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Infighting derails Westminster City Council; new rules didn’t initially help

September 6, 2024

The Westminster City Council again is in turmoil with infighting. City business again is suffering.

Last week’s Westminster City Council meeting started at 4 p.m. on Wednesday. It ended after 5 a.m. on Thursday. It was the council’s second 10-plus hour meeting this summer. A lot of what the council managed to accomplish dealt with motions it was supposed to hear two weeks prior, such as approving contracts for street improvements around town and a playground renovation at Tony Lam Park.

“With the infighting, we can’t concentrate on the business at hand to take care of what the city needs,” said Mayor Chi Charlie Nguyen. “We’ve been pushing back items, and this affects residents in the city of Westminster.”

As an institution, the Westminster City Council is no stranger to drama and dysfunction. A previous iteration of the council censured then-mayor Tri Ta and also Nguyen when he was then vice-mayor. A censure is a formal and public condemnation of a councilmember’s behavior.

This summer, another round of volleys to censure councilmembers has bogged down city business and led to institutional reforms. Though they were to take effect immediately, the reforms didn’t seem to have much consequence at last week’s meeting.

The council voted 3-2 to amend the way members can bring agenda items to discussion and to limit how long any member can speak on an item without receiving majority approval to continue.

Before, any two councilmembers could ask the city manager to schedule the discussion of an item. Moving forward, a majority of the council will have to agree to add any agenda item requested by a councilmember other than the mayor. In Westminster, councilmembers are elected by voters in one of four districts, while the mayor is elected citywide.

Councilmember Amy Phan West called the change a convenient way for the majority, who she calls a “gang of three communist dictators,” to silence ideas they disagree with.

“For the mayor to exempt himself, that’s unacceptable,” she said in an interview. In a statement she made on her social media accounts, Phan West said the rule “mirrors the tactics of authoritarian regimes that stifle dissent and disregard the will of the people.”

Nguyen pointed out that the new rule returns Westminster to the way previous councils conducted business, and he defended the mayoral exemption.

“The mayor is responsible for the whole city, not only for one district,” he said. “And the main thing is if we have an emergency item that comes up, the mayor needs to be able to put that up for discussion if the urgency demands it cannot wait until a vote at the next meeting.”

“I’m not abusing the system,” he said. “I’m doing what needs to be done in order to get the city moving forward.”

A second rule intended to limit the length of discussions on existing agenda items to two rounds of five-minute comments unless additional time is approved by a majority vote purportedly took effect immediately.

But after that vote, Phan West and Councilmember NamQuan Nguyen steamrolled the limits, despite repeated warnings from the mayor, proceeding to talk for the vast majority of more than four hours of discussion about agenda items for which other councilmembers did not support extended dialogue.

In an interview, Phan West refused to commit to abiding to the new city rule. “We have freedom of speech,” she said. “I will continue to defend freedom of speech.”

The rule states that if a councilmember does not adhere to the policy or willfully disrupts a meeting, they will be warned to stop three times and if they continue they may be removed from the meeting.

“When a councilmember continues speaking over another member, I have to give a warning,” Charlie Nguyen said. “I don’t want to silence anyone. I don’t want to mute anyone. But I need to get the meeting in order. It is my responsibility to do that. At the same time, I don’t want to remove anyone from the meeting. The goal is to get everyone together and talk about trying to resolve the problem together for the benefit of the community.”

When it comes to discussions about conduct and protocols, the council is divided three against two, with newcomers Phan West and NamQuan Nguyen typically pitted against council veterans Charlie Nguyen, Carlos Manzo and Kimberly Ho, who terms out this fall.

Phan West, elected in 2022 fresh off a primary loss to represent U.S. House District 47, was censured in August by her colleagues for allegations she violated the city’s ethics policy in several ways, including using brash language on the dais, filing a false police report against Manzo and trespassing across a construction site on her dirt bike — among a potpourri of other claims.

West says the allegations are politically motivated. “Maybe they don’t like how I speak so bluntly,” she said.

“I’m not a career politician,” she added, although she has twice run for Congress and said she might run again for public office when her council term ends in 2026. “I will speak from my heart, and I will never be polished or politically correct, you could say.”

Last week, she and NamQuan Nguyen motioned and seconded censure of Charlie Nguyen and Ho, spending about two hours unfurling their allegations against their colleagues. Both of those motions failed when in front of the full council. Phan and NamQuan Nguyen spent awhile arguing for the city to ask voters to appoint rather than elect its mayor — the deadline to add any such measure to the ballot this November has passed and Westminster voters denied that very measure in a 2022 election.

During the discussion, Phan West made derogatory comments about the mayor. She later acknowledged she could have handled that conversation more respectfully.

“I was frustrated because I felt silenced over and over and targeted by a new rule by a group in power that doesn’t care about each individual district’s voice,” she said.

She said the mayor has struggled to keep meetings in order, arguing his warnings to her about crosstalk at the dais are unfair while she says he’s allowing his supporters to heckle her from the audience.

Charlie Nguyen said the new resolution is fair for everyone.

“If we run meetings according to Robert’s Rules of Order and we respect each other, then we don’t need to have additional policy put in place,” he said. Robert’s Rules of Order is the foremost guide for parliamentary procedure for public governing bodies across the United States, including city councils and committees.

The last council meeting also ran long because Phan West and NamQuan Nguyen skipped a two-hour closed session during which city officials were supposed to discuss pending legal issues behind closed doors. It was at least the third time this summer that both have missed a closed session, a pattern that has at times caused public business to get pushed back until later in the evening.

Then, throughout the meeting, the two councilmembers intermittently left the dais together without announcement, interrupting their colleagues while speaking and causing the council to lack quorum on issues when another member needed a recusal or when an exasperated Charlie Nguyen sometimes joined them.

When the two councilmembers walked out of the room at one point, Manzo called their behavior childlike and said it was “the most unprofessional behavior I’ve ever seen in my life.” He later, in an interview, said he regretted his comments as he strives to improve the professionalism at the dais.

Phan West said she comes from the private sector. “I’ve never seen,” she said, “a toxic working environment like this in my whole life.”

The Westminster City Council’s first full meeting with the new rules in place is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 11.

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Infighting derails Westminster City Council; new rules didn’t initially help

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