Craig A. Steele
T 213.626.8484
F 213.626.0078
E [email protected]
350 South Grand Avenue
37th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90071
rwglaw.com
August 1, 2023
VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL
Honorable Mayor and Members of the City Council
c/o Al Zelinka, City Manager
City of Huntington Beach
2000 Main Street
Huntington Beach, California 92648
Re: Agenda Item 23-612: Richards, Watson & Gershon
Honorable Mayor and Members of the City Council:
I was informed this afternoon that your City Council agenda tonight includes an item in which the City Attorney intends to “report” on the history of the City’s engagement of Richards, Watson & Gershon to review the handling of the Moore/Field litigation. This is a matter in which the City Attorney purported to have recused himself after acknowledging to a previous City Council that he had a conflict of interest under California’s Rules of Professional Conduct for attorneys.
I was lawfully engaged by the City Council to review the matter, and I provided an extensively sourced 29-page written report, with accompanying exhibits, that was made public by the City Council. I submitted that report to the City Council on July 5, 2022. In over a year since, the City Attorney and others have gone to great lengths to impugn my integrity and question my motives, but never to refute the accuracy of the report. I have this afternoon been provided with a 46- slide powerpoint presentation in which the City Attorney raises a number of spurious reasons why my report should not be trusted; he does not show where any portion of the report was inaccurate or false.
I previously refuted these allegations in a declaration under penalty of perjury, filed with the Orange County Superior Court. That declaration, my report, and the evidence upon which it was based, are available in the public record for anyone who is interested in looking at the substance of the issue. I also have thoroughly refuted the allegations regarding the propriety of the City’s hiring of this law firm in publicly available letters to Mr. Gates’ attorney.
Honorable Mayor and Members of the City Council
August 1, 2023 Page | 2
There is one claim in the presentation that I feel I must specifically refute, because the City Attorney has made it - falsely - over and over again. The City Attorney has claimed that I never “interviewed” him as a part of the review. This is incorrect. As noted on page 13 of my report, I met with Mr. Gates on three separate occasions, two prior to the time I drafted my report and all prior to the time I submitted it. The first two meetings took place in the presence of Mr. Gates’ attorney, Derek Cole, and Interim City Manager Sean Joyce. The third meeting included those individuals as well as the members of the subcommittee the City Council appointed for this matter. In every meeting, the City Attorney stated the fundamental premise of his position on the issue, which is that he “abstained” from acting as City Attorney on the Moore/Field case, and therefore had nothing to do with the City’s handling of the matter. That claim appears again in the powerpoint presentation. In my report, I documented at least seven closed sessions in which he participated as City Attorney in the City Council’s closed session discussions. Documents established that he was not participating only as an individual defendant, which would have been irregular enough, but as City Attorney. Again, those documents and my report were made available publicly and the City Council waived the attorney-client privilege over those documents.
There is an old lawyers’ adage that says: “When the law is in your favor, argue the law. When the facts are in your favor, argue the facts. When you have neither, pound the table and yell like hell.” It is indeed unfortunate that the table pounding and yelling continues over a year later.
Very truly yours,
Craig A. Steele
cc: Al Zelinka, City Manager
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