City Hall Watchdog Put on a Leash : Government: Jim Brannan has investigated numerous city matters in recent months, looking for mismanagement. Workers say he is causing them stress, and the city manager has given everyone but an assistant the OK to ignore his inquiries.

Longtime Walnut resident Jim Brannan calls himself just a “model citizen” with a more-than-average curiosity about the city’s finances and operations.

City officials say he’s an “obnoxious” nuisance who’s wasted many hours of staff time and soured morale at City Hall in a misguided bid to uncover mismanagement.

The feud, which has been escalating for months, reached a flash point recently when nearly half of the city’s 49 employees filed a confidential grievance claiming that the burly, retired IRS appeals officer was causing them stress.

In an unusual abridgment of a citizen’s access to government, City Manager Linda Holmes then notified the self-styled watchdog that she had assigned her own assistant to deal with his future inquires and instructed the rest of the city staff that they could ignore him.

“Those employees have been under continual attack by Mr. Brannan, and I just think that it’s not fair and we will no longer tolerate it,” Holmes said.

Brannan said he is awaiting a written notice from the city confirming the restrictions on his access and will contact county and state authorities in an effort to contest it.

“It’s a violation of my rights,” said Brannan, who retired from the Internal Revenue Service in 1990. “I can’t believe the city would go along with restricting someone at City Hall. . . . I’ve been a model citizen.”

Holmes, who consulted with the City Council before making her decision, counters that nothing in the California Public Records Act, which guarantees citizens access to government documents, prohibits the use of guidelines to keep public employees from being abused.

“The Public Records Act says we have to make reasonable access to the public and we’ve actually gone overboard,” Holmes said.

Brannan, 51, has become a well-known figure around City Hall since last October, when he began investigating various city matters, including a proposed civic center project, bond contracts and payments to city contractors.

“We have given him hundreds and hundreds of documents,” Holmes said.

But staff members said Brannan resorted to intimidation and threats to obtain the numerous city documents that he contends reveal financial mismanagement.

“I really feel sorry for him,” said City Clerk Beverly Sherwood, whose office fields many of Brannan’s requests for documents. “I don’t think he knows how else to handle himself except in an adversarial way.”

“That’s utter nonsense,” Brannan said of his accusers. He said Holmes was trying to discredit him. “This is part of her whole process.”

Prompted by a proposal last month to expand employee shifts to nine hours per day and give workers an extra day off every two weeks, he began to investigate the working hours of city employees.

Brannan asserts that city employees don’t get to work at the current starting time of 8 a.m.

At least twice last month he arrived at City Hall just before it was due to open and charted the arrival time of all employees, many of whom he said were late by 15 minutes or more.

“I went down there at 8 o’clock and there didn’t seem to be anybody there,” he said.

At that point, city employees started refusing to talk to him, Holmes said.

“He is so obnoxious with the staff that they simply don’t want to deal with him.”