The Lynchburg City Council will hold a special meeting Tuesday where it will take up a resolution to censure two of its members — Marty Misjuns and Jeff Hegelson.
The resolution posted online as part of the council’s agenda would go beyond a standard censure resolution, though. It would strip both members of their seniority, reassign seating on the council dais, and bar the two council members from participating in the annual review of the city attorney.
The dispute stems from some of the long-running infighting between two Republican factions on the city council. Misjuns and Hegelson both backed a primary challenger to fellow Republican council member Chris Faraldi earlier this year. Challenger Peter Alexander lost that election and finished just outside the margin that allows for a recount. Instead, Alexander filed suit to have the election declared void, saying it was unclear whether all the votes were counted. (He recently withdrew the suit after his attorney said an investigation allayed any concerns.)
On June 29, the day after the lawsuit was filed, city attorney Matthew Freedman called multiple council members and, according to Helgeson, asked whether the city should get involved; Helgeson said he advised against it. Helgeson said Freedman later sent the city council an email “marked attorney-client privilege with action items.”
Freedman said the city had an interest in the outcome of Alexander’s suit because the result “could potentially affect thousands of city voters, the city paid for the election and the lawsuit makes very serious allegations against the city’s registrar and electoral board, who are deemed employees of the city under Virginia law” — but, he said, the city did not represent any of the parties in the suit.
Helgeson and Misjuns called for a special meeting of the council, but only one other council member showed up: Mayor Stephanie Reed, who then ruled there was no quorum.
Misjuns and Helgeson have said that they would like to release the full contents of Freedman’s email to council but couldn’t because Freedman marked it as confidential due to attorney-client privilege, which only a majority of council can waive.
Nonetheless, before a July 9 meeting of council, the two council members provided reporters with a printed copy of the email in which the body text was redacted except for a portion of a sentence that reads “and, where necessary, defend Vice Mayor Faraldi.” With the rest of the email’s body text blacked out, the context of that phrase was unclear, and council members did not discuss it during the meeting, but the city attorney called the actions of Misjuns and Helgeson “shameful.”
The resolution before the council would censure both Helgeson and Misjuns for violating attorney-client privilege by releasing the email. A censure is a form of reprimand that, in Lynchburg, carries with it a fine: one month’s pay for Helgeson and two months’ pay for Misjuns, whose fine would be higher because he had previously been censured by the city council. The resolution stipulates that the fines would be waived if the two agree to participate in special training through either the Virginia Municipal League or similar organization.
The resolution singles out Helgeson, saying that as the most senior member of the council, he “should know to govern with a certain level of decorum representative of said tenure.”
If passed, the resolution would demote Helgeson, a 20-year veteran of the Lynchburg City Council, to last place on the council’s list of seniority, and would reassign him to a seat on the far end of the dais. Both Helgeson and Misjuns would be barred from taking part in the city attorney’s annual performance review. The resolution also says that the city attorney is not obligated to respond to inquiries from either council member and that both men are barred from requesting legal counsel from the city attorney, unless approved by the mayor.