October 4, 2024
By Brian Hews • [email protected]
Yet another high-level employee has filed a discrimination lawsuit against the Montebello City Council, this time by Interim City Manager Arlene Salazar. In the lawsuit, Salazar accuses Councilman David Torres of harassment, intimidation, and retaliation. The lawsuit also slammed current City Manager Raul Alvarez, accusing him of harassment and retaliation.
Salazar is currently on paid administrative leave, placed there through no fault of her own.
The harassment and intimidation against Salazar started in 2019 when Torres bypassed then-City Manager Rene Bobadilla by emailing Salazar directly, putting Salazar in an extremely awkward position.
With his emails, Torres blatantly violated Sections of the Montebello Municipal Code.
It was not just Salazar who was affected by Torres’s actions. His behavior created a toxic culture inside City Hall, demanding several other city employees answer his emails, putting them in an awkward position with their bosses.
As a result of his abuse of power, eight city employees filed complaints against him, so Torres, according to sources, compelled the city to initiate a costly investigation in late 2021.
It did not go well. Several employees, including Salazar, were interviewed with the investigators “sustaining” multiple allegations of misconduct against Torres. In an investigation like Torres’s, “sustained” means that there was enough evidence to prove the allegations were true.
In May of 2022, the investigation findings were presented publicly at a City Council meeting where Torres was in attendance. But Torres and his crony allies Georgina Tamayo and Scarlet Peralta, ignored the investigation and instead brazenly attacked Salazar for testifying as a witness in the investigation.
Sometime after the meeting, the lawsuit alleges, Torres turned up the harassment on Salazar by engaging in abusive conduct, including berating her in front of other employees and humiliating her on multiple occasions.
Torres’s relentless harassment forced Salazar to file a claim with the city in September 2022, a move that temporarily slowed the harassment….for a few months.
Torres, Peralta, and Tamayo once again turned their sites on City Manager Bobadilla, systematically abusing him while slowly taking his authority away. Following the appointment of Torres as mayor, the first action he took, along with Tamayo and Peralta, was to strip Bobadilla of most of his administrative authority, including his hiring power.
At the time, sources told Los Cerritos Community News that Torres, Peralta, and Tamayo, much like their actions against Salazar, “had it in” for Bobadilla. The three put so much pressure on him that the embattled city manager could no longer take the abuse. He took voluntary leave in January 2023 and eventually resigned in May 2023. That put Salazar in charge and back into the sites of Torres, Peralta, and Tamayo.
Stood Up Against Power
At the time, a civil engineering company named Infrastructure Engineering (IE) “was pressuring City Councilmembers to award it a contract with the city.”
Salazar was against IE, telling the City Council several times that awarding a contract to IE, previously known as Advanced Applied Engineering, would result in oversight problems and a gross waste of public funds.
Salazar based her assertions about IE on the company’s performance in another contract with the city, which ended up getting audited by California’s Independent Office of Audits and Investigations.
Based on that audit, project costs totaling over $479,000 were, according to the state, “not in compliance with state and federal regulations.” In addition, the audit cited a potential conflict of interest that involved a “city consultant.”
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California’s Independent Office of Audits and Investigations summary page of Infrastructure Engineering. According to the CIOAI, $479,139 in reimbursements “was not supported.”
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Despite Salazar’s warnings about IE, the City Council chose to continue with the company, a decision that, among many others approved by Torres and his cronies, raised significant concerns about the city’s financial management; IE recently signed a large contract with the city in September of this year.
By June 2023, residents were fed up with Torres, Peralta, and Tamayo’s antics, announcing a recall effort against the three, citing their treatment of Bobadilla and the city’s public affairs director, Michael Chee, another employee who had filed a fresh claim accusing Torres of retaliating against him after Chee spoke out against Torres and his cronies.
Chee’s claim centered around Torres, Peralta, and Tamayo voting to “defund” Chee’s position at a meeting. The action was not on the agenda. The brazen move likely violated the Brown Act and several Municipal Codes related to city government.
In a City Council government, the City Council is not in charge of hiring and firing employees; the City Manager has that authority. If Montebello’s budget were approved, which it was at the time, then Chee’s position would be “funded,” and a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) would be included. The MOU would have terms and conditions of Chee’s employment, protecting Chee from wrongful termination and other actions.
That did not matter to Torres. At the meeting, Torres tried to defend the decision to eliminate Chee’s position as a financial one, explaining that he believed the department was too “top heavy.” Chee called the action “petty” and “vindictive,” adding he was given no due process or warning of the action to eliminate his job.
Around that time, the city hired Raul Alvarez as City Manager. Alvarez had zero large municipality budget and operations experience. According to sources, his career consisted of a stint on the staff of former Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, eventually leaving under a cloud. Rendon got Alvarez a job in Lynwood, where he eventually moved to Huntington Park, a city 1/3 the size of Montebello, as Assistant City Manager before his hiring by Montebello.
Alvarez wasted no time becoming Torres’ attack dog. In his first several months as city manager, Alvarez took actions to marginalize and oust multiple women holding executive management positions in the city, several of whom were black and Latino.
Then he turned to Salazar.
According to the lawsuit, starting January 2024, Alvarez increasingly sidelined Salazar in a manner “that was publicly humiliating and made it difficult for her to perform critical job responsibilities,” including barring Salazar from weekly meetings, barring her from one-on-one meetings with various Department Directors within the city, locking her out of closed session city council meetings, and banning attendance at community events including Rotary and Soroptimists events.
Finally, in June of this year, City Attorney Arnold-Alvarez Glasman, on orders from Alvarez, walked into Salazar’s office during a Zoom meeting and personally handed her a notice placing Salazar on paid leave.
LCCN confirmed with Salazar that the delivery by Glasman had occurred during an active Zoom meeting.
Since then, according to the lawsuit, the city has attempted to discredit Salazar and, according to sources, has initiated an investigation into Salazar.
The sources tell LCCN that former Bell Gardens Police Chief Keith Kilmer, who had a rocky three-year stint as Police Chief in San Bernardino, is spearheading the bogus investigation.
When contacted by LCCN, Montebello Councilman Torres wrote, “Despite 17 witnesses and 8 claims filed against me, none of those claims turned into harassment lawsuits under the government code in which they were filed. In fact, all claims expired on September 14 of this year when the two-year statute of limitations was reached. I still maintain my actions were appropriate and protected. As for the whistleblower claims, I can’t comment on pending litigation at this time.”
It was a misleading comment, as there is no such thing as a “harassment” lawsuit. Harassment claims under the law must allege harassing conduct on the basis of a protected characteristic that includes race, gender, or disability. Even though the term harassment has been used to describe Torres’s behavior, the government claims filed by the eight city employees alleged unlawful retaliation.
Torres did not comment when asked about the costly investigation that was “sustained.”
Councilwoman Angie Jimenez did not mince words, “The current state and work culture in our city has been highly discriminatory against women since a new City Manager, Raul Alvarez, came to Montebello back in November of 2023.
“All of the employees he placed on administrative leave are not only high-ranking professionals but have all been women, black, and Latinas.
“Most employees who have resigned since he arrived have been women who have left for fear of being alienated or retaliated against. Their resignations have all been forced.
“Ms. Salazar has been a pioneer in her field and earned her seat at the table by creating waves and opportunities for other women; she should have never been treated as she was. Neither should any women be forced to resign or separate from the city.
“This is a story that needs to be told, and I hope that LCCN takes the time to shed some light on the misogynistic male chauvinistic environment that the city of Montebello has become under its new leadership of Raul Alvarez, Councilman David Torres, and old-guard City Attorney Arnold Alvarez-Glassman.”
