Port Censure Report Rips Sandy Naranjo, But Allies Label It ‘Big Fat Nothingburger'

By Ken Stone, Times of San Diego

52 mins ago

Sandy Naranjo was censured Tuesday by six fellow San Diego port commissioners on the strength of a 23-page investigative report she didn’t see until late Wednesday.

The report, by Bay Area-based lawyers Jane Kow and Ilana Parmer Mandelbaum, paints a dark picture of conflict between Naranjo, 36, and the port’s chief attorney and ethics officer, Thomas Russell, 70.

Russell’s name was redacted some 260 times in the report — showing up as Employee A — but a slew of clues point to him.

The report says Naranjo launched a “surprise attack” on Russell at a Dec. 13, 2022, closed meeting as part of his performance evaluation. She questioned his integrity on the basis of what the investigators called faulty information.

“One commissioner interjected to interrupt Naranjo’s interrogation, by exclaiming, ‘Enough! This kind of inquisition is not appropriate,’” the report said.

Commissioners were “alarmed” that the National City rep failed to provide advance notice of her allegations or give Russell an adequate chance to meaningfully respond.

Despite the drama, Naranjo ended up voting to give Russell a raise, award a merit bonus and extend his contract to 2025.

Friction between Naranjo and Russell apparently began shortly after she took office in January 2021 when Russell raised questions about Naranjo’s short-lived consulting business and her husband’s work for Baker Electric, which provided electric services for some district projects.

Ultimately, no conflicts of interest were found, and Naranjo could have recused herself from matters she was involved in.

But Russell’s efforts to review potential conflicts of interest and gather info from the new member “created tension between him and Naranjo, who resisted responding to his inquiries and contended that he was unfairly targeting her for scrutiny and mistreatment.”

Interviewed twice, Naranjo told investigators that Russell was condescending and treated her with a “lack of professionalism and respect.”

“Naranjo contends that [Russell] is biased against her because ‘she’s a queer, woman of color and lower income’ and is a staunch advocate for racial and environmental justice,” the report said. “She contends that [Russell] believes the District is not the place for such advocacy.”

Commissioners critical of Naranjo weren’t named.

Neither were two “labor leaders” who supposedly told a commissioner about a proposed “Pay to Play” scheme by Naranjo’s now former husband, Andrew McKercher, “whereby he attempted to leverage Naranjo’s role as a commissioner to help certain unions secure work on contracts with the district.”

McKercher, according to a divorce document filed in November 2022, made $220,000 a year as a union organizer with IBEW Local 47. (They were married in 2015 and separated June 1, 2022. They share custody of a daughter, 8, and son, 6.)

In a statement that accompanied the report, attorney Sonia Carvalho of Best Best & Krieger said the censure resolution addresses “various breaches of fiduciary duties along with violations of state law. … In the spirit of transparency and full disclosure, the board also authorized the release of the investigative report after receiving requests to do so from Commissioner Naranjo’s attorney and members of the public.

“The board’s action is intended to uphold the integrity and public trust of the Port, protect its employees, preserve the integrity of Port contracts and commitments, protect against interference with the agency’s ability to conduct the public’s business, and limit legal liability created by Commissioner Naranjo’s actions.”

On Thursday, board Chairman Rafael Castellanos issued his own statement:

No one disputes that Commissioner Naranjo is a vigorous advocate for her community. What’s at issue here is her conduct toward the Port’s Ethics Officer — who was just doing his job. Her subsequent behavior toward the Ethics Officer was clearly retaliation.

Unfortunately, Commissioner Naranjo would rather change the subject than take responsibility for her egregious retaliation against the Ethics Officer. Let’s look at the facts. The board voted unanimously to censure her – a serious consequence for her retaliatory behavior toward the Port’s Ethics Officer as determined by an independent investigation.

The claims she makes in this report against the employee, myself and others are just another example of her personal attacks against those who she perceives are raising concerns about her conduct.

Two lawyers representing Naranjo fired back.

Late Wednesday, Dan Gilleon told Times of San Diego:

Retaliation is the act of punishing a whistleblower for reporting potentially unlawful conduct. It’s illegal because it’s bad for a society that condemns corruption. Anybody who isn’t sound asleep would see the Port’s censure of Commissioner Naranjo as patent retaliation.

She raised concerns over an objectively troubling, potential conflict of interest involving a powerful Port official. The Port purportedly investigated her allegations, but as soon as the investigation was complete, only Commissioner Naranjo was censured.

It seems obvious that, despite its representations to the contrary, the Port was never investigating the concerns raised by Commissioner Naranjo. The Port was investigating her, and the Port did so because the powers that be didn’t like Commissioner Naranjo meddling with the beloved secrecy that cloaks their business dealings.

On Thursday, attorney Cory Briggs, who spoke at Tuesday’s board meeting on Naranjo’s behalf, called the report a “hatchet job.”

Why?

“Because it fails to attribute any substantive accusations to anyone except Tom Russell, which makes this a ‘he said, she said’ situation,” Briggs said via email, adding:

"It’s worse than that, however, because the docs in the appendices do not support the investigator’s assessment (e.g., there were no cooperation delays by my client, no financing was ever at risk, there was no retaliation … There’s no such thing as defamation in an official proceeding, and so on.) The report was hyped to be something terrible about Sandy, when in fact it shows that she was only doing her job in trying to hold Tom Russell accountable for his conduct while refusing to violate the Brown Act through illegal serial meetings.

"The hatchet was for sure swung by Tom Russell through his subordinate, Rebecca Harrington, who’s listed on the “cc” line of the investigation. If TR had nothing to do with the investigation, why is one of his subordinates in the loop rather than the report being exclusively between outside counsel and the board?

"Also, you know that [Russell] was in the loop because he waived his privacy rights so that the report could be disclosed before the report had been disclosed. How did he know what was in the report? He’d obviously been informed about the contents in advance or else he would have insisted on seeing the report before agreeing to waive his privacy."

Despite the loss of her vice chair title — and chance to ascend to chair of the board — Naranjo will continue to get a stipend for mileage and phone expenses. In her divorce judgment, she said was getting a $13,200 annual port stipend.

At the time, she was working for San Francisco-based Climate Plan. But she left that job in December 2022.

Today she does administrative work for a private law firm (not Briggs’ or Gilleon’s) that does no work involving the port, Briggs said.

Besides her lawyers, La Prensa San Diego publisher Arturo Castañares came to Naranjo’s defense with a searing 1,400-word indictment of the redacted report, which he called “full of innuendo and subjective conclusions that failed to prove that she actually did anything wrong.”

Castañares wrote: “So what does the report prove Naranjo did to merit her colleagues’ rebuke? Nothing. A big fat nothingburger. As the old woman in the 1980s Wendy’s commercials used to ask, ‘Where’s the beef?’”

A one-time chief of staff for former state Sen. Steve Peace, Castañares noted that one issue the report didn’t address was Naranjo’s complaints of discrimination toward her by Russell.

“But the report curiously states that those issues were ‘beyond the scope of this investigation,'” his story says.

Castañares concluded: “In the end, the report offers no smoking gun proof of any violation of law by Naranjo. The report does not prove she violated her duties or did anything more than voice her concerns with the performance of their lawyer — something she is both empowered and expected to do in carrying out her duties as a commissioner.”

Times of San Diego is an independent online news site covering the San Diego metropolitan area. Our journalists report on politics, crime, business, sports, education, arts, the military and everyday life in San Diego. No subscription is required, and you can sign up for a free daily newsletter with a summary of the latest news.