Jordan Assures City Councilors on Review Board
by Bill Dusty
In a letter to the Springfield City Council dated July 11, 2008, Mayoral chief of staff Denise Jordan reassured wary Councilors that the city’s Community Complaint Review Board (CCRB) was alive and well.
“At no time has the CCRB been defunct,” Jordan said.
Jordan corrected and earlier statement when she said she mis-spoke in a CBS-3 report when she said the Board met twice a week. She said she meant to say twice per month. The dates she gave for past CCRB meetings were: April 24th, May15th, June 5th and June 9th. She said a May 29th meeting was re-scheduled, and the first meeting of July was cancelled due to the 4th of July holiday.
She went on to say that “to date” the Review Board is overseeing two cases. (Two cases since January or two cases right now?)
In her letter, Jordan informed the City Councilors that it was her understanding, via counsel from City Solicitor Ed Pikula, that since the CCRB is considered an “advisory committee” to the mayor, it is not subject to Open Meeting laws. This still does not explain, however, why the meeting dates themselves were never posted or made public.
Melinda Pellerin-Duck, the original coordinator of the Review Board, recalled from her time as coordinator that the only meetings that were never open to the public were those involving police officers and civilians as those cases were being reviewed. “The coordinator, under the Executive Order and guidelines,” said Pellerin-Duck, “must conduct informational meetings and inform the community – hence the reason it is called a Community Complaint Review Board.”
Jordan still did not reveal the identities of the current Members of the Review Board in her letter, although Board Member and chairman H. Edgar Alejandro was recently quoted in a Republican article as saying things were “moving in the right direction,” so at least he seems to have survived. In the letter, Jordan said there are nine members to the Board, with three alternates “to be named.”
Jordan also defended the decision to go with a part-time coordinator, saying that she believed a full-time coordinator wasn’t necessary. When the CCRB was first established by former Mayor Charles Ryan back in September of 2007, he appointed Melinda Pellerin-Duck as its full-time coordinator. Following the November election, Mayor-elect Domenic Sarno announced that he would be replacing Pellerin-Duck with his chief of staff, Jordan. He said eliminating the full-time position and having Jordan performing the coordinator duties part-time would save the city $45,000 (although the City’s Fiscal 2009 budget [pdf] quotes a “$40,000″ savings).
It was soon after this, however, that official letters began to arrive in the mailboxes of Review Board Members, relieving them of their duties. And the CCRB slipped into a silent fog thereafter.
Jordan said the Review Board in Springfield is “without precedence” – although there are several community complaint review boards in place throughout the United States. Pellerin-Duck, meanwhile, maintained that the only thing unprecedented about Springfield’s Review Board is Jordan’s overseeing it on a part-time basis. According to a statement by former Mayor Ryan, no other review board in the nation is run by a part-time coordinator. “There is no city in the country with a civilian review board that does not have a full-time coordinator,” Ryan reportedly said. In a recent story in the Republican, the Rev. Talbert W. Swan II asserted that a full-time coordinator position was part of the settlement reached in the racial bias suit against the City that led to the establishment of the CCRB.
Jordan said she would be answering any and all questions concerning the Review Board in a press conference scheduled for next week.
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