Bee Opinionated: Councilman caught again + County’s quiet crisis + Carter’s character | Opinion
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Hello hello, it’s Robin Epley again with — you guessed it — The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board.
Why does Sacramento City Council Member Sean Loloee keep yelling at people in public? Moreover, why does he keep getting filmed doing it?
You’d think he’d learn after the first or second time, but last week a new video surfaced, this time on the popular social media app TikTok, of Loloee accosting a young woman at a mixer event in north Sacramento.
The woman, Angela Grijalva, believes the councilman recognized her last name: Her mother, Maria Grijalva, who was unsuccessfully sued by Loloee for defamation.
It’s been a rough road for Loloee since he was elected in 2020. He has been investigated by various media outlets and the city for allegedly not living in his north Sacramento district, a saga that featured Loloee giving conflicting statements about where he lived and growing increasingly agitated by legitimate questions from reporters.
Police have been called to Loloee’s Hagginwood home to investigate vehicles sold there, and police were also called to a party at his house where a man allegedly brandished a gun.
Meanwhile, his District 2 constituents are in dire need of more housing, but Loloee has said in public meetings many times that he is “not a fan of affordable housing.”
Eventually, he was cleared by a city-hired investigator regarding questions about his residence, but these problems only seem to have caused Loloee to lash out at anyone who dares question him.
“Grijalva claims Loloee directed personal attacks at her, including calling her a ‘disgusting pig.’ The video Grijalva took doesn’t capture those words, but Loloee does call her ‘a liar,’ an ‘instigator’ and ‘a horrible human being’ on camera. Worse, the video shows Loloee escalating a situation when one would hope an elected member of the Sacramento City Council would de-escalate a tense encounter.
“It was apparent that he was not going to stop until he got his ire out on me,” Grijalva said.
Loloee did not return multiple requests for comment.
County Call In
“In Sacramento County, structural racism creates disparities in so many areas, including housing, employment, health and criminal justice. addressed these issues, but their commitments were broad and need to be fleshed out. Last year, Sacramento County hired a consulting firm, and they are now looking at how to make their contracting policies more equitable. That’s a great start, but it’s not enough.”
April Jean, a member of the city of Sacramento’s Racial Equity Council as well as a racial justice trainer and consultant, wrote a great op-ed for The Bee last week about Sacramento County’s slow roll on doing anything more than simply declaring racism a public health crisis.
Other counties and cities have made the same public health crisis declaration but then proceeded to take direct action to address it. Namely, the City of Long Beach, which created a racial reconciliation framework with 120 ambitious goals in 2020. Then, last February, they released an impressive one-year progress report.
“Long Beach has trained more than 1,000 employees, improved language access, created an equity commission made up of residents, built an online equity dashboard and done much more,” Jean wrote. “It’s time for our county leaders to deliver on that promise.”
Character Defines The Man
“We met a lifetime ago, in July of 1975, when I attended a $25 campaign fundraiser at a hotel near what’s now Reagan National Airport outside Washington D.C. I don’t remember a lot of what he said that night, but I do remember being won over by the former Georgia governor’s humility and genuineness.”
Les Francis, a former staffer to President Jimmy Carter, wrote a wonderful op-ed last week detailing his experiences with the former chief executive. Francis served as Carter’s “whip” at the California delegation at the 1976 nominating convention, field director of the Carter/Mondale California campaign, and then a position on the White House staff in early 1977.
“A couple of months into my job in congressional relations, I wrote my first memo to the president under my own name. The next day, it was returned to me with an embarrassing notation, in red ink, at the top. I had misspelled ‘liaison,’ using one ‘i’ instead of two. It was circled, accompanied by a checkmark and the initial J.’ Some mistakes you never forget, and never make again.”
In the essay, Francis relates many stories of his time in the White House alongside Carter and staff, but, most movingly at the end: “The night of Carter’s defeat to Ronald Reagan was one of the few times in my adult life I truly cried, and I only did so after the President shook my hand and thanked me for all my work on his behalf. Since then, I have been with Jimmy Carter many times, at reunions, book signings, and Carter Center ‘retreats.’ In the last two of those that I attended before COVID, I was able to spend time with the president and just chat. It was no longer staff and boss talking, but something different, more personal. Between the former president and most of us who worked for him, there was profound mutual respect, trust, and loyalty.
Most of all, loyalty. Jimmy Carter reliably inspired loyalty, though not the fawning sort. It was something more, and it grew out of the man’s essential character, which is what had drawn me and so many others to him in the first place.”
About two weeks ago, The Carter Center announced the former President would, “after a series of short hospital stays … decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.”
President Carter is 98 years old.
Opinion of the Week
“‘...As I sit here in this courtroom and look around (at) the many portraits of judges and other court officials and reflect on the fact that over the past century your family, including you, have been prosecuting people here in this courtroom,’ the judge went on, (and) couldn’t help noting that many of those prosecuted by Murdaughs ‘have received a death penalty probably for lesser conduct.’ — South Carolina Judge Clifton Newman at the Friday hearing where he sentenced Alex Murdaugh to life in prison without possibility of parole, as related by Bee Metro columnist Melinda Henneberger in her excellent column on why we must abolish the death penalty.
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Bless up,
Robin Epley
