A Conversation with City Councilman Matt Orlando.

I had the opportunity to talk with Councilman Matt Orlando on the phone on Monday, May 8th.

Following up on our email interview, I wanted to ask him some final questions related to the Pentz affair and the recall effort that has been initiated against him and Councilman Sepulveda. I didn’t record the phone call, but took some notes to jog my memory. I wrote these up into this post that Councilman Orlando then reviewed for overall accuracy. Quotes, where I have provided them, are paraphrased summaries and not at all verbatim, but I believe they do reflect the general essence of our conversation.

As we began our talk, I told Matt that, since I’d had the benefit of reading his thorough responses to my interview questions as well as his letter to the San Tan Sun this past weekend, I hoped in our talk to step back a bit from the specific details of the controversy and ask for his perceptions on the more personal implications. Implications such as how this controversy was affecting him and his family, how his sense of personal integrity and faith may have been involved, how he saw the larger community impact of this potentially divisive issue, what he might have done differently with the benefit of hindsight.

What I discovered in Matt was a very articulate, earnest public servant who is a little disappointed that his long-time service to Chandler seems to be held so cheaply by his detractors because of one politically unpopular decision.

I began by asking Matt how this was affecting him personally. While it was frustrating from a personal standpoint, he said, it probably was affecting his wife more.

"She’s wondering how and why a community that trusted a man as the President of the YMCA Board, the Optimist Club and many other organizations – trusted him for years with their kids as a coach – could just throw that all away because of one incident in which he made a decision they didn’t like. How a community could turn on a long time servant in such a visceral way and call him stupid and make threats against him. That’s something that’s tough for her to handle.”

As he pointed out, Matt served for eight years on the Council in the 1990s and during that time, as well as the two years he’s served now, he’s been involved in doing a lot of good work for the City. I asked him why he thought this was happening now.

“There are a lot of factors going on right now, but I’d say that a major factor is the upcoming May 16th Council runoff election. A lot of the emotion in this is being drummed up by the electoral politics that are going on.”

It’s hard to disagree with him. In my own research, and as I’ve noted on The Precinct 134 Blog before, there are a number of elements that are coming together in sort of a “perfect storm” to fuel the controversy. One of the candidates for the runoff election, Jeff Weninger, is a key member of the Republican party and has already come out in strong favor of re-hiring Pentz. Councilman Huggins has expressed in a personal email to me his desire to re-hire Pentz, and Mayor Dunn and Councilman Caccamo are on record endorsing Weninger's candidacy.

Furthermore, the initiator of the Recall effort – Ray Pilara – is also a volunteer on Weninger’s campaign. Another member of the Recall committee, Ray Metcalf, has expressed his own desire to run for City Council in the future when he applied to take Councilman Sepulveda’s seat during Sepulveda’s temporary vacancy while on active duty in Iraq. Councilman Huggins allegedly has directed at least one resident to the Recall website and, as I’ve learned from a source recently, is also a long-time friend of Metcalf. And Mayor Dunn’s law partner, Rep. Steve Yarbrough (LD-21), will be facing a campaign threat from the outgoing Councilwoman Wallace.

The political intrigue is even more complex than that. From Matt’s reading of the 153 emails that were sent into the City Council critical of the Council’s decision to separate Pentz, he suggests that there are parallels in the wording and argumentation structure to many of them – similar wording praising Pentz, similar wording condemning the “Gang of Four” that gave him negative marks in his review - suggesting that there may have been a concerted email effort which account for at least some of the correspondence they received. And the media also appears to be at least passively complicit, by editorializing in some articles to suggest that Pentz was “forced out” (when, in fact, he was “separated” by mutual consent, with a very generous compensation package far exceeding the contractual obligation).

When I suggested to Matt that there certainly seemed to be a lot more to the story than just the “Gang of Four” rhetoric a lot of people are using, he agreed:

“The previous council voted to separate [City Manager Donna] Dreska, and that cost the city a lot of money in a separation agreement. And it was the same three Council members who voted to move her on that are so upset at the separation of Pentz, now.

And when you see lawyers, PR firms, campaign members and a movement in the public all getting involved – directly or indirectly - in an organized Recall that just so happens to coincide with a Council runoff campaign, there’s more than just simple discontent with a single Council decision. There’s still a lot of an ‘old boy system’ in Chandler that’s feeding into the electioneering here.”

In fact, part of Matt’s vulnerability here is perhaps that he’s not, by his own words, a great ‘politician’.

“I’m more an analytical, fact-oriented kind of guy. I look at the facts and I try to make the best decisions I can – on a cost-benefit basis - whether that’s based on the economics or other factors. But I don’t do the political calculation of whether it will be politically expedient. I do what I do not for politics, but because I enjoy giving to the community, because I love Chandler.

But, in the political arena, some people tend to assume you’re self-serving and that you’re only making your decisions for political reasons. They assume this about you because THEY tend to think that way. They think that we must all be motivated by politics. But I don’t work that way.

If I were going to do the political thing, I might have done it differently. The politically expedient thing would have simply sat back and passed the city manager’s review without too close a look. The hard thing is to analyze it and see what’s in the best interests of Chandler. But when you do that, even with the best intentions, some people will still question your motives and ask ‘What’s in it for you?’

It’s tempting to take the easy road, but I have to look at myself in the mirror. I have to know I’ve done the right thing, even if it’s difficult.”

When I asked what he thought people imagined he might possibly have to gain from going through this ordeal, he said he didn’t know, and that it only made sense based on the highly charged political season.

I noted that I’d seen a part of the video of Pentz’s review and asked him a bit about that meeting. Matt said that he needed to be circumspect about what he could say for legal reasons, but he could share his view on the process. In a moment of self-evaluation, he shared what he considered to be a mistake he’d made:

“If you look at that video, I think I might have gone a little overboard in my comments in the last two hours. I was trying to show a trend that, for me, had been a tipping point in my thinking. I wasn’t trying to be vindictive, but just trying to use the process to move us on to a better place.”

I asked Matt how he might have handled things differently knowing what he knows now.

“I think, maybe, I would have asked the Council to conduct the review after the May 16th election instead of before. There’s so much of this that’s politically charged, I think I’d have urged the Council to wait.”

At this point, I delved a little bit into an area that a lot of folks are uncomfortable discussing in politics, but which means a lot to me personally: namely, personal faith. I suggested that if he preferred to decline to answer, I would respect that, but that otherwise, I was curious about how he viewed faith and whether and how that has been a factor in this controversy. Matt seemed comfortable in expressing himself in this area. He’s a member of St. Andrews the Apostle Church, a member of the Knights of Columbus and has been involved in the church for many years. He stressed his deep respect for religious belief and a highly developed sense of personal integrity, faith and family values and that those values came out in the way he approaches public service and decision-making. “My son and daughter,” he also informed me, “are getting Confirmed in the church this weekend and we’re pretty excited about that.”

(Speaking of which, please allow me to offer my congratulations and heartfelt blessings to the Orlando family!)

I then asked Matt if he wished to offer a closing thought:

“You know, I’ve lived in Chandler for 23 years and served my country, state, community for many years as a public official and in community service. This is my home, our home – I love Chandler. The people who know me know, deep down inside, that I did the right thing.

Now, we need to move on, take care of more of Chandler’s business and stop this divisiveness because it’s not helping us get where we want to be.”

I closed by thanking Councilman Orlando for his time and consideration as well as his service to our community. I expressed my ongoing commitment to continue to pray for him as he serves us on the City Council. He thanked me for my time and said he appreciated my prayers. He offered to speak again if I wished and, at this, we said goodbye.