FAIRMONT– Prior to the regular Fairmont City Council meeting on Monday, the council held a special meeting to discuss the potential code of conduct and city staff standards of engagement.

At a special meeting on Dec. 15, 2025, the council asked that a code of conduct be in effect by March 1 and that public input be a part of it. Then on Jan. 16, 2026, the council set the special meeting for Feb. 9 to discuss the proposed code of conduct.

Acting Administrator Paul Hoye said that prior to the city’s former interim city administrator, Jeff O’Neill’s departure, he had been working on a code of conduct policy and city staff standards of engagement.

“At this meeting we’re just looking for additional feedback from the council because this is the council’s policy that they’ll be adopting,” Hoye said.

Council Member James Kotewa said he has repeatedly asked for a code of conduct and said the former was lapsing in certain areas. He briefly referenced the city of Alexandria’s code of conduct which the League of Minnesota Cities has deemed one of the best in the state.

“The issues that we’ve dealt with in meetings have been mostly behavioral, not necessarily procedural… we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard and it’s very important for us to take a look at that. There’s rules and procedures for everything,” Kotewa said.

Council Member Randy Lubenow asked for some clarification on the documents the council was looking at during the meeting. City Clerk Betsy Steuber said she had provided both the current rules of procedure and a draft of the code of conduct so that the council could compare the current language with the proposed language.

Lubenow then said he had some questions about the communication, specifically 9a which reads: Council members should direct all questions to the city administrator or department head (director public works, finance director, police chief). The city administrator shall be included in all communications.

“It seems like that should not be phrased that way. It should be that council members should direct all questions to city administrator and department head that is affected. I think it’s important for the city administrator to know what’s going on, but it’s important to get the information to the department head,” Lubenow said.

Hoye pointed out that it also said that the city administrator should be included in all communications.

Chris Hoodecheck with Flaherty and Hood referenced city charter, section 2.0.

“Essentially there could be an argument made that correspondence is supposed to be directly through the city administrator and no one else, but I think it’s fair to read it as… the city administrator is copied on all correspondence,” Hoodecheck said.

Lubenow then suggested that the charter commission look at the matter and said that he felt like questions should be directed to both the city administrator and department heads, rather than to just one person (city administrator).

Council Member Britney Kawecki said that because she doesn’t have access to the city attorney, she has gotten a second opinion on the matter.

“Neither the council nor any of its members shall dictate the appointment or removal of a city administrator or employee,” Kawecki said. “That means… I can’t go and say, ‘I want you to hire….’ Now I can go there and express my views to the city administrator… then it says except for the purpose of inquiry and investigation under section 2.8,” Kawecki said.

She further said it had nothing to do with communicating with city employees and that if it was going to be a problem with the council, it should go to the charter commission for consideration.

Hoodecheck said he did not know who Kawecki had gotten her second opinion from but that it had more to do with separation.

“The bottom line is, the point of a charter provision like this is to separate the government from the employees and administrators and individuals that are working through the city,” Hoodecheck said.

Kawecki said that until something is taken to the charter commission, she wanted to make sure that it was applied equally and not selectively to certain council members.

“I have an email in here from a council member sitting at this bench who is sending emails to staff and I know that council members at this bench do their rounds in this building and they talk to staff about issues inside the city and they call the staff and do all of that. I do mine all via email,” Kawecki said.

Council Member Jay Maynard asked Mayor Lee Baarts to enforce the rules of decorum in discussion, specifically when council members make comments about other councilors.

Lubenow said he believed that the discussion seemed like a “waste of everybody’s time.”

He added that when he first began on the council, he was told only to communicate to the city administrator, which he thinks is “wrong” and puts too much pressure on the city administrator.

Thirty minutes into the meeting, Baarts pointed out to the council that it had only discussed one item so far.

Kotewa said his understanding was that one of the biggest things with the code of conduct was maintaining some decorum.

“It’s been disheartening this last year on the council the amount of complaints and things that come though. Everything that I’ve learned is coming down to communication. One thing that I’ve learned as a police officer is that you can ask questions, or you can question someone,” Kotewa said.

He said that the council needs to be held responsible and said it has lost some areas of civility.

Kawecki, however, called the code of conduct 95 percent subjective.

“I’ve already been through two code of conduct hearings that have been based on subjectivity… for me, when I look at the past code of conduct, I wasn’t able to be found guilty on it so let’s quadruple it in size and add a 100 times more subjectivity to nail her the next time,” Kawecki said.

“Careful, councilor,” Baarts said.

Kawecki continued and said, “for me, you can’t expect that this isn’t personal, that this isn’t being designed specifically for me….We all know that my emails were just blocked,” Kawecki said.

She referenced her personal schedule and said that between her young children and her non-traditional work schedule, she has time late in the evening to consider and respond to city matters.

“I don’t expect people to respond. I’m doing my job. I have a different life than everybody else,” Kawecki said. “We’re all adults. Turn off your notifications.”

She said the council’s job shouldn’t be deciding on a code of conduct, but rather following the charter.

Hoye then spoke up and said that when he took his current role as acting administrator, he saw some issues with communication between staff and council that he thought could improve. He asked the council to consider that they email staff between 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and that if they compose emails outside that time frame that they delay the message.

“Just out of courtesy of staff that also have personal lives and families that they want to be focused on outside of work, I requested that those emails to be sent during that period of time,” Hoye said. “Knowing that those emails can be involving stress, when employees are getting ready to go to bed, they shouldn’t be having to think of that during that period of time. They should have time on their own, outside of work, that they’re not having to deal with emails that could be sent later when they’re not an emergency.”

However he said the timeframe was not the reason that he blocked Kawecki’s emails but rather the reason that he blocked her emails to staff was because he was finding emails to staff that he was not being included on.

“When I requested Councilor Kawecki to include me on future communications, she did not address my concerns. She ignored those concerns and continued to do so. So when I look at the charter, I do not feel that Councilor Kawecki was following the charter,” Hoye said.

Following Hoye’s remarks, Baarts said that in 45 minutes the council had not talked about one thing dealing with the code of conduct.

“We haven’t done one thing. We haven’t done one thing on 16 pages of a draft…. I really want to know why we’re here…. We’re just going back and forth,” Baarts said.

Kotewa again said the reason he wanted to discuss code of conduct was because he wanted to avoid discussing employees and issues between individual council members, which he said he felt was inappropriate for the council to do.

Maynard agreed that he was disappointed with the conversation thus far but said the council needed a code of conduct.

Baarts asked the council if it would like to actually discuss the code of conduct at a different meeting.

Kotewa made a motion to adjourn and said he would like to review the proposed code of conduct again and have a meeting again by May 15. The motion unanimously passed.