Richmond drops suit it filed against mayor

The city of Richmond has dropped a lawsuit it filed against its own mayor — after spending nearly six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars in court trying to muzzle him from blasting out confidential city emails and related secrets on his personal blog.

Mayor Tom Butt's eForum blog, in which he shares all city doings that he thinks the public deserves to know, has rankled city officials and a majority of City Council members who have felt the sting of his acerbic barbs and believe he blabs too much about what goes on behind closed doors.

On Tuesday, Butt voted against paying the law firm that sued him and ridiculed fellow council members for authorizing the suit in the first place.

“That's $400,000 of taxpayer money that the City Council has spent trying to find some way to get to me, and they've come up with nothing,” Butt said about the lawsuit and an investigation of an employee's complaints against him. “I don't really care what you guys do — if you want to litigate this thing for the next 10 years, go for it. Come on. If you want to cut your losses and put your tail between your legs and walk off, then that's fine, too.”

Butt revealed on his Nov. 5 blog that four council members known as the Richmond Progressive Alliance unsuccessfully tried to sway the city attorney to support a lawsuit that claimed the city never should have approved a controversial mixed-use development at Point Molate.

The plaintiffs — a coalition of community and environmental groups — alleged that the development was illegally negotiated behind closed doors by a previous City Council. The Richmond Progressive Alliance council members also oppose the planned Point Molate project.

Butt, who has served more than two decades on the council, claimed the council members' efforts to block the project risked “bankrupting the city” by breaching contracts already approved with the developers.

And on Nov. 16, the mayor published previously classified findings of a nearly two-year investigation that exonerated him after a city employee accused him of discrimination, retaliation, corrupt conduct and abuse of power related to the development of a visitor center in Richmond.

For ignoring the former city attorney's letters ordering him to cease and desist from publishing confidential information on his blog, Butt was censured by the council Nov. 23 on grounds that he was “breaching his duty as mayor.”

But Butt's unwavering refusal to delete his old blog posts or refrain from divulging more information led the city's new attorney to recommend that the council just drop the case.