Local police ticket Midlands mayor over how she ran town council meeting
A dispute at a recent Swansea town council meeting resulted in a police citation being issued to the town’s mayor.
Mayor Viola McDaniel said a town police officer came to the mayor’s office and issued her a court summons based on how she had conducted a town council meeting two days earlier, allegedly for violating a town ordinance on council procedure.
The citation put the mayor in the unusual position of being cited by her own town’s police for how she conducted a town meeting.
The case came to an end Thursday when McDaniel appeared in municipal court to fight the ticket, only for Swansea police to drop the complaint, the mayor told The State on Monday.
The police citation followed a contentious town council meeting on Oct. 8, when McDaniel said she declined to recognize a motion by a town council member to amend the meeting agenda.
“We were busy and I said, ‘No sir, we’re going on with the agenda,’ and he got mad,” McDaniel said. “I’m thinking it’s just politically motivated.”
McDaniel declined to name the councilman she had the exchange with, but said he was a former opponent in her 2021 campaign for mayor who is also a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the town over budgeting irregularities — which matches up with Councilman Michael Luongo.
In 2022, Luongo and fellow town council member Doris Simmons sued McDaniel and the town of Swansea alleging an audit found some $3.3 million in assets unaccounted for. In a reply, McDaniel said the lawsuit mischaracterized what the audit found in the town budget and counterclaimed that the suit was defamatory. The suit remains pending.
Luongo told The State he asked for McDaniel to be issued the summons because he felt her denial of his motion was out of step with the rules for council meetings laid down in the town ordinance.
“I was just trying to get a point of order in, and the whole council was in agreement to do it,” Luongo said. “And when I did that, she wouldn’t recognize me.”
The State saw a copy of the ticket issued to McDaniel. It cited a provision of a town ordinance allowing a police officer to issue a municipal court summons for violations of town ordinances, but does not cite a specific violation by McDaniel. The provision of the ordinance calls for a $500 fine for violations.
“If I hadn’t met the conditions of going to court, I’d be going to jail,” McDaniel said. “I wasn’t about to pay a $500 ticket.”
Even with the complaint dropped, she felt the true purpose of the citation was to embarrass and undermine her in the community. She also pointed out that Swansea’s five-person police department is under the direction of the town administrator, not individual council members.
McDaniel maintains she did nothing improper in the meeting.
“I followed Robert’s Rules of Order, and you have to be recognized to speak,” she said, referring to the standard guide for conducting a public meeting.
The mayor was represented at the hearing by Columbia attorney Seth Rose, who said he couldn’t think of any precedent for a governing body’s meeting disputes to be turned into a police case, and certainly not for the matter to be brought to the same police department that answers to the council, because it creates an inherent conflict of interest.
“The citation being issued was outrageous,” Rose said. “There is no place for this to happen anywhere.”
The Swansea Police Department did not respond to a request for comment from The State before publication.
Luongo said he was disappointed to see the complaint dropped at Thursday’s hearing.
“I don’t feel like I was truly represented,” he said. “If I had an attorney there, he would have called a point of order, and said, ‘If they’re not prepared to proceed, we are.’”
Luongo said he has spoken to an attorney about potential next steps to ensure Swansea’s council meetings are run correctly.
“If I try to raise a point of order, I feel that she would do it again,” he said.
But McDaniel said the council has met since the disputed Oct. 8 meeting, and she has been able to preside without incident.
“It wasn’t discussed,” she said. “It was just a regular meeting.”
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