Reso 2026-021 Discipline - Councilmember Aguilar

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3 yet served in that capacity. She claims she agreed to step aside since Simon was then the most senior City Council Member who had not yet served as Vice Mayor, with the understanding of an agreement that Simon would support her candidacy as Vice Mayor the following year (2025) since she would then be the member with the longest tenure who had not yet served. During the January 6, 2025, City Council Meeting when the vote for Vice Mayor was to take place, Bowen claimed that Simon reneged on this alleged agreement and instead nominated Aguilar to be Vice Mayor. Aguilar nominated Azevedo. After Azevedo inquired whether the Vice Mayor was to be selected on a seniority basis, he decided to nominate Aguilar. Viveros-Walton nominated Bowen based on her seniority and the fact that she had not previously served as Vice Mayor so she should be given that opportunity. Simon did not nominate anyone, but he claimed that the selection process was not fair and questioned whether Council Members should serve on a rotational basis — he wanted to revisit the rule for selection of a Vice Mayor. Bowen believes that Simon and Aguilar both attempted to thwart her opportunity to serve out of retaliation for voting in favor of their censure just a few months earlier in November 2024. Mayor Gonzalez reminded Simon that an understanding and agreement about the selection process for Vice Mayor had already been established last year to allow the member with the most seniority to be designated. Ultimately, after some discussion, Bowen received a majority of the votes, by 4-3 to be Vice Mayor for 2025. On January 9, 2025, three days after her selection as Vice Mayor, Bowen sent Simon an email (copying the City Attorney Richard Pio Roda): Hello Fred, I am writing to share some concerns and my deep disappointment regarding your actions during that City Council meeting. We spoke cordially at length on multiple occasions (December 30 and a few hours before the meeting on January 6) about our shared desire to work together and move beyond politicking and drama. You shared your preference to be appointed to [Alameda County’s] Stopwaste [Commission] and I offered numerous times to advocate for you to be the alternate. You declined. We both know and discussed how the appointments are the Mayor’s discretion. To mislead the public about the process and our conversations is neither courteous, transparent, nor truthful. I am also deeply troubled by your effort to circumvent the VM appointment process, especially because it is the very process that you created last year so that you could be VM instead of me. As we both recall, you asked me for the courtesy of deferring the nomination (knowing that I had the necessary votes to be VM in 2024), so that you could have a chance before your term ended. The argument you made (and repeated numerous times to me, including during our Jan 6 call) was that you thought it was important to have a clearly defined process so that it would not [be] political or messy therefore we should have a rotation with the most senior person who hadn’t been VM yet. To be clear, if that were not the case, then you would not have been VM last year. The courteous, honest, and appropriate course of action would have been to follow the defined process and support my turn my [sic] VM. Not once during our conversations did you mention your confusion about the process nor your issues with me being nominated for VM. It was evident by the comments CM Aguilar and CM Azevedo made immediately in response to your misleading remarks that there were prior discussions to nominate others, despite what is outlined in the Council Handbook. Exhibit A Resolution No. 2026-021 Page 3