Exclusive: Sacramento mayoral candidate Flo Cofer details alleged bribery call
Flojaune Cofer wasn’t surprised to receive a phone call from California Black Chamber of Commerce President Jay King on Sep 24. The two had been speaking on and off for months.
King took an interest in a candidate who won the primary last March and stood on the doorstep of becoming Sacramento’s first Black female mayor.
But Cofer was shocked at what happened on that call.
The call allegedly involved King offering her a campaign contribution through developer Paul Petrovich.
“In late September, I was told that I would be given a campaign contribution in exchange for agreeing to extend the city manager’s contract by one year, ” Cofer said during startling public comments at a Dec. 17, City Council meeting, just prior to a vote on whether or not to extend Howard Chan’s contract.
In an exclusive interview with The Bee, Cofer and King, for the first time have elaborated on that phone call, how she reacted to it, what he said he meant to convey and what preceded it.
Despite the rupture in their relationship, they recalled similar details, though King denied he tried to bribe Cofer. In a colorful and blunt interview, King expressed some admiration for Cofer and derided the winning candidate Kevin McCarty, casting doubt on his truthfulness and said that many people view him as “a liar.”
King, a DJ and musician who created R&B hits in the 1980s, takes pride in the accomplishments of the CBCC and expressed dismay about the controversy over his call with Cofer.
”She might have misunderstood,” he said of the bribe allegation. “She might be in her emotions, I don’t know, but Flo’s a lot of things, but a liar ain’t one of them.”
King said that he spoke both about extending Chan’s contract and raising money for Cofer, but he denied referring to any specific donation. “I said, I’ll help you raise money. I’ll... help you. But it’s got to be because you are going to help me stabilize this city. The city needs to be stable..” Asked if he specifically mentioned Petrovich, King said, “I might have said, ‘I will talk to him.’ I would have talked to all my friends.”
Cofer is adamant about what she heard: Commit to extending City Manager Howard Chan’s contract, and his $500,000-plus annual salary, and “a campaign donation will drop into your campaign account from Paul Petrovich, tonight.”
Cofer remembered exactly what she said in response. Thinking of the history of slavery in America, she said, “my ancestors’ wildest dreams are never to be bought and sold again. And my integrity is not for sale.”
King said he does not remember Cofer’s comments about her integrity. He said not backing Chan’s contract was a mistake and that it hurt her.
“Flo should have won, and she could have won,” he said. “The reason why Flo didn’t win is because she wasn’t bendable. When I say bendable, I mean where she would take into consideration how to move.”
King offers advice
Cofer said that she welcomed King’s interest in her campaign at first.
“I’m a Black woman in Sacramento, of course I know who Jay King is,” she said. “I’ve been on his show, he’s an influential voice and has accomplished a lot.”
She said on phone calls he talked about his aging dad who lived in the Bay Area at the time and how King was in the process of buying a house so he could move to Sacramento.
King made two donations to Cofer’s campaign over the summer, each for $1,000.
“Jay did and said some things that made me think that he was more supportive of me than Kevin in general, but not that he was a committed supporter,” Cofer said.
As they spoke, two names kept coming up, she said: Chan, who King said was, according to Cofer, “a great guy who you would work well with, if you give him a chance.” And Petrovich.
“Jay kept telling me, I need to make more inroads into the business community,” she recalled. “But while he kept saying business community, the one name he kept mentioning was Paul Petrovich.”
Cofer said that King confided in her something that she found both surprising and troubling, She said that King said he had played a unique role as a go-between Chan and Petrovich and helped persuade the city manager to settle with Petrovich for $26 million in a lawsuit with the city.
Even though the lawsuit was largely over procedural issues, Cofer said that King was adamant that the city had done something criminal and could have been on the hook for well over $100 million, if not for the settlement that he helped broker.
“If they could do a rich white guy like that, just imagine how they treat Black and brown people,” Cofer said King told her.
In his interview with The Bee, King said he admired Petrovich. “He brings money to our city, he brings tax dollars to our city, he brings beautiful edifices to our city,” King said.
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King said he was a go-between in the settlement between Petrovich and the city. “Paul Petrovich was ready to go scorched earth on our city,” he said. “Could have got as much as $150 million….. They lied. That’s how me and Howard actually built our relationship.”
Lunch, calls with Chan
Both King and Cofer said they spoke about Chan multiple times and that King arranged for a lunch meeting.
“I wanted she and Howard to have a relationship,” he said. “So, Howard would be an ally versus an adversary, and I told her as much.”
In August, King, Cofer and Chan had lunch at Seasons 52, the same Arden Fair bar and restaurant that the city sponsors a monthly CBCC mixer, paying the chamber $15,000 in a current contract.
