Another Leon Valley council member on hot seat
A Leon Valley city councilman who routinely has been a dissenter on council votes and a critic of the suburb’s police and staff leadership now is the focus of an attempt to strip him of his seat — the second such proceeding the city has held in just over a year.
City Council member Will Bradshaw will be judged by his council colleagues, even as at least one of them, and possibly all four, stand to lose their own council seats after the Nov. 3 election. He is accused of violating the city charter and an anti-harassment ordinance in his criticisms of the suburb’s police force.
Also, the council is asking the city ethics review board to investigate Bradshaw’s recent “political apparel” — he wore a red, white and blue face mask that said, “Josh Stevens for Leon Valley” at a Sept. 1 council meeting — as another possible grievance in the hearing. Stevens, a local businessman and leader of a reform group called the Change Leon Valley Project, is challenging first-term council member Catherine Rodriguez in the election.
The action against Bradshaw comes despite the fractious council’s recent unanimous support of a plan to hold mediation talks to help city leaders iron out their differences.
Bradshaw objected when the council went into an executive session last week to discuss the charges against him, saying he wanted them aired completely in public. But Keith Sieczkowski, the lawyer hired as special counsel for the forfeiture hearing, said the information was protected under attorney-client privilege.
“The citizens will not stand for this,” said Bradshaw, a supply chain manager elected to the council in May 2019.
During the meeting, Bradshaw said he’s received “an overwhelming amount of support of emails and messages of people who are seeing what’s going on in our little town, and are sick and tired of the unconstitutionality of this council body and what they’re doing to get rid of the minority voices that are elected by the citizens.”
Last year, the council voted 2-1, with Bradshaw opposed, to declare council member Benny Martinez’s seat vacant and forfeited. Martinez was the subject of numerous complaints that he repeatedly gave staff orders or direction, undermining the city manager. Like Martinez, Bradshaw has been a vocal critic of the city’s administra
like he was holding it upside down and backwards. But there are several AP images that clearly show the spine right-side up.
In the most iconic photos taken of the event, it is a little harder to read the spine, but the free end of the ribbon bookmark clearly dangles below the
Bible, which is how it was when the Bible was oriented correctly in the other images.
Video of the event confirmed that Trump consistently held the Bible rightside up. In fact, at several points he appears to look down on it to make sure that he’s holding it correctly.
The Biden campaign did not respond to an inquiry for this article.