A town council member and the resident who filed an ethics complaint against him can agree on one thing: Gilbert’s mediation process is “weird.”
Beyond that, the two came to no resolution Tuesday of the differences laid out in Maureen Hoppe’s ethics complaint against Councilmember Jim Torgeson.
Hoppe’s complaint alleges that Torgeson called her a pig from the dais Sept. 19 when he said he had no desire to get in the mud and wrestle with a pig during a discussion of a previous Hoppe complaint against Torgeson. He said he was talking about the ethics process.
“I made a pretty clear statement about how I felt about the pig thing and ‘pig-gate,’ and I still maintain that,” Torgeson said. “She doesn't deserve to be called that. I didn't call her that. Nobody in the room thought I called her that. I don't know how to get any better than that.”
But he never delivered that message in person. The two said the mediator never brought them together in the same room. They never even saw each other in the Gilbert Municipal Court hallways during the process.
Instead, mediator Mark Lassiter spoke to Hoppe for about an hour in one room, then went down to the hall to a room with Torgeson and spoke with him for about a half-hour.
Afterward, he returned to each party and told them mediation was at an impasse.
Both parties said they were dissatisfied with the process.
“I would've thought there would've been some face-to-face, but I think that would've come at a point where there was something to agree upon or we were getting somewhere,” Torgeson said.
Hoppe compared it to a badminton game in which she served the birdie, it landed on Torgeson’s side and that was it.
“We just wasted what, let's just say roughly $2,000 for nothing, because I never got to even speak to Mr. Torgeson,” she said. “Here I enter into this process, and it doesn't really exist. I'm in a la-la land.”
Neither Torgeson nor Hoppe spoke about what they said to the mediator because of a nondisclosure agreement they signed entering into mediation.
Hoppe had been reluctant to sign the agreement because she said she felt the process was paid for public dollars and should be public information. But she relented on the last day, Dec. 1, because she said she was forced to if she wanted the complaint to go forward.
She did send the Gilbert Independent an email before mediation saying she would seek an apology from Torgeson.
Mediation on ethics complaints is a new process for the town with Hoppe’s latest complaint on Torgeson being the first time it has been used.
It came after a series of ethics complaints were lodged in 2021 against Mayor Brigette Peterson, including by Torgeson before he was elected to council. The complaints were dismissed, and a frustrated council decided to come up with a new process to prevent the ethics process from being weaponized by council members’ political opponents.
An ethics subcommittee came up with the new process that requires mediation before a complaint can be moved forward to an investigation. Torgeson served on the subcommittee with Scott Anderson, who chaired it, and Vice Mayor Kathy Tilque.
Council adopted the new rules in June, and they took effect Aug. 20, though in the interim, seven ethics complaints were filed against various council members. Five of those have been dismissed. A sixth against the mayor resulted in an acceptance of a report but not its findings after council criticized how the investigation was conducted. The seventh is still under investigation.
Torgeson said he believed Hoppe’s newest complaint would be discussed at council’s Dec. 12 meeting, and that would allow the new process also to be discussed.
“I can tell you that we will be revisiting how this is set up to try and make it work better for everybody,” he said. “And I mean, that might sound counterintuitive coming from somebody that's got an ethics complaint against them, but I can see where people can feel shorted.”
He said he cannot know but believed Anderson, who has frequently expressed concern about how the non-stop complaints were hurting the town, would want to bring it up.
“If Scott doesn't ask for it, I'm going to ask for it Tuesday night,” Torgeson said. “Someone will ask to reconvene that (subcommittee). ... This has to get discussed on a whole bunch of different levels.”
We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org. Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on X.
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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