ALLENTOWN, Pa. — A court hearing scheduled for Thursday morning will not go ahead after Allentown City Council voted 14 hours before it started to pause its legal fight with the mayor.
Council voted 4-3 to pass a measure that temporarily suspends the body’s lawsuit against Mayor Matt Tuerk.
Council President Cynthia Mota and members Santo Napoli, Daryl Hendricks and Candida Affa voted for what Napoli called “an opportunity to reset and really work together."
Members Ed Zucal, Ce-Ce Gerlach and Natalie Santos voted to go ahead with Thursday’s hearing.
Council hired former FBI agent Scott Curtis in June to investigate allegations of racism and workplace discrimination by and against Allentown city employees.
The body sued Tuerk and Finance Director Bina Patel three months later, accusing them of trying to prevent and obstruct that investigation.
Council also on Wednesday suspended its contract with Curtis' company, FLEO Investigations.
‘We’ve gotten nowhere’
Napoli on Wednesday urged his colleagues to support his motion to suspend the litigation, warning any legal resolution could take months and continue to stifle any investigation.
“Here we are, 14 months later, and we've gotten nowhere. And to me, … in the business world, that's unacceptable for things to take that long,” Napoli, a city business owner, told LehighValleyNews.com.
He’s confident council members, Tuerk’s office and their solicitors still can work together to hire an investigator to look into reports of racism first publicized last summer by the city’s NAACP branch.
Zucal, who spearheaded council’s push for an investigation, said the investigation “would have been settled a long time ago” if Tuerk did not take actions to obstruct it.
“It’s not us that’s delaying this; It’s the administration,” Zucal said, urging members to move forward with Thursday’s hearing.
Zucal is running against Tuerk in the 2025 Democratic primary for Allentown mayor.
Gerlach also pressed her colleagues to reject Napoli’s proposal, calling for a judge to independently settle the legal dispute rather than trying to work it out with Tuerk and his administration.
Mayor responds to vote
Tuerk told LehighValleyNews.com he was “pleased” to hear council members “rallied” to end its legal fight with him and Patel.
He said he’s “been supportive of council’s investigation into how we do things in the city to make sure that we can create a more inclusive environment” for more than a year.
But he’s always questioned the process council used to hire Curtis as its investigator.
He listed more than a dozen concerns in a June memo to council.
Those concerns include council not following the city’s typical process for hiring a contractor. Council has maintained it has authority under the city's charter to hire an investigator through its own process.
Tuerk announced he would not honor council’s contract with Curtis and FLEO Investigations less than two weeks after they were hired to lead the probe.
The mayor declared that contract to be “defective” and “void,” kicking off months of disputes between his administration and some council members.
Council sued Tuerk and Patel in September. The legal dispute "made it more difficult for us to work with them," the mayor said.
Money saved: Napoli
Council and the mayor can save a lot of taxpayer money by resolving their dispute within City Hall rather than at the Lehigh County Courthouse a block away.
Members earmarked $300,000 — or more — to conduct the investigation, while putting aside $20,000 for an attorney to argue its lawsuit in court.
Napoli said he worried a Lehigh County judge would simply order council members and the mayor to resolve their dispute out of court — after the city paid for lawyers on both sides of that hearing.
“I don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to get that result,” he said. “I think we just need to figure out a compromise and move this forward — and as quickly as possible.”
“Let's stop throwing good money after bad money, and let's find a way to get this done,” Napoli said.
Mota, who signed off on the lawsuit as council’s president, said members voted to pause the litigation because “we’re really worried about the taxpayers’ money.”
“We all need to work together, one way or the other,” she said.
