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HomeMy WebLinkAbout7/7/2020 Item 08, Papp Clerk, Intern From:James Papp < To:E-mail Council Website Subject:Item 8 Dear Heidi, Carlyn, Andy, Aaron, and Erica, It is difficult to know where to begin, as CHC liaisons’ charges have changed thrice in a week, and they seem to be related to earlier complaints that were dismissed by the city attorney’s office. I’ll go through this briefly, as I don’t expect the minds of council to be changed. (The signal contribution to harmony of Andy and Carlyn’s action is getting John Ashbaugh and Dan Carpenter on the same side for once. And if you’d told me two weeks ago Richard Schmidt would be defending me, you could have knocked me over with a feather.) I also doubt you’ll read this, but if you want to read only part, skip to then end, which I have something useful to say about chairing advisory bodies, for which for years I have been recommending training, which has so far fallen on deaf ears. Immediately after CHC’s April 27 hearing, Andy wrote to me: “I tuned in for a little bit – seemed to be going well. But good point about lack of public participation. I’ll check in with staff to see if we can increase our messaging on that.” Sounds good. Shortly after that, I heard that Scott Martin had complained that his team hadn’t been given enough time. Staff pushed back on that: I had gone out of my way to communicate my research to Bob Pavlik before the meeting; asked him to get in touch, which he hadn’t; given his team extra time to present; and reopened public comment to allow him to respond to my findings. All very unorthodox but a courtesy to a colleague I like and admire who turned in a deeply flawed historic resource evaluation, based on the absence of relevant and easily available information. I never heard more of Scott’s complaint, so I assumed city attorney concluded that it was, based on staff response, invalid. Andy and Carlyn only tried to schedule a meeting to talk about the April 27 meeting after CHC’s May 18 meeting, that is after—on continuation—CHC had recommended against RRM’s delisting application. That doesn’t smell like a coincidence. (I have put in a PRA request for further clarification but have received, as yet, no response.) The meeting finally happened with Andy, Christine, and me on Thursday, June 25, when I was criticized by Andy for 4 words out of 4 hours of adjudication of this item. I stand by those words as “communicating honestly” (“Tips” 2) my professional assessment as an architectural historian, I proposed it to the group as a whole (“Tips 4), and since I spoke first, nobody should have expressed disagreement with me (“Tips” 5). By Tuesday, June 30, in the public staff report, that accusation had been disconnected from RRM’s Johnson Block hearing with: “At various times over the past 18 months, especially over the past several months, the Council Subcommittee Liaisons have met with Mr. Papp regarding concerns 1 about adversarial interactions during Cultural Heritage Committee meetings. There has been insufficient or little noticeable change in subsequent interactions, so council liaisons requested his resignation.” I immediately emailed to Christine and Derek that this was not only an elaborate fabrication but it was not even a plausible lie: no one was having meetings “over the past several months.” Nobody read the email at first, but within a couple of hours of my drawing Christine’s attention to it on Thursday, this charge was withdrawn. The problem with lying as opposed to, say rudeness is that, if someone is capable of being rude, you always know when they’re being rude, but if someone is capable of lying, you never know when they’re lying, so there’s no point dealing with them at all. The irksome thing about this lie was that of the six meetings I actually did have with one or the other of staff liaisons over the past eighteen months, the first was about Carlyn’s adversarial interaction at CHC, when I, the committee, and staff liaison had reached out to assist a member of the public regarding the Rodriguez Adobe. The latest version of the charge (as far as I know; I haven’t checked since Thursday) is: “At various times over his tenure, the Council Subcommittee Liaisons and staff have met or informally discussed with Mr. Papp concerns about interactions during Cultural Heritage Committee meetings. As provided by Council Liaisons Christianson and Pease: ‘Although some individuals may be comfortable with Mr. Papp’s style of communication, we feel that Mr. Papp’s questioning and deliberations during meetings do not consistently promote positive relationships for the general public, staff, applicants, and other committee members and may be limiting full public participation and discourse.’” This not only contains no evidence, it is so vague as to be impervious to evidence. But let me provide a little evidence to concentrate the mind. I have had two formal conversations with council members about “interactions during Cultural Heritage Committee meetings.” In July 2016, Jan Marx bought me a scone at Bello Mundo and said Richard Schmidt had accused me of bullying committee members over 71 Palomar. I pointed out that he had already made the same accusation in the Tribune but about staff; also that our meeting was three hours, and if I had not crafted a motion that could attract a majority, we would be there still. In 2017, Carlyn and Andy met with me about having been rude to Sandy Baer. I explained I had been rude to her because she had been rude to a presenter, but I acknowledged my fault, apologized to her, and took her to lunch at the Vegetable Butcher. As far as I know, at that time we considered each other friends and still consider each other so; she was a fantastic committee member, and I recommended her for the History Center board. When Carlyn and Andy interviewed me for Planning Commission in 2019, they brought up my interactions—or something like the word—and I said that they had complained about the incident with Sandy, I had apologized, and did they have anything else? They didn’t have anything else. The insinuation in “concerns about interactions” is that they were all to do with me. In 2016 John Belsher threatened to sue me for defamation, and Christine said the city would back me. (He 2 didn’t. And when he called me a liar in a CHC hearing, I pointed out merely that public comment was