Houston city clerk resigns on Election Day

HOUSTON — It may be several weeks before election results for the city of Houston can be certified.

Houston Mayor Rosemary Burnett said several Houston residents have filed complaints contesting the results of Tuesday’s Houston City Council elections.

If a candidate, or 10 qualified voters, contests the election in writing to the city clerk before noon Monday, Oct. 10, Burnett said Houston Municipal Code says the council can’t certify the election results until an investigation is conducted.

“Upon receiving a notice of contest, the city council shall order an investigation conducted by the clerk and city attorney,” reads 3.37.010 part B of the code. “Those contesting the election, those whose election is contested, and the public shall be allowed to attend all investigation and recounting proceedings.”

Burnett said the council will meet Tuesday to formally consider City Clerk Steve Cunningham’s resignation, which he tendered verbally and in writing on Election Day, Oct. 5. He resigned amid accusations he improperly helped a group of disgruntled residents force a recall election.

Burnett said the entire e-mail archive from Cunningham’s city account was turned over to Houston City Police Department for investigation after a preliminary review of part of the e-mails by Deputy Mayor Lance Wilson discovered a troubling message the clerk had sent to recall petition organizers looking to oust then-mayor Roger Purcell.

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

The e-mail was sent after the Purcell recall group 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.

“He broke a trust. He knows he was wrong,” Burnett said. “He should have referred them to an attorney for proper wording.”

Mayor Burnett said the e-mail review began after she voiced concerns about Cunningham’s work and asked him to account for his time.

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 general things to say. There were no specific allegations of misconduct, and 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 both sides agree on and all of them relate to a specific e-mail.

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 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.

Cunningham 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 that could potentially have been 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 a much more independent 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 keep his job. But he’d had enough, so he tendered his resignation. Maybe now he’ll have more time to devote to his family.

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 remained a councilman, though he chose not to run in this year’s election, which was Tuesday.

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.