Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Patricia Barrett’s position on the county housing authority board. The error has been corrected.
Tonight, the Stockton City Council is scheduled to vote on whether to replace a climate committee member appointed by Mayor Christina Fugazi, and on the city’s latest response to a scathing grand jury report released last year.
The climate committee vote would remove Patricia Barrett, an advocate for homeless residents and member of the Housing Authority of the County of San Joaquin’s board of commissioners, from Stockton’s Climate Action Plan Advisory Committee.
It would replace Barrett with Kristine Williams, an associate director of the affordable housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners and a member of the San Joaquin Valley Housing Collaborative, according to Williams’ application for the committee and her Linkedin profile.
Tonight’s vote comes two weeks after the City Council simplified the process for councilmembers to seek a vote on removing committee members they appointed.
All seven climate committee members including Barrett were nominated by Fugazi and appointed in a unanimous City Council vote in July. The mayor requested Barrett’s removal last week, according to documents attached to tonight’s City Council agenda. The documents don’t say why Fugazi wants Barrett removed.
The City Council is also scheduled to vote on the city’s third response to a 2024 San Joaquin County Civil Grand Jury report that lambasted the 209 Times’ alleged attempts to manipulate city government.
The 209 Times is a social media page sometimes presented as an unbiased news source, but which is run by a Stockton political consultant.
The grand jury determined that the 209 Times has “consistently attempted to undermine the local democratic process by misleading the Stockton electorate and attempting to affect election results through unethical influence.”
The grand jury tasked the City Council with improving political campaign transparency, and the city’s responses to harassment of its employees, among other changes.
Tonight’s proposed response highlights anti-workplace violence policies the city has created, and a potential new policy that would automatically share the results of any city Brown Act investigation with the grand jury. The response also presents options for reviewing the efficacy of an ethics hotline for city workers.
If approved, the response will mark the City Council’s third update to the grand jury since Aug. 2024. The council meeting’s open session starts at 5:30 p.m. today at City Hall.