whose founder and Executive Director Ken Houston subsequently won election to the Oakland City Council in November 2024, six months after the solicitation; whether a donation was made and whether Duffey’s contracting decisions favored the Beautification Council are unresolved; • Targeting of EBMUD and PG&E — regulated utilities that do not fit Duffey’s own stated “Community Partners” definition — exposing that definition as pretextual and the actual target criterion as any entity with City financial relationships Duffey could leverage;
• Receipt by the City Attorney’s office of the draft solicitation 23 days before execution, with no documented intervention to prevent the resulting violations; • Non-production of the sponsorship solicitation document in any version, despite confirmation it exists and targeted CPRA requests; and
• Solicitation of CWS — a vendor under active FBI and DA investigation — while overseeing City contracts with that company.
We respectfully request that the appropriate oversight authority:
• Conduct a full investigation into the solicitation, receipt, routing, and concealment of all donations associated with the May 25, 2024 Fairyland Family Day; • Interview the eight City staff members named in Duffey’s May 2 email, including Celso Ortiz; and additionally Aracely Garza (Duffey’s chosen intermediary who managed all vendor donation acknowledgments and logistics from the City Administrator’s office), Shamie Sahandy, Tanisha Thomas, and Jasmine Zamora (who co-drafted event announcements), and Josh Rowan (CC’d on solicitation emails); determine what each knew, what direction they received, and whether any concerns were raised; specifically determine what City Administrator Jestin D. Johnson knew of his executive assistant’s role in managing contractor donations on Duffey’s behalf;
• Determine whether attorney-client privilege is properly asserted over any Ortiz communications on this matter, and evaluate application of the crime-fraud exception;
• Determine whether the Beautification Council was solicited, whether any donation was made and how it was routed, and whether Duffey played any role in initiating or expanding the Beautification Council’s OPW contracts; review all communications between Duffey and Ken Houston in the relevant period; • Issue targeted CPRA requests or subpoenas for all communications between City employees and EBMUD and PG&E in April–June 2024, to determine whether those entities were solicited;
• Compel production of all versions of the sponsorship solicitation document from both the City and Fairyland, or require a legally compliant CPRA exemption log; • Compel full compliance with CPRA 25-8086 and 25-9052, including an exemption log for any withheld records;
• Determine whether Duffey personally used the 50 USSL event tickets and whether that constitutes a gift ethics violation;
• Examine Duffey’s contracting decisions involving WMAC, USSL, Marinship, CWS, Cooper Construction, and ABC Security for procurement compliance; and • Take appropriate disciplinary and remedial action consistent with the findings of that investigation.
Exhibits: Internal planning email (May 2, 2024); CPRA-produced donor email records (6 documents); CPRA request status records (3 documents). All are attached and incorporated by reference herein.