La Plata’s mayoral censure story has a new chapter: primary records obtained since our previous coverage — the underlying MDOT email chain and the town’s full Charter — now allow us to fact-check specific claims from both the mayor and the council, rather than simply reporting their competing accounts.
As previously reported, the Town Council voted 4-1 Aug. 18 to censure Mayor Jeannine James over her handling of a state highway-safety coalition appointment, and James disputed the council’s version of events in response to written questions, saying the MDOT invitation had been hers alone from the outset. The documents now in hand largely settle that specific factual question — and complicate both sides’ public framing in different ways.
The actual email chain shows a more precise sequence than either side’s earlier public statements captured. MDOT Secretary Katie Thomson invited James personally, as mayor, on June 11. But on July 20, MDOT Senior Advisor Vinn White followed up with Town Manager Chuck Stevens — not James — writing that MDOT needed “executive-level attention and doers” and was “open to arrangements (mayor or council member) that helps give shine and delivers.” Town officials say that email was the basis for the council’s July 28 vote to nominate Guttenberg. Stevens notified MDOT of the nomination at 7:39 a.m. on July 29; nine minutes later, James emailed MDOT leadership and the lieutenant governor’s office directly, writing that the council’s designation “does not align with the intent or basis of your invitation.” Two days later, White told Stevens and Guttenberg that after consulting MDOT leadership, “this particular invitation is not transferrable or can be further extended.”
That timeline directly contradicts the specific claim James made in her earlier response to this newsroom: that the invitation was “nontransferable” from the start. The July 20 email shows the opposite — MDOT explicitly telling the town it was open to either the mayor or a council member. The “not transferrable” language only appears in MDOT’s July 31 email, sent after James’s intervention, not before it.
The council’s account holds up better on that specific point, but not entirely. White’s July 31 reversal email doesn’t actually say James’s intervention caused it — it thanks the town for its consideration and is framed diplomatically. The resolution itself only goes as far as saying James’s email “leads members of this body to reasonably believe” it prompted the reversal. That’s an inference the council drew, not a fact MDOT put in writing.
The bigger new finding cuts against the council. A full read of the town’s Charter — not just the sections quoted in the resolution — turns up no provision authorizing the council to censure the mayor or any elected official at all. The Charter’s only mechanisms for holding an elected official accountable are voter recall by petition and referendum, or automatic forfeiture of office following a misdemeanor conviction tied to election or personnel-law violations. The council’s general authority to “determine its own rules and order of business” likely explains how it adopted both the Code of Civility and the censure resolution — but nothing in the Charter spells out a disciplinary process for elected officials, or uses the word “censure” at all. That’s a real basis for James’s separately stated position that the council lacked express authority to act, even though her specific factual claim about the MDOT invitation doesn’t hold up.
One more new detail: the council’s Sept. 8 charter-amendment hearing, previously described only in general terms, targets something specific — eliminating the mayor’s current Article III authority to call a special council meeting. That’s a discrete power shift, not yet adopted, running on a parallel track to the censure fight.
Neither side has commented on these specific findings yet; James’s account of the MDOT invitation’s “nontransferable” status has not been reconciled with the July 20 email, and the council has not addressed the absence of an express censure provision in the Charter.
