Santa Rosa City Councilwoman Julie Combs faces questions over residency after purchasing condo in Ecuador

A City Council member splitting time between homes in Santa Rosa and South America is drawing sharp questions about her ability to fulfill her duties after her absence from City Hall contributed to the delay of one measure before the council and prevented her from voting on a second issue.

Councilwoman Julie Combs, who has served on the council since 2012, plans to phone in to a Santa Rosa City Council meeting from her part-time home in Ecuador next week for the third time this year. A spotty international telephone connection stymied her attempt to vote on design standards for affordable housing projects Tuesday shortly after the council was forced to delay a vote on new building codes.

One of her colleagues, Councilman Ernesto Olivares, said early in Tuesday’s meeting that he’s heard Combs “has actually vacated her home and moved out of the country” and asked top city staff to find out “whether she intends to continue serving on this council or not.”

“As you saw tonight, we had to postpone an item,” Olivares said, “and we have a lot of critical issues that we’re going to be facing and making decisions on here in the very near future that’s going to require some full attention.”

Combs, whose term is up at the end of 2020 and does not plan to seek reelection, denied that she has left Santa Rosa for good in a message published on Facebook on Thursday morning.

She did not accept a request for a phone interview Thursday, though she did respond to some questions via email.

While she and her husband are “selling a home that is too large and too expensive for us now,” Combs said in her post, she is “looking for a more affordable place to live in Santa Rosa.”

“I am also continuing to work and vote on issues I’ve been working on for many years,” she said. “The idea that if I’m out of town for a couple of weeks I suddenly don’t understand issues in Santa Rosa is pretty silly.”

Combs acknowledged in September she had considered resigning from the City Council and moving to Ecuador with her husband full time, citing health and financial reasons that prompted her to curtail a bid for county supervisor earlier this year. She and her husband already have bought a condominium in the city of Cuenca.

However, Combs decided to retain her seat because she wanted to be able to vote on her successor, which she can’t do under the current rules. She asked her colleagues to reconsider how council vacancies are filled, but she couldn’t rally a majority to support her proposal.

After that, she traveled to Ecuador for a couple of weeks, was marked absent for one mid-October meeting, returned to personally attend the council’s Oct. 22 meeting, and once again left town to celebrate her and her husband’s early November birthdays in Ecuador. She most recently missed a Nov. 5 council meeting, but so did Olivares and Councilman John Sawyer.

Combs called in to a council meeting from Ecuador in March and teleconferenced in again Tuesday. She said she plans to participate in next week’s meeting over the telephone, the third time this year she has phoned in to a council meeting.

Council members are not bound to attend every meeting or stay within Santa Rosa’s city limits for 100% of their term. However, they can lose their seat for a number of reasons, including leaving town for more than 30 consecutive days without their colleagues’ permission.

City Attorney Sue Gallagher said city staff would address Olivares’ question about Combs’ residency.

“We’re looking into it and just confirming that she continues to maintain a residence here in Santa Rosa and that she is not outside of the jurisdiction more than 30 days,” Gallagher said.

Combs does not appear to have left the city for a month straight at any time since she was elected, and, in her Facebook post, she said she “will continue to be a resident of Santa Rosa.”

Former Mayor Scott Bartley, who criticized Combs in a public Wednesday night Facebook post of his own, said his former colleague is unfairly denying Santa Rosa citizens their representation.

“Coming back into town once every 30 days doesn’t cut it for being engaged in the community, I’m sorry,” said Bartley, whose time on the council overlapped with the first two years of Combs’ tenure.

Neither Bartley nor Olivares reached out to Combs before their public comments on her residency, she said in an email. In her Facebook post, she said, “And I do wish people who are making comments would talk directly with me in private rather than making pronouncements at public meetings.”

“If they cared they would have asked me directly,” she said. “But instead they are just distracting away from important decisions for our city that have been in the works for some time.”

The council had to delay the building code vote because of the temporary lack of a quorum in Tuesday’s meeting. Mayor Tom Schwedhelm was absent, and Jack Tibbetts and Victoria Fleming both would have had to recuse themselves from voting on the issue to avoid a potential conflict of interest because they own property near the city’s wildland borders, Gallagher said.

That left four council members participating in the meeting - Combs, Olivares, Sawyer and Vice Mayor Chris Rogers - and under normal circumstances, that would be enough. But while the state’s open meetings law allows for officials to conduct government business via teleconference, it also requires at least four participating members of Santa Rosa’s City Council to be within city limits when doing so. With Combs out of the country, the council lacked a quorum and had to postpone.

Combs later missed a vote on state-mandated design standards for certain affordable housing projects when her telephone connection appeared to cut out shortly before roll call.

The measure passed anyway, with Combs marked absent; when she reconnected a few minutes later, she noted that she would have joined her colleagues in voting for it.

In her Facebook post, Combs pledged to discuss her situation further next week, when she again plans to call in to a council meeting. She did not respond Thursday when asked via email whether she was planning to serve out the remainder of her term.

“I’m working out difficult family medical and financial issues as best I can while continuing the supposedly part time job on council,” Combs said in her Facebook post. “I’ll say more on Nov. 19.”