Charlottesville City Attorney Jacob Stroman is at the heart of turmoil in the city of Chesapeake and calls for investigations into Chesapeake’s mayor’s conduct.
In August 2022, Chesapeake Mayor Rick West asked then-Chesapeake City Attorney Jacob Stroman to help his stepbrother with a legal issue. He needed a permit for a septic tank permit in Nahunta, Georgia, and was running into problems, WHRO and The Virginian-Pilot reported earlier this month.
“I have wasted a pile of money already… and do not want to waste another ($3,000 to $10,000) to find out there is nothing we can do legally,” Jonathan West emailed Mayor West. The quote appears in the WHRO’s report from Aug. 15. The publication uncovered the issue after receiving the mayor’s emails, text messages and memos through a Freedom of Information Act request.
According to the publications, the mayor told his stepbrother that he would check with Stroman. Stroman later texted West: “We are happy to see what we can find out.”
Stroman has been Charlottesville City Attorney since July 2023 and on administrative leave since April, while an investigation into an unspecified complaint is ongoing. An assistant city attorney who was put on leave at the same time is no longer employed by the city.
The Chesapeake turmoil has nothing to do with Stroman’s administrative leave, Charlottesville Council Member Lloyd Snook said in an email to Charlottesville Tomorrow. Snook said he didn’t know about the Chesapeake situation before WHRO broke the story.
Other council members either refused to comment on the matter or didn’t respond to Charlottesville Tomorrow’s email. Some forwarded the request to Charlottesville’s communications office.
Stroman didn’t respond to Charlottesville Tomorrow’s request for comment.
Following the Chesapeake mayor’s request for help in 2022, Stroman and at least one member of his Chesapeake staff got involved.
The mayor’s stepbrother was building on a property he bought in Nahunta, Georgia, but he didn’t realize there was a moratorium on new connections to the city’s sewer system before he started. Georgia lawyers wanted at least $3,000 to look at his case, he wrote Mayor West in an email seen by WHRO.
Stroman reached out to the Nahunta, Georgia city manager and city attorney and filed a Freedom of Information Act request, according to records seen by WHRO. Chesapeake staff spoke with a Georgia Department of Health staff member, and eventually, the matter was resolved.
“We had a conversation with an official in the Georgia Department of Health,” Stroman wrote in an email to Mayor West. “We shared with him our experience that in Virginia a local ordinance imposing a moratorium on new septic or alternative onsite systems when sewer was not available would be preempted (overruled) by state law. I suspect that is what did the trick.”
Stroman credited his colleague Ellen Bergren, current deputy city attorney, for “invaluable” assistance as an expert on utilities law.
While Chesapeake doesn’t have rules prohibiting the mayor and his family from using city resources to their benefit, the incident was flagged by ethics experts who spoke with WHRO as problematic.
Now, at least one Chesapeake City Council member has called for the mayor to resign, while others ordered a probe into the incident. One asked for the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office to conduct an independent investigation into the case. Another wanted to focus on finding out how the information was leaked and requested Chesapeake’s current city attorney to review Stroman’s emails and see whether he forwarded any of them to his personal email or deleted before leaving the position, The Virginian-Pilot reported.
Stroman resigned from his position as Chesapeake City Attorney in January 2023, about six months after helping the mayor’s stepbrother.
His resignation was forced. Plans were already in place to terminate him at that time over a different issue.
According to The Virginian-Pilot reporting, Stroman warned City Council members in 2022 that they likely violated state law when they refused to produce documents requested through a Freedom of Information Act request. He encouraged the Council to provide the records to mitigate their legal liability.
“It is difficult to overstate the vulnerability of both the city and the council member in light of the prior, inaccurate FOIA responses,” Stroman wrote. If the Planning Commission member Levin Turner, the person behind the request in question, were to file a lawsuit, the city would likely to lose, and might be ordered to pay Mr. Turner’s attorney’s fees, Stroman wrote.
In other words, Stroman appears to have been fighting for more transparency. At least, that’s how one Charlottesville Council member saw it.
“I had read about the controversy, and I had researched the background of his legal opinion and the advice that he was giving, and I saw that he was getting flak for giving what seemed to me to be a completely appropriate legal opinion,” Councilor Lloyd Snook, who is also an attorney, told Charlottesville Tomorrow in an email.
“Personally, I regarded the fact that he was willing to tell Council what they did not want to hear as a good thing, and as a qualification rather than a disqualification.”
That wasn’t the Chesapeake Council’s reaction, and it wasn’t the first time the mayor was unsatisfied with Stroman’s legal interpretation, according to The Virginian-Pilot sources. According to the Pilot’s report, the Council voted to accept Stroman’s resignation but the original plan was to terminate him. However, they gave him an option to resign first, which Stroman accepted.
Half a year later, he started as Charlottesville City Attorney.
