Councilwoman no longer plans to hire her partner
City Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca, the Democratic socialist shaking up Denver politics, says she no longer intends to hire her partner as a city staff member.
Through her top aide, the former mayoral candidate Lisa Calderón, CdeBaca sought a waiver from the city ethics board earlier this month to add her partner, Kerrie Joy Landell, as her office’s third paid staff member.
CdeBaca now says she won’t try to hire Landell, but rather keep her on as an unpaid volunteer working primarily on community engagement projects.
“We just decided it’s not worth it to pursue this, because it’s an unnecessary stain on our record,” CdeBaca said by phone Tuesday.
She said that Landell has been working at least 40 hours per week for and with CdeBaca since the councilwoman was sworn in over the summer, and that Landell was logging even more hours during CdeBaca’s campaign.
“When people want to protect against nepotism, it’s because the perception is that if you hire someone you’re related to, they’ll be treated differently from other people. And that isn’t necessarily what we were setting up in our office. We were being very clear about the layers of reporting, about who would decide things,” CdeBaca said.
She added: “We’ve been accountable and transparent every step of the way, but if it’s too difficult for people to understand, we won’t pursue it.”
Landell, an educator who calls herself an “artivist,” is, like her partner, a prolific organizer around progressive issues in Denver.
She also served in the U.S. Marines and, CdeBaca said, offers some protection for the councilwoman, who said she has received “hundreds of death and rape threats,” particularly after the viral circulation of a clip in which she espoused beliefs many read as communist.
CdeBaca said she originally sought to hire Landell because she’s as qualified as anyone to work in the council office and because it didn’t seem fair to her that Landell was putting in so much free labor.
“I don’t think it was a mistake,” CdeBaca said of her previous intention to hire Landell. “But I don’t think that it’s fair for the public to expect two public servants for the price of one. I didn’t fully recognize how that would become the norm in our relationship.”
Denver’s ethics code doesn’t prohibit the hiring of family members by city officials, although it does caution against it, and anyone seeking such an arrangement must seek a waiver, as CdeBaca did.
The ethics code does prohibit officials directly supervising their family members, which CdeBaca said she would not have done. She said Landell would have reported to Calderón.
“This was all Lisa’s call,” the councilwoman said. “She had been working directly with Kerrie and really relying on Kerrie to fill in a lot of the gaps that we had.”