National City Council member Ron Morrison held a meeting on July 17 to publicly cite Mayor Alejandra Sotelo-Solis, Vice Mayor Mona Rios and fellow Council member Gonzalo Quintero for committing what he claims is a substantial violation of the Brown Act during a June 16 City Council meeting.
Morrison spoke candidly with roughly 50 attendees — mostly vocal supporters — and explained the chain of events leading up to Friday’s public meeting at the Veteran’s Wall of Honor.
On June 3, the day after Blackout Tuesday, a day intended to bring attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, Morrison shared an image on a personal social media account that prompted a heated discussion in the comments section of that page. The image in question looked visually similar to those posted the day before in support of the movement and stated, “Due to COVID, we’re gonna need people to riot from home and destroy your own shit.”
Two weeks later, at a June 16 City Council meeting, Sotelo-Solis, Rios and Quintero unexpectedly presented Morrison with a motion of censure that included three demands: Morrison must refrain from similar comments in the future; the council member immediately issue an apology via social media; and that he would be removed from his position as the city’s third alternate representative from San Diego’s Regional Association of Governments, commonly known as SANDAG among local government leaders.
Referring to the June 16 meeting as a kangaroo circus, Morrison maintained he had nothing to apologize for and said, “If I issued one, it wouldn’t be one they liked.” He also said the two week gap between his post and the June 16 meeting provided adequate time to add the motion of censure to the meeting’s agenda.
More importantly, because that motion of censure was not on the meeting’s agenda nor related to an urgent matter, Morrison claims it was not in compliance with the Brown Act and, on July 16, Morrison presented a formal “cure and correct” letter to City Council demanding they resolve the situation.
“What can they do? First of all, they could rescind the motion of censure entirely. The other thing they could do is put it on a future agenda so the public could be involved in it and they could vote on it again. I think that would be the prudent thing,” Morrison said Friday.
By law, he noted, the city has a month to decide what course of action they will take.
“The city has 30 days in which they can cure it, they can deny it, or they can ignore it, which is the same thing as if they deny it. At that point, you can look to judicial relief,” Morrison said.
This is not the first time Morrison found himself in a legal battle surrounding social media; in 2019 a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed against Morrison after he blocked a constituent on Facebook.
Neither Sotelo-Solis nor Rios provided any comments in the days following Morrison’s public meeting.
In a follow-up email, Quintero said he looks forward to “days where we can unite and lead from a peaceful dais,” but did not offer any comment on Morrison or provide any indication of how the City Council plans to resolve the situation.
