Seeking more details about sexual harassment allegations, Palo Alto delays vote on Downtown Streets Team contract

With top executives at Downtown Streets Team facing allegations of sexual harassment, the Palo Alto City Council agreed on Monday to postpone its vote on a $336,400 contract with the nonprofit, which provides homeless individuals with jobs cleaning up local roads.

By a unanimous decision, the council rejected a recommendation from city staff to approve the three-year contract on its “consent calendar,” where numerous items get approved by a single vote. Instead, it directed staff to return at a later date for a public hearing on the proposed contract for maintenance of downtown parking lots, streets and alleys.

The decision followed months of unsuccessful attempts by city staff to obtain information from the Downtown Streets Team about the investigation that it had commissioned in 2018 into five complaints from former female employees. The former employees claimed that the nonprofit fostered a hard-drinking party culture and that its CEO Eileen Richardson was involved in sexual harassment, including an episode at a December 2014 holiday party in which she made advances toward an intoxicated employee.

In June, the council allocated a grant to the nonprofit as part of the Community Development Block Grant program but suggested that future funding may hinge on the nonprofit’s disclosure of its response to the allegation. Since then, city staff had repeatedly tried to obtain the report from the investigation, which was conducted by the Law Offices of Amy Oppenheimer, but the nonprofit has refused to provide it, according to a report from the Department of Planning and Development Services. Instead, the nonprofit had provided three pages of information about the report without specifying what was investigated and which charges, if any, were deemed credible.

The Monday vote to delay discussion of the new contract marked the first time that the council had declined to approve funding for Downtown Streets Team since the allegations against its executives first surfaced more than a year ago. Council member Lydia Kou suggested that she would vote against the contract if the item was not removed from the “consent calendar.”

Council members Liz Kniss and Alison Cormack then both agreed to remove the item from “consent” and directed staff to bring the contract back at a later date.

Several speakers at Monday’s meeting urged the council not to approve the contract until the Downtown Streets Team provides a redacted report from the Oppenheimer investigation. Michele Dauber, a Stanford University law professor, was among them.

“Voting to approve this contract tonight will tell any future contractor that the council can be safely ignored, whether on the subject of sexual harassment or anything else,” Dauber said. “Downtown Streets Team is betting that the City Council is a paper tiger and that they can safely refuse to answer your legitimate questions and still receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money.”

Barron Park resident Winter Dellenbach acknowledged that the nonprofit provides extremely valuable services — helping homeless individuals and keeping city streets clean. But she also argued that the nonprofit’s executive team has a responsibility to respond to the council’s inquiries about the allegations.

“The responsibility here lies on those folks who are the administrator and the board members of the Downtown Streets Team,” Dellenbach said. “Be very clear where the responsibility lies here. They have the choice of releasing this report.”