“Jay set the whole thing up and he told me, ‘there are no limits, no rules, ask him anything that you want,’” she said. Cofer remembered pressing Chan about a decision he had made not to open warming centers during a January storm. Several homeless people died during the storm. Cofer said that Chan said he would make the same decision if he had to do it again and that his hands were tied because of COVID.
Chan did not respond to requests to comment.
King was not the only one pressing Cofer to agree to the contract extension.
Chan’s contract extension was a hot-button topic that the City Council had delayed to when the new council and mayor would be seated in December.
Then-Mayor Darrell Steinberg, she said, wanted both candidates to agree, for stability sake, to extend Chan’s contract. If they did, he told Cofer in a September phone call, he would ask the current council to extend the contract.
“Darrell was saying to me and Kevin, if we both were comfortable with an extension for Howard’s contract, that it would be great if we could say so publicly,” she said.
Steinberg, Cofer said, told Cofer that if she and McCarty agreed, he would ask the current council to extend the contract.
During an Oct. 23 mayoral debate, McCarty delivered the kind of support Cofer said she had been pressured to offer.
“We need stability at city hall,” McCarty said. “I support having the city manager stick around one more year ... I have worked with Howard Chan before in the past when I was a council member. He’s a fine public servant. I can work with him in the first year. I think it’s important we have continuity in the early days.”
McCarty would eventually reverse that stand and vote against extending Chan’s contract in December. After Cofer’s public comments at the City Council McCarty issued a statement:
“Since the start of my campaign, I have been aware of the importance of the City Manager’s contract....Supporters and opponents of the city manager did offer their political support if I made a commitment to either support or oppose his contract. Consistent with my record as a 20-year elected official, I rejected all of them.”
The call about contract
As the election drew to a close, and the controversy picked up on whether to extend the contract, Chan called to Cofer at 5 p.m. Sept. 20. Cofer called the city manager back a short time later, according to a call log provided by Cofer. The two spoke for an hour and 18 minutes.
Unlike the lunch, which was more of a “get to know you” meeting, Cofer said the discussion was almost exclusively about Chan’s contract situation.
Chan, Cofer said, expressed frustration and said he felt betrayed by the City Council. Chan’s position was that the council had agreed to extend Chan’s contract, then reneged on that commitment.
“It was kind of an unusual conversation,” she recalled. “He talked about his mom. He said she’s an intensely proud woman who felt people should be treated respectfully, and she would be very upset to see Chan treated this way after all his years with the city.
“He never overtly asked me to take a stand and support him. He said I shouldn’t feel pressure. He was just like, ‘look, I don’t want all this, you know, all these people kind of going to to bat for me.’”
“I told Howard, ‘I can’t make a decision on your contract so quickly because I need to look at your performance evaluations.’ And he was like, ‘I’ve never had performance goals or metrics the entire time I’ve been here. And I said, ‘well, that’s gonna make my due diligence really difficult.’”
Cofer said she essentially gave Chan “a hard no” on extending his contract.
“What I said is: ‘If this was really about respect, than you got your answer. The council is not respecting you by punting this decision. So if this is really about respect, you should just quit.’”
Who knew about the call?
Cofer’s public comments may have been surprising to many in Sacramento. But the call was known among elected officials and others in Sacramento.
After she hung up with King, Cofer said she called several City Council members and said about 30 people knew soon after the call. Steinberg confirmed she called him.
Describing her call with Steinberg, Cofer said, “I told Darrell that the call made me very uncomfortable and felt like a bribe.”
Steinberg, Cofer said, “kind of took off his mayor’s hat, and said, ‘I’m really glad that you’re honoring your values, that you have a true north. That is absolutely terrible. Things like that have happened to me a couple of times in my career, and of course, I’ve turned them down. So your instinct on this, your gut reaction is absolutely right, because that’s wrong.’’
Cofer said she told Steinberg the call forced her to decide not to back Chan.
“I told Darrell, ‘this is what happened. It made me very uncomfortable, and I’m absolutely out now. I was already out before, but I’m not getting involved in this.’”
Cofer said that many people advised her not to go public about what she said she experienced.
She felt compelled to speak out after concluding that the alleged bribe represents “a kind of cancer in politics and city government in Sacramento where transparency has taken a back seat to transactional politics.”
After McCarty changed his mind to oppose extending Chan’s contract in December, King sent him a text message, which he shared.
“Kevin, everyone said your words couldn’t be trusted. U proved on the first chance you got that assessment is true. Now lets see how vindictive will you will be.”
McCarty responded, “My attorneys have advised me against any communication with you. I wish you well.”
This story was originally published February 4, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
