Bryant Moynihan: Gadfly or watchdog?

Sitting in his office on North McDowell Boulevard, surrounded by stacks of papers related to the city's budget that took hundreds of hours to compile, former City Councilmember Bryant Moynihan acknowledges how intensely he follows Petaluma's spending.

"Yes, I suppose that I'm a little crazy about this stuff," he said with a sheepish grin. "But I tell you what. I'll stop being crazy when the city stops misappropriating funds."

Welcome to the world according to Bryant Moynihan. Whether people love him or hate him - and most who know him tend to fall into one of those two categories - they can't ignore him. That's because almost a decade after he left the City Council in 2004, he's still having an impact on the city.

Moynihan has been watching the city's finances carefully for the past 10 years. His complaints over what he calls inappropriate spending have caused a myriad of changes to the city budget - everything from minor budget line item amendments to major shifts in the way the city funds storm drain maintenance in town. In 2006, Moynihan sued the city for information regarding city spending under the Public Records Act request and won. He's not always successful, however. In 2008 and 2010, Moynihan led efforts to place sewer rate rollback measures on the ballot, both of which failed. The 2008 measure even prompted a lawsuit by the City of Petaluma against Moynihan.

Some would call his fiscal watchdogging downright hypocritical, given that he was charged with violating the city's campaign finance law shortly after he won his council seat in 2000. Right after that election, Moynihan immediately began collecting money for his next city council run. Some of the payments were more than the $200 limit specified by Petaluma's campaign finance law. Moynihan argued that he had followed the letter of the law when accepting the donations, since he had not been a candidate in a political race when he received them. Moynihan settled the suit with the city in 2003, after a two-year legal battle that cost the city close to $90,000 in legal fees.

Most recently, Moynihan filed a lawsuit against the City of Petaluma on behalf of the wastewater ratepayers. His suit, filed in January 2012, alleged that the city had inappropriately spent at least $4.7 million of wastewater fees on activities not related to wastewater - most notably, storm drain maintenance. While a Sonoma County judge agreed with Moynihan and ruled essentially in his favor last week, the judge also said that the city was only liable for up to $2.1 million of the $4.7 million alleged to have been misspent. Hearings will begin on Oct. 10 to determine how much the city must pay back to the wastewater fund.

This recent development has emboldened Moynihan to continue fighting the city over what he says is irresponsible spending - not that he needed the confidence boost. Even before the verdict was handed down, Moynihan had already begun work on another complaint against the city over what he says is inappropriate use of wastewater and stormwater funds to pay part of City Manager John Brown's salary.

"Municipal accounting is very strange and unique," said Moynihan. "Most councilmembers, including all the ones currently on the council right now, don't have the adequate training or understanding of the budget to really know if everything is legal. They rely on an overworked city staff, which may give them wrong information - which has already given them wrong information in the past. That's why I do what I do."

But whether Moynihan is actually helping or hurting ratepayers in his letter-of-the-law monitoring of city finances depends on whom you ask. Former City Councilmember Matt Maguire, who served on the council with Moynihan for two years, said that Moynihan's actions cost the ratepayers in the long run.

"He claims he wants to protect the ratepayers, but he takes actions that basically destroy local government," said Maguire. "When he says he's fighting the good fight, that's completely untrue."

In Moynihan's recent lawsuit against the city, City Attorney Eric Danly said that even though Sonoma County Judge Gary Nadler technically ruled in Moynihan's favor, Moynihan's suit really had no positive impact on the ratepayers, since the judge found the city was not charging excessively high rates.

"You can see where it doesn't make any sense," said Danly. "In the end, rates aren't changed and the city must pay a lot in legal fees and time spent working on the complaint. And other city funds, like stormwater maintenance, suffer as well."

Since 2006, the city has spent almost $200,000, not including staff time, on Moynihan-related lawsuits. But that's not all. According to Danly, those amounts do not include how much the city spent fighting Moynihan's two unsuccessful ballot measures, which Danly estimates is around $500,000.