City Council tells mayor to clean up his act or step down

The Milpitas City Council has threatened to either censure first-term Mayor Rich Tran or seek his resignation if he doesn’t stop his “unacceptable behavior” and unprofessional conduct, which it says included hugging a department head and making agerelated comments.

In a letter delivered to Tran late Tuesday night following a City Council meeting, the council says Tran has tarnished the city’s reputation and undermined public trust in elected officials. It issued the letter one day after sending out a news release publicly rebuking the mayor.

But Tran is pushing back, claiming the public statements amount to nothing more than a political takedown attempt during an election year organized by council members who don’t support his re-election.

This news organization reported last week that a 2017 city-commissioned investigative report by an outside firm concluded Tran likely “engaged in conduct of a sexual nature” when he hugged a department head at a holiday dinner in 2016.

It also suggested he “more likely than not … made age-based comments” to former City Manager Tom Williams and other employees, which Williams alluded to in making legal threats against the city.

In the news release sent out Monday evening referring to that report, the council said it had an obligation to express its “deep concerns about the professional behavior of Mayor Rich Tran as an elected official and as Mayor of our city.”

The four council members who issued the news release are Vice Mayor Marsha Grilli, Garry Barbadillo, Bob Nuñez and Anthony Phan.

They wrote that elected officials serve in a position of public trust, and “when a member of our City Council, including the Mayor, demonstrates a lack of respect for our code of ethics and for the public we have been elected to serve, then it reflects poorly on the City and corrodes that trust we have worked so hard to build and maintain.”

The Tuesday letter also referenced the investigative report’s findings.

“To be clear, this behavior is not acceptable to the Council,” the letter said of Tran’s alleged comments regarding age and gender. “It is mandatory that you conduct yourself professionally and with an eye toward appropriate interpersonal boundaries and decorum in all such circumstances.”

It concluded by saying that if Tran doesn’t clean up his act, especially in public, “the City is prepared to do any of the following:

• Make use of the City’s Censure Policy. • Seek to limit your use of City Hall.

• Publicly seek your resignation.”

Tran said in an interview Wednesday the rebuke is timed to hurt his chances of being re-elected later this year.

“It’s not often that you see a City Council rebuke the mayor,” he said. “That goes to show Milpitas has the dirtiest, petty politics in all of Santa Clara County.”

Nuñez is planning a run for mayor against him. Also, Tran said, Grilli and Barbadillo both know he won’t be supporting them in their bid for re-election to their council seats this year, so the rebuke serves as political payback.

Tran said the report — conducted by Danvillebased Kramer Workplace Investigations between May and November of last year — was “thoroughly disappointing.” He said the hug he gave a female department head at the holiday party in 2016 was a very quick “side hug” and the woman was not offended by it.

He also said the report’s allegations that he asked another city employee if they had any single friends to set him up with for a date was a joke, mentioned only after that employee asked whether he had a family or kids.

He also flatly denied making age discrimination comments to Williams or others.

“The rebuke by the City Council is a deceiving document,” Tran said. “Nowhere in the statement shows factual information on actual wrongdoing.”

He said, “If it were up to me, I would challenge all those who accused me of wrongdoing to a polygraph or lie detector test,” because he thinks they were pressured into lying about him by Williams.

“We hope he now understands that words have consequences, and that as Mayor representing all our residents and all our employees, he must adhere both to a much higher standard than for a private person, and to a standard that we have not fully seen from him,” the council’s rebuke said.

“Looking forward, we trust that the Mayor has learned and grown from this painful experience over the past year,” it adds.