Sacramento Councilman Sean Loloee is making a mockery of his colleagues and the city

The Sacramento City Council’s persistent protection of disgraced member Sean Loloee is impossible to defend. Loloee’s fellow politicians have failed to act despite an onslaught of city, state and federal investigations and dispositive proof that he doesn’t even live in the county, let alone the city or the district he supposedly represents.

The clubby council hasn’t been content just to shield Loloee from a thoroughly justified removal from office. Member Angelique Ashby went so far as to praise his pessimism about a city homelessness measure as wise prescience, saying in a recent meeting that his comments had “summarized all of our positions the best.” To not only allow the councilman to retain his seat but also shower him with praise is astounding.

For months, credible reporting by The Sacramento Bee, Capital Public Radio and others has used public records, police reports, tax filings and photo evidence to show that Loloee resides not in North Sacramento but in affluent Granite Bay. The Hagginwood home he claims to live in full-time — miles away from his wife’s $1.4 million Placer County home — is occupied by a woman who manages Loloee’s grocery stores and lives there with her family.

When The Bee published its first story on the subject in June, several neighbors of the property, which was doubling as a parking lot for more than a dozen vehicles, said they had never seen the councilman. By last week, Loloee was so eager to demonstrate any association with his alleged home that he claimed to have been present at a party there a year ago to which the police were called after a man brandished a gun. Records related to the incident do not name Loloee, which would be a glaring omission by law enforcement if the property owner were in attendance.

In an interview with CapRadio, which first reported the nine police responses to the property spanning the three-plus years since Loloee purchased it, he disputed that the other eight incidents ever took place. Instead, he said he was “going to call the (police) chief and see what’s going on.”

The police calls involving parties, noise complaints, fireworks and a convicted felon allegedly possessing five guns are another ethical test for the City Council. Based on past results, Sacramento’s elected leaders are likely headed for failure.

The council has abdicated its responsibility to the city in favor of misguided cronyism by willfully disregarding the overwhelming evidence that Loloee does not live in District 2, which encompasses North Sacramento, Hagginwood and Del Paso Heights. The first-term councilman is currently the subject of an independent city investigation into his residency, code enforcement violations for unpermitted construction, a California Fair Political Practices Commission investigation for allegedly failing to disclose rental income, and a federal lawsuit accusing him of threatening his employees with deportation.

Mayor Darrell Steinberg rightly initiated the city investigation, but the results have been scant, and the timeline for resolution of the case is unclear. What more does the council need to see before it prioritizes the interests of North Sacramento residents and the city as a whole by cutting ties with a man who has shown himself to be unfit for public service?

Their inaction condones his deception and makes a mockery of Sacramento’s standards for ethical representation. District 2 needs a champion who comes from the community and advocates for its best interests, not a cynical outsider exploiting a disadvantaged community to which he doesn’t belong.

Loloee is not the first council member to be accused of failing to reside in the district he was elected to serve. But he is the first to face such a damning wealth of evidence refuting his ever-changing account of the facts. The council cannot continue to allow such a brazen abuse at the expense of public faith in elected officials.