over and he was out of order.) A couple of years ago Scott Martin registered a complaint against me, and my recollection of Assistant City Attorney Jon Ansalobehere’s summary of it was: “He accused you of behaving like an asshole, and we listened to the tape and told him he had behaved like an asshole.” I’m definitely a hard-ass—about “facts, reasonable assumptions predicated upon facts, and expert opinion supported by facts.” There are applicants who (especially when they don’t get their exact way) mistake that for being an asshole. As Glen Matteson kindly put it in an email to me, “You can be a bit intense when pursuing a line of questioning.” Some people might say too intense. Some (if few) have suggested not intense enough. One tries to be Goldilocks. Over five years, one may not always succeed. But in credit to my fellow committee members, professional and amateur members alike, they are thoughtful and informed and impossible to bully, and I have never tried. As for some letters of personal vituperation of me by developers and architects, which Andy puts great stock in, they are just irrelevant, in an HR process, as encomiums of me by members of the public—as long as they lack specific and substantial evidence. But this is not an HR process, and the charade of its being so has become a farce. Advisory body members serve at the whim of the council, and if you are going to remove me, at least have the honesty to do it whimsically. Now, this is the part that interests me: the letter from Levi Seligman. I think it’s interesting for its revelation of the dynamics of meetings, chairing, and perceptions of chairing. This was apropos of TenOver’s 10 Peach Street project, presented by Joel Snyder at our June 22 hearing: 4 2-story houses behind 1-story historic houses, plus a 1½-story house at the corner, in the Mill Street Historic District. In committee discussion, all of my colleagues were against the project for incompatibility, though their objections were somewhat amorphous and unspecific. As chair I try to speak last, draw people together, and move things forward (though at other times the job of chair is to slow things down). I concentrated on facts: that there was historic precedent for a back alley in the Mill Street district (Peachphillips) and plenty of precedent (if not historic) for taller infill behind lower historic buildings in the district. I then pointed out that one of our public speakers from the district, Laura, had criticized the sameiness of the four new back alley structures. If they were redesigned to be more varied, would that solve committee members’ objections over compatibility? Everyone agreed it would. Would Joel be willing to redesign? He said he would be excited to, and TenOver had only given us something a bit banal (my word) so as not to offend our sensibilities. Staff discouraged a continuation, but we wanted to see it again, so I used my chair’s prerogative under the bylaws to set up a subcommittee that could see the new designs in the next ten days and recommend on them before the item came up before ARC. What had been a few minutes ago a project dead in the water was now moving forward. 3 Then I was alerted that Mr. Seligman was present and wanted to speak, so I reopened public comment to allow him to do so. He expressed his unhappiness about not wrapping up that night at some length and in bitter terms—not, perhaps, as someone else expressed it, doing himself any favors. When he had said his say about that and was not adding anything new, but still continuing, I cut back to committee discussion, but there was no time obligation, as I had reopened public comment for him solely as a somewhat unorthodox courtesy; applicant had already used their full time; and technically I should have opened to everyone else. The practical reality is that there was no way we could ask Joel to present designs while we waited. On the morning of Tuesday, June 30 the subcommittee met; TenOver presented their new designs; they were much, much better; committee members and staff did some further tweaking with the architects; the result was compatible under SOI standards; and applicant, public, and committee all got most of what they wanted. This is what a preservation professional and experienced and assertive chair who has street cred with committee members, developers, and preservationists can accomplish. A few hours later I was called on to resign over four expressive but accurate words. I came into CHC with a bang, throwing myself between (if only metaphorically, but pretty close to physically) a backhoe and the tilhini Aqueduct. I will go out with a back interposing myself between a deficient HRE and the Johnson Block, which we now understand in the context of H. S. Laird, San Luis Obispo’s pioneer architect, and the history of rare castellated commercial buildings and San Luis Obispo’s rare Fire Proof Building District, of which it is the oldest survivor. A lost resource is a resource lost forever. Two intangible resources I gained from the first encounter were the friendship of members of the yak tityu tityu yak tilhinia and the friendship of Mark Rawson, with both of whom it has been a pleasure to work. I will hope they think of me as hard-ass and not an asshole. As Susan Brandt- Hawley, dean of California preservation lawyers, has said, she never knew contentious preservation litigation that did not end with the developer proud of the final result, and the ytt, the Copelands, Hotel SLO, Mark, and San Luis Obispo will have something to be intensely proud of when the tilhini Aqueduct is fully presented. I would like to thank the city for allowing me to serve on the Cultural Heritage Committee, my fellow members for allowing me to serve three times as chair, city staff for their endless and unstinting support, and whatever powers that be for allowing me to save important historic and archaeological resources and forward well-designed projects and developments. I will not be attending tonight’s hearing, as Andy has assured me of the certainty of the result, and the last time I was there with a complex, substantial, and I must say quite expensive appeal, council members had no questions but subjected me to ad hominem. I will say of CHC, I cannot recollect a single item where we did not have questions, and I cannot recollect a single occasion where a member of the committee made a ad hominem attack. 4 5