EASTHAMPTON — In the wake of longtime City Councilor Dan Rist calling on council leadership to deal with what he alleges is harassment and bullying by fellow councilor Owen Zaret, two former councilors are saying that they were also on the receiving end of such behavior.
Peg Conniff, who served for three terms before not seeking reelection in 2021, and Lindsey Rothschild, who resigned in June in the middle of her second term, both reached out to the Gazette after a story Wednesday detailed the conflict between Rist and Zaret. They said similar behavior had been targeted at them, isn’t isolated, and wasn’t something that cropped up suddenly or recently.
Zaret on Friday denied Rist’s claims, alleging that Rist is the one who has been marginalizing and retaliating against him for more than a year. He also asserts that Rist has employed “microaggressions and condescending language” in public, such as telling Zaret he talks for too long in meetings.
“He’s bullying me,” Zaret said. “He’s using his power to prevent me from using my voice and communicating concerns, certainly back then and now. You can’t have it both ways when you say you want to have a very professional relationship and then just make rude comments that also extend to public events.”
Zaret says Rist has severed communication with him outside of council email after he expressed concerns last year about the deliberation process for an ordinance item as well as the source of information that was submitted on the record. After sharing that with Rist, who was vice president of the council at the time, and then-president Conniff, Zaret alleges that both councilors didn’t acknowledge his concerns and opted not to discuss it further.
The situation continues to unravel, Zaret says, when insinuations were made that he had attempted to harass someone while trying to gather information.
“When I went to councilors Conniff and Rist, they basically just decided that they didn’t want to hear that and shut me down,” he said.
Rist did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
Zaret says he’s attempted to talk with Rist on multiple occasions, but those efforts have gone unanswered. Zaret says that by limiting his access to them, Conniff and Rist were censoring him.
But from Conniff’s perspective, Rist was establishing boundaries by only communicating with Zaret via City Council email rather than through personal phone calls, text messages and emails.
“Councilor Rist is entirely within his right to do so. There is no rule that states that councilors must meet one on one outside of council, use personal email or texts to communicate or have any personal relationship outside of City Council,” Conniff said in an email. “This perceived ‘disagreement’ stems from the appropriate and justifiable boundary setting by Councilor Rist … I know this to be true because I, too, had to implement the same boundary setting with Councilor Zaret during my tenure as City Council president.”
Conniff said that the boundaries set by Rist do not inhibit the work of the Finance Committee nor the work of the council as a whole. She said that demanding a personal audience for issues that come before the council is both inappropriate and unnecessary, as conversations like that are most desirable in the public eye.
“Having once had a friendly relationship with Councilor Zaret, I was shocked and disturbed at the sudden turn it took during my time as council president,” she said.
Conniff further stated at one point, she reached out to the city’s Personnel Department and the city attorney, and even considered invoking Rule 19 of the City Council, which is the Code of Ethics.
The rule requires an atmosphere of professional conduct and civility among its members and specifically cites not tolerating harassment, or threatening or abusive language. The code of ethics also extends to council members’ social media presence or electronic communications.
Conniff said she decided not to pursue any sort of resolution as it seemed “counterproductive” and would serve as more of a distraction to city leaders during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I therefore chose to remain silent. However, with the recent harassing of Councilor Rist and given my deep admiration and respect for a man who has given 27 years of his life to the City of Easthampton, I come forward,” she wrote in the email. “We have already lost a strong and capable councilor when Lindsey Rothschild resigned due to similar treatment and the city is now at risk of losing another city councilor as a result of Councilor Zaret’s behavior.”
In her June resignation letter to the council, Rothschild cited personal reasons for leaving the council. In a recent interview with the Gazette, she attributed part of the reason behind her resignation to stress she felt while serving on the council alongside Zaret.
“I chose to tie my resignation into a neat little bow and walk away and not look back, hoping to erase the experience. In truth, I left the council full of pain and shame … shame that I finally took the easier route and walked away, being yet another woman silenced,” she said in an emailed statement to the Gazette.
Rothschild emailed an Aug. 9, 2021 letter she sent to Emily Russo, who is the city’s director of human services, reporting that Zaret was targeting women who disagreed with him or failed to defend him.
“This past week I introduced an amendment to an ordinance. Councilor Zaret disagreed with the amendment and quickly turned the focus of the conversation to him and later referred to the introduction of the amendment as an ‘ambush’,” Rothschild wrote. “After spending the last few days feeling traumatized, frustrated and losing sleep from being targeted by Owen Zaret’s psychodrama about a disagreement over an ordinance, am beginning to have second thoughts about running for city council again. I am thinking about how I can avoid being on any committees with Owen Zaret and thinking how to ensure that I can have minimal contact with him. Then, I realized that something is very wrong. I should not feel this way.”
Zaret said that while some councilors may have described feeling bullied and harassed, he didn’t see the circumstances that way. In Rothschild’s case, he said he had no idea what she was referring to and insisted that there were multiple times where she would lash out at him in a way that could be a violation of parliamentary procedure.
“There was nothing I ever did that would represent that,” he said. “Using strong language that’s emotionally or politically charged, that’s not bullying or harassment. That’s expressing your opinion.”
Council President Homar Gomez declined to comment on the current climate of the council, but said he was in the process of setting up a mediation between Rist and Zaret, which Zaret says he welcomes. In responding to the comments of the former councilors, Zaret said he feels targeted.
“It’s just … really disconcerting, especially with how hard I work and, you know, the feedback I’ve received from the community at large,” he said. “They’re not out for the best of the city, they’re out for the worst of Owen Zaret.”
Emily Thurlow can be reached at ethurlow@gazettenet.com.
