I’ve sat through a lot of city meetings over the years, and I try to give elected officials the benefit of the doubt. So I want to be fair here. But I also think the facts matter, and in this case, I don’t think the San Luis Obispo Personnel Board got them quite right.
The board’s recommendation against a censure hearing for SLO Mayor Erica Stewart came down to one sentence in the city’s own Censure Policy: censure shouldn’t follow “an occasional error in judgment, which occurs in good faith and is unintentional.” On July 27, board members Calvin Stevens and Jill LeMieux decided Stewart’s disclosure of a confidential grand jury report met that bar, and voted 2-1 against a censure hearing.
Here’s the thing, though. That sentence asks two questions, not one. Was it good faith, and was it unintentional? You need both for the finding.
I watched the recording of the meeting. The discussion was almost entirely about good faith and so was the motion. Nobody on the board really dug into whether the conduct was unintentional, and I think that’s worth some folks’ attention. Because the record actually raises a fair question about that. The grand jury’s cover letter said clearly that the report was confidential until its public release, cited the penal code section that prohibits early disclosure, and told recipients the report “must be kept confidential until its public release.”
And Stewart’s back-and-forth with Cal Poly’s Courtney Kienow wasn’t a single slip. Kienow told her fairly quickly that Cal Poly wasn’t even supposed to have the report, and the conversation between them kept going for days after that. I have a hard time squaring “unintentional” with a conversation that continues after someone tells you the other party wasn’t supposed to receive it in the first place. That’s a real question the board needed to work through and it never did.
Good faith on its own isn’t the standard. The policy asks for both, and I don’t think we’ve gotten a straight answer on the second half yet.
The advisory opinion comes back to the Personnel Board on Aug. 14 before it heads to City Council. Board members Sharon Seitz and Chintan Desai missed the July 27 meeting and are expected to be there this time. That’s a real chance for the board to look at the whole policy, not just half of it.
Folks in this town deserve a recommendation that actually applies the standard the city adopted, start to finish.
Brett Cross
vice chair, Residents for Quality Neighborhoods
Current candidate for SLO City Council
This article appears in Education Today 2026.
The public really needs to read Councilmember Marx’s exhaustive and scholarly complaint, it’s 160+ pages. How those tools at the personell Board ignored it is beyond me. The Mayor knew precisely what she was doing and was simply trying to curry favor with her real employer, Cal Poly. Get if her ASAP before she and ruins this towns reputation further.
*get rid of the Mayor. I’ll take Councilmember Marx as mayor any day.
It’s apparent that Stewart knew that Kienow wasn’t privy to the Grand Jury report because she forwarded it to Kienow. Furthermore, Stewart’s comments to Kienow show that she does not support the residents’ complaints about the disruptive Cal Poly students. Stewart is supposed to be representing her constituency.
Exactly. Her emails to Kienow show back and for plans for how to deal with any fallout from leaking the report should anyone find out. The only reason anyone did is because some brave soul, 6 months later did a public records request where even then, the mayor or city slow rolled divulging the info. This is our Mayor, folks. Conniving, sneaky, and with her own agenda to advance her own self interest.
The leak was not in good faith to actively improve conditions for the citizens of the city. The multiple interactions taken were to conspire with Cal Poly on rebuttals of points the Grand Jury asserted. If the interactions were good faith efforts for the city the action taken would have been to get a head start on interventions and action plans to remedy shortcomings by the city and Cal Poly. An investigator would want to know why it made sense to the person making the error at the time they did it. Dodging accountability or downplaying was not a good faith reason to leak, leading to the conclusion the leak was willful disregard of the confidential warnings.