Sullivan City Manager describes termination as politically motivated ambush

Sullivan City Council isn’t saying why it fired City Manager Lisa Rivera Monday evening, but Rivera has an opinion on the matter: she says she was blindsided by insider politics because she wouldn’t play ball.

 

 

After discussion behind closed doors in executive session, council voted 4-1 Monday to terminate Rivera after less than a year on the job and put Police Chief Reynaldo “Rey” Cortes in as interim.

 

Councilman Rene Peña, who made the motion to fire Rivera, directed requests for comment after the meeting to city attorney Jay Peña, who said council had decided to “move in a different direction.”

 

“The city commission is elected by the community, is elected by the people to do what’s in favor of the city,” he said. “There was really no negative tenor to the conversation or to the decision that was made but there’s always a presumption that when they do make a decision it’s for the betterment of the city. In this case they made a decision to move on.”

Mayor Alma Salinas, who cast the sole vote against terminating Rivera, declined to comment.

 

In contrast, Rivera had an awful lot of opinions about her ouster and her former employers.

 

“They used me as a pawn,” she said.

 

Rivera, who lacked a contract and didn’t receive any sort of severance, says she was hamstrung from the beginning in Sullivan City.

 

“I was stopping them from doing things that I did not agree with,” she said. “I found out a lot of things that had happened prior to me starting here, and so I was trying to help them.”

 

Rivera declined to say what things she’d stopped council members from doing, but alluded vaguely to financial issues and cronyism.

 

In one instance, she said, a city councilman had sexually harassed a staffer, though she declined to share details on that incident.

In another, she said the city’s fire department had cost it thousands of dollars by failing to do its paperwork right.

 

Rivera said she’d been trying to right the ship in Sullivan City, but bumped up against a municipality where accountability is figured on who you know.

 

“It’s all based on friendship,” she said. “Politics and friendship. And to the point where you don’t question, you just ‘Do as I say.’ And some of the staff went through it and they didn’t appreciate it.”

 

Rivera says that sort of politics applied to the way council fired her. She says she and Salinas, her only ally Monday, were on vacation last week when they found out council would discuss her termination.

 

“No warnings, nothing had been brought up to my attention…absolutely nothing,” she said.

 

Rivera is part of a rotating door of city managers and secretaries who’ve rapidly cycled through Sullivan City in the past few years.

 

The city’s had at least three different city secretaries over the past four years, and has changed police chiefs, city attorneys and city managers.

 

“It’s like a culture clash for me in Sullivan,” Rivera said. “It’s a lot different from what I’m used to.”