Seaside city manager’s lawsuit is an unusual twist on free speech.

Seaside City Manager Craig Malin isn’t a normal city manager. He cruises around Seaside on a bike that he doesn’t seem to bother locking up. His office, spiffed up with mid-century modern furniture, features a collection of baseballs on his desk and bats in a corner (this is his year, as his beloved Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series).

Maybe the weirdest thing about him, though, is that he communicates. Not begrudgingly – he actually seems to love it. He has an open-door office policy, an amusing Twitter feed, an evolved personal website he updates regularly and a city-business newsletter called The Manifest posted to the city’s website every week. He even says he likes journalists, to which I think, “C’mon – hating us is a national pastime bigger than baseball.”

He also likes accountability. And he says that’s at the heart of a lawsuit he filed June 15 against The Quad-City Times; its owner, Lee Enterprises; and journalists Barb Ickes and Brian Wellner, alleging the newspaper and those staffers libeled him as city administrator of Davenport, Iowa.

“I asked them four times to correct the record. I got a response the first time I asked them, from their attorney, and it was not supportive,” Malin says.

It took Malin over an hour to explain to me, in painstaking detail, what led him to file the suit, a copy of which can be found on mcweekly.com. In essence, things began to go south with the paper starting in about 2014 over a few big initiatives Malin championed. One included redirecting a fraction of a sales tax toward funding college scholarships for Davenport high school graduates in exchange for those grads staying in the city for a set amount of time – a way, Malin says, to stop the brain drain. At first, the paper backed it, he says, but then changed heart. The initiative died.

Another included the city launching an open government initiative called Davenport Today, a website that featured a searchable database of city expenditures, every Iowa Open Records Law request sent to the city (and the city’s corresponding responses) and every email received or sent by Malin. That a newspaper wouldn’t champion an open government endeavor seems ludicrous, but Malin says the paper viewed it as competition to its own work, even though the site never sold advertising. The award-winning website died after Malin left.

Things got uglier when Davenport undertook an initiative to buy out and move a privately owned casino. Other Iowa cities had succeeded in such conversions, resulting in millions of dollars in tax revenue. The city started the process of buying it, the paper decried it and the deal never happened. Then a private developer bought it for the same price being offered by the city. The city then planned to develop a sports complex, aided by a state grant, on land near the new casino development.

In June 2015, the paper wrote Malin kept details of costs of grading the land for the development secret, even from the City Council. Malin maintains the city was doing no such grading work. Still, the mayor asked for the resignations of both Malin and the city attorney (and later called for a special council meeting to discuss firing them both). A majority of the council boycotted and the meeting didn’t take place. Still, Malin left his job a week later.

In his lawsuit, Malin lays out a litany of instances of alleged libel surrounding the grading. One of the most glaring had the writer putting words into quotes and reporting them as something Malin said.

“[The paper] falsified the written record, they manufactured quotes and they published the exact opposite of the plainly visible truth,” Malin says. “I support newspapers holding people to account but to do it to attack someone who is advancing the public interest of government transparency strikes me as not appropriate.”

Dan Bowerman, city editor of Quad-City Times, says the paper has no comment. Lee Enterprises’ director of communications says it has no statement.

Suing is an extreme move and Malin faces a long slog to prove what he alleges. But just as I can’t imagine a paper not championing an open government website, I can’t imagine them not correcting their errors either.

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MARY DUAN writes The Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com.