Vice mayor will retain title; mayor calls claims of bullying ‘baseless’

Milpitas Vice Mayor Karina Dominguez will retain her title at least through the end of the year, despite the mayor’s efforts to switch someone else into the role.

Mayor Rich Tran, who raised the idea of making a switch last month, was met at Tuesday night’s Milpitas council meeting with accusations of sexism, bullying and Trump-like behavior by Dominguez’s supporters during a tense, two-hour discussion.

In the end, the council decided to take up the matter again in January because the city has no official guidelines on how to approach switching a vice mayor title.

“We really see this as an act of you seeking revenge on her; it’s really getting strange,” the Rev. Jethroe Moore, president of the San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP, said to Tran at the meeting, accusing him of trying to oust Dominguez because they have different positions on some issues, including whether to rename a city street after President Barack Obama.

Referring to President Donald Trump, Moore said, “45 tweets; you use Facebook. There seems to be more similarities in you disrespecting women and their right to have an opinion than actually leading this city in any direction.”

The at-times contentious meeting was the culmination of two weeks of online arguments and criticisms of Tran, sparked at the Nov. 19 meeting, when he sprang a proposal on the council to discuss switching someone else into the vice mayor role Tuesday, and the council, including Dominguez, went along with it.

But during that meeting, Dominguez also posted on her vice mayor Facebook page that she felt the move was intended to silence and bully her because she’s a woman with strong opinions, and she received support in her stance.

Tran has pushed back, saying his intention from the beginning was to allow for more “shared leadership” and give other council members like Bob Nuñez and Anthony Phan a chance at the title.

He bristled at the accusations of sexism or bullying Wednesday in an interview, calling them “disappointing” and “baseless,” noting that he has supported other women in politics regularly.

Milpitas city codes make no reference to the vice mayor role, how a person should be appointed and how long the term should be. Traditionally, however, the mayor has nominated a council member at the start of a new two-year term who is generally confirmed by the council, and the vice mayor typically also serves out that term.

Some claimed Tran is trying to cut Dominguez’s term in half after their public spats on Facebook and on the dais over issues in the city including affordable housing.

“She’s one of the few women of color in leadership. Two years last time, now you want to cut it short. That’s vengeful, man,” Moore said.

Tran said he was taken aback by the comparisons to Trump. “I’m a Democrat, but thank you very much.”

He insisted the vice mayorship is “just a title” and that the council “all have the same lane on the track.”

Dominguez, in an interview after the meeting Tuesday, said she agrees the vice mayorship is only a title but said because Tran didn’t communicate with her about his idea in advance of the Nov. 19 meeting, she felt it was an assault on her as a woman and an independent political voice in Milpitas.

“This isn’t just about me and Rich; this is about overall what message are we sending,” she said.

“And the message that was clear and was felt by many people in this region, was you’re stripping one of the few women of color to have the vice mayor role, and you’re stripping it away from her without talking to her.”

Dominguez said because she’s not always voting in lockstep with Tran, he was using the move “as a way of showing that I am the mayor and ultimately what I say is what goes around here.”

Tran on Wednesday said Dominguez is spinning a “false narrative” that he expects others to fall in line with him.

“I don’t care which way she votes,” he said.

“What I’m most disappointed about in Karina is some of the kind of emotions and feelings (she shows) in the City Council chambers when there’s votes,” he said, claiming she voted against a housing subcommittee and rental assistance program “out of spite” because it wasn’t as strong a package as she wanted.

He also claims she contradicted her public statements about wanting public input when she voted to support changing the name of Dixon Landing Road to Barack Obama Boulevard, when there hadn’t been community outreach meetings about the topic.

“It’s that underlying leadership that I’ve been very disappointed with. The hardest part about my job is to do the most difficult things in the city,” Tran said Wednesday, adding that the discussion the council had Tuesday about the vice mayor role was necessary and healthy.

The council ultimately told city staffers to bring back a host of information at the second meeting in January on how other cities handle the role of vice mayor, including term limits and duties, as well as information on if and how Milpitas could transition to a rotational model, where the vice mayor and mayor slots are annually switched among council members.