Agenda Item: Citizens Business #5
Laurie Alderman
"Good evening, Mayor and Members of the Council.
I am speaking tonight as a resident and stakeholder to address a dark, pervasive pattern of governance in the City of Cotati. This administration operates under an unwritten rule: if you dare to criticize the unanimous, lockstep decisions of this council, you will face swift and severe personal consequences outside of these chambers. You all on the council ratified this dark, pervasive pattern with renewing unanimously at the last council meeting the renewal of the city manager’s contract.
The City Manager and city staff have systematically weaponized municipal enforcement mechanisms to silence dissent. My family learned the consequences firsthand last week, and the timeline exposes the absolute bad faith of this administration. On June 8, the bidding closed on the City's new Multi-Jurisdictional Request for Proposals for Code Enforcement Services—an RFP explicitly designed to bring objective, standardized, and unbiased oversight to our city standards. The RFP is a joint initiative covering the Cities of Sonoma, Cotati, Cloverdale and Windsor.
But instead of waiting for that neutral triage system to take over, this administration rushed a punitive enforcement action against my household just days later. You deliberately exploited your outdated, insular system one last time to carry out a personal vendetta. You towed my mother’s car in front of her home while she was sleeping for expired tags—a certified medical necessity for a household with two wheelchairdependent individuals. Leaving disabled residents stranded without emergency transportation wasn't a policy oversight; it was a deliberate, weaponized strike timed perfectly to evade the incoming neutral standards of the new RFP. When we requested an accommodation at our home, you sent Police Lieutenant Paul Goodin to act as a biased, defensive judge at a bedridden woman's bedside, extracting over one thousand dollars from her under duress.
You did this because you knew an independent, outsourced contractor under the new multi-jurisdictional system would never have authorized such a heartless, legally indefensible seizure.
This is the definition of a predatory, retaliatory local government. Dissent is a constitutional right, not an invitation for municipal harassment. This toxic culture of intimidation is why the city is facing a federal civil rights lawsuit in Barich v. Cotati. It is why you are hiding 'potential litigation' in your closed session tonight. I demand that this Council investigate why staff rushed to bypass the intent of their own multijurisdictional RFP just to bully my disabled 89-year-old, visually and hearing impaired and mostly bedridden mother, and I demand a restoration of basic constitutional sanity to Cotati. Thank you