Houston City Clerk resigns on election day

HOUSTON — Of all the days for a city clerk to resign, election day is probably the worst.

According Houston Mayor Rosemary Burnett, city clerk Steve Cunningham verbally resigned Tuesday morning in the midst of the city election, an event the clerk generally oversees.

“I'd had problems with Mr. Cunningham's work over the last couple of weeks,” Burnett said in explaining the events leading up to the clerk's resignation. “I asked him to account for his time and he refused to do so and was very evasive.”

So she had the company that handles the city's computers pull all of Cunningham's e-mails. She handed them over to Deputy Mayor Lance Wilson who reviewed them last week and reported back to the mayor.

“It came to my attention that he committed a serious breach of trust,” Burnett said.

For his part, Cunningham disputes most of this account. He said that he, Burnett and Wilson went into a closed-door meeting to discuss his job performance last week but that Burnett and Wilson had nothing but really general things to say. There were no specific allegations of misconduct. He was ordered to only act at the mayor's behest.

"Well, yeah, that’s what I thought I was doing," Cunningham said.

And, he said, he was the one who called in the computer company when he was asked for his e-mails.

But there are some facts here that both sides agree on and all of them relate to a specific e-mail.

Back in February a recall campaign began against then-mayor Roger Purcell. The group organizing the recall submitted an application, which Cunningham rejected because it wasn't specific enough. The group then asked Cunningham what would be a sufficiently specific application. Cunningham wrote an application that would pass muster and sent it to the group. The group sent it back unchanged as its application. And Cunningham approved it.

To Wilson, that’s a smoking gun.

“He knew what he was doing at the time was improper,” Wilson said, referencing later e-mails in which he Cunningham expresses concern to one of the recall's organizers, Julia Normand, about losing his job over the matter. “He should have maintained some degree of neutrality, which he did not.”

But Cunningham sees it a different way. One of his jobs as clerk is to provide information to the public. That's what he was doing when he answered questions about how to construct a proper recall petition.

He said he wrote the wording eventually used on the petition as an example. He didn't think the organizers would use it verbatim. There were plenty of things the mayor had done, which could potentially be grounds for recall. He assumed the organizers would choose one of them, rather than use the one Cunningham chose for his example — the mayor’s use of emergency lights in a borrowed police vehicle during a trip to Fairbanks.

Cunningham does seem to find fault with himself when talking about what he did when the recall application was handed in and, to his dismay, he saw his own words there.

He said he thought about going to Purcell and asking him to delegate the matter to the city's deputy clerk. But he and Purcell had had numerous run-ins before.

"Chances are good that I probably would have been fired. So in order to avoid that at that point I chose to keep it quiet," Cunningham said.

Really, he said, he was in an impossible situation, working for the mayor and being asked to decide whether a petition to recall that mayor was a proper one. And he was stuck between two factions. Any choice he made would be suspect in the eyes of either Purcell's camp or the recall’s organizers. The clerk, he said, should be much more independent a position than it is in Houston.

“Until the city learns how to organize things and plan things they're going to continue to run into these problems,” Cunningham said.

When all of this came to light, Cunningham said, he got the impression that maybe he could have stuck it out and kept his job. But he'd had enough. So he tendered his resignation. Maybe now he'll have more time to devote to his family, he said.

As for the recall election — the city scheduled one after the successful application was accepted, but Purcell resigned as mayor before it could be held. The city council chose Burnett to take his place.

Due to what Cunningham described at the time as a clerical error, Purcell's status as a member of the city council — Houston’s mayor is also a councilman — was never in jeopardy. He remains a councilman, though he chose not to run in this year's election, which is due to wrap up Tuesday night.

Speaking of which — Wilson said that the city's deputy clerk, Sonya Dukes, has been trained and is capable of stepping in to run the city's election in Cunningham's stead. Houston has just one polling place, Houston City Hall.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.