LCC board blocks vote to strip chair of gavel

A deadlocked Lane Community College Board of Education rebuffed a motion Wednesday that could have led to temporarily removing board chair Zachary Mulholland from his leadership position.

At the start of the board’s meeting, member Steve Mital moved to add an item to the agenda about forcing Mulholland to relinquish the chair while an investigation into charges he verbally abused and bullied LCC’s president during meetings is underway. Mital emphasized he was not calling for Mulholland to step down from the board, just from his leadership position.

Mital pointed to an April 25 letter to the board from the Eugene-Springfield NAACP expressing “deep concern” about the allegations and calling for Mulholland to “step aside during the course of the investigation.” 

Mital also cited an April 15 letter from the Lane Community College Foundation asking the same.

Both letters came in the wake of the board’s April 2 meeting, during which the board’s vice chair, Kevin Alltucker, read a letter in which he outlined the accusations against Mulholland. “Based upon my professional opinion, the chair is a bully who is misusing his chairmanship role to intimidate the president,” Alltucker read at the meeting.

Mulholland did not directly respond to Alltucker’s charges at the meeting. But he did say he respected LCC President Stephanie Bulger and suggested that the main issue was a strained relationship he had with Alltucker. 

LCC officials have referred the matter to outside counsel for an investigation, according to a report included in the board’s packet for Wednesday’s meeting. 

“We have not addressed this yet as a board,” Mital said Wednesday. “Given the situation, I think it’s appropriate for the board chair to step back until the investigation is complete.”

Board member Denise Diamond disagreed, saying the motion was “inappropriate for several reasons.” She said the investigation is not complete, “therefore there has been no conclusion. … This process is being handled in a judicial, legal manner and it should proceed in that way and we should wait for that to happen, because that is appropriate, private and confidential. And that’s in the best interest of the college and the community.”

Diamond also said the LCC foundation might have overstepped its proper role in sending the April 15 letter.

Mulholland said his legal counsel advised him not to step down “at this point in time, and I’m going to be focused on the work of the board.”

The vote on the motion to add the item to the official agenda failed on a 3-3 vote — a familiar split for the board, which has been one member short since Lisa Fragala resigned in November after winning election to the state Legislature. The board deadlocked on appointing a replacement for Fragala.

Mital, Alltucker and Julie Weismann voted to add the item to the agenda. Diamond, Mulholland and Austin Fölnagy voted against. 

The April 25 letter from the NAACP said the allegations against Mulholland are “emblematic of a broader systemic issue in which white men in positions of authority are allowed to wield power in ways that harm, silence and endanger Black women and other women of color.” Bulger is Black.

The letter, signed by Demond Hawkins, president of the Eugene-Springfield NAACP, and Drae Charles, its executive director, said that if the charges against Mulholland are substantiated, he should resign immediately from the board.

The letter asked the board to publicly affirm a “zero-tolerance policy for harassment, retaliation and abuse of power — especially when directed at women, staff and people of color.” The letter also asked the board to commit to “transparent reporting regarding the ongoing investigation to the public.”

In a brief interview Wednesday with Lookout Eugene-Springfield, Charles said that recent news reports about the board had “caused some significant alarm for us and the need for intervention.”

He said the board had not responded to the letter as of Wednesday.