The ouster of Pacific Grove’s city manager empowers the bullies.

There are a lot of people in Pacific Grove who love their hometown and yet are dismayed by the City Council’s agreement on July 26 to pay $438,000 plus six months of insurance premiums to separate from the former city manager, Ben Harvey. I know this because I’m one of them, and I’ve been talking to my neighbors. It seems worth reminding the City Council: That is our money.

Members of this council fancy themselves as fiscal conservatives and dedicated conservators of the public trust, but to be so cavalier with taxpayer funds is both dumbfounding and hypocritical.

At a council meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 2, Councilmember Luke Coletti – the leader of the anti-Harvey faction that just spent $438,000 of the city’s dollars to make Harvey disappear – seemed determined to prove that point. As the council deliberated about a three-year, $2.6 million general plan update, he looked to whittle away the $110,000 earmarked for a climate action plan and $80,000 for an economic development component. He did not mention the two years’ worth of city manager salary that the council had just signed away.

I get it; some members of the City Council don’t like Ben Harvey. That’s life, but paying nearly half-a-million dollars to have someone go away is not just bad policy, it’s foolhardy.

Many people in town like the initiatives of the former city manager. They like the idea of economic development – a lively downtown and two hotels to generate revenue to fund parks, coastal protections, cops, firefighters, youth center staff. They like the idea of diversity, equity and inclusion being elevated in city policy. They think cannabis sales in town and a skate park would each enhance quality of life for residents. Far from seeing those as fireable offenses, they see those policies as progress.

That is what makes this separation so mind-boggling. The current council majority has repeatedly stymied and stonewalled many of those initiatives: reversing a previous council’s vote to permit a cannabis dispensary, derailing a proposed skatepark and slow-walking the hotels through public hearings.

Harvey’s contract was renewed in July of 2021 by a 6-1 vote. (He was originally hired in 2016 from a field of 60 candidates.) While he is not loved by all, he was a competent administrator. The trains ran on time, as they say. Contracts with five bargaining units were approved, the coastal Recreation Trail got redeveloped, the library got renovated, streets got resurfaced. At the same time, the city’s coffers got filled up, to the tune of $11 million now in reserves. All that while Harvey steered the community through the public health emergency of the Covid pandemic.

Not everything he did was successful – plans for one hotel concept fell apart, and missteps potentially cost the city $100,000, according to an investigation by the grand jury. His initial proposal for a pedestrian-only restaurant zone downtown got replaced with a better, city-wide parklet program. But if the City Council had cause to fire Harvey – or if they had enough votes – they could have simply terminated him.

The $438,000-plus they just squandered could have funded a lot of good work in Pacific Grove. It’s an outrageous waste of public funds.

I’m skeptical that the council has fully considered the consequences of their actions, both within the city and in the broader city manager candidate pool.

This council will now be correctly identified to prospective applicants as a meddling, bullying and micromanaging body. There are three sustained claims of workplace harassment by Coletti toward Ben Harvey that have never been publicly remedied. (Coletti told me he didn’t want to discuss any of this.)

The City Council appointed Coletti to serve on a three-person subcommittee responsible for hiring a new city manager. That will impact the candidates interested in the job. Who would want to work for bosses like these?

Good city managers have choices. So I suspect they’ll get applicants who have few other options, or those who recognize the perils of the job and will demand to be overpaid.

Within Pacific Grove, the consequences of this decision are even more perilous. This City Council just demonstrated that bad behavior by councilmembers will not only be tolerated, but rewarded.

ERIK CUSHMAN is the Weekly’s publisher. Reach him at erik@mcweekly.com