Sunnyvale seeks restraining order against former council candidate

City officials are seeking a restraining order against former Sunnyvale council candidate Maria Pan, who was arrested following an incident at the Jan. 23 council meeting.

Before that meeting started, Pan walked behind the dais and sat in the seat of Councilman Michael Goldman. When she was asked to get up from the seat by officers from the Department of Public Safety, she grabbed the desk and shouted that the seat was rightfully hers.

Two officers then forcibly removed her from the council chambers. According to Sunnyvale communications officer Jennifer Garnett, Pan was arrested for disturbing a public meeting and resisting an officer, then booked into county jail.

Garnett said it wasn’t the first time Pan disrupted a council meeting. On Jan. 19, she crossed out Goldman’s name on his name plate, replaced it with hers and attempted to take his seat.

“The truth is he is temporarily sitting there and I’m ready to be sworn in, but the city won’t swear me in,” Pan explained to the Sunnyvale Sun. She admitted to crossing out Goldman’s name on his nameplate, but said she did not try to take his seat on Jan. 19. “I went over there and said ‘You’re sitting in my seat.’ I went and sat in the rows for the audience.”

Pan was a candidate for District 7 on the Sunnyvale City Council during the 2011 election. Pan came in third place with 1,759 votes in a race won by Tara Martin-Milius, who received 7,601 votes and went on to serve as the District 7 representative until she was unseated in the 2016 election by Goldman.

For the past several years, Pan has used public comment time at the beginning of council meetings to assert that she was the winner of the 2011 election and has repeatedly asked that the council inaugurate her. She alleged in a lawsuit back then there was an error in the vote-counting programs, but the court dismissed the suit in February 2012 citing a failure to show convincing evidence.