Two days after the forcible removal of Martinsville City Council member Aaron Rawls from a council meeting, he and fellow councilor Julian Mei held a press conference to share their concerns about the incident and the impact that council dynamics are having on the city’s reputation.
At Tuesday’s council meeting, Mayor L.C. Jones, who believed Rawls to be insulting a staff member, cut his comments short. A sheriff’s deputy approached Rawls and asked him to leave. The deputy escorted Rawls out of the room after he collected his belongings.
The removal came after Rawls’ comments about a possible pay increase for City Manager Aretha Ferrell-Benavides.
Days prior to the meeting, Rawls had criticized the council in a sharply worded email; among the criticisms was the council’s ongoing pay negotiations with Ferrell-Benavides.
At noon Thursday, residents and members of the press converged on the sidewalk outside Martinsville’s municipal building to listen to Rawls finish the comments he had started two nights earlier.
“I don’t want this to be the next step in the drama,” Rawls said. “I want this to be [about] what are we doing now and how do we go forward.”
Rawls touched on several points, including the quality of city leadership and Martinsville’s reputation outside the city.
Both he and Mei said they believe that the circumstances leading up to Rawls’ removal were planned.
Rawls said that efforts to remove him from the meeting only happened after he began talking about potential executive pay raises. The gathered crowd cheered and clapped at this observation.
He accused Ferrell-Benavides of signaling the deputy to have him removed. Ferrell-Benavides denied this.
“No one signed [the deputy],” she said by email Thursday evening. “She is a court deputy and acted as trained in her court role. While the moment was difficult I do not have the authority to remove a member as city manager. While I serve as clerk the mayor is the chair and is the only [one] with the authority to request the removal of someone who is out of order.”
Ferrell-Benavides added that while the mayor was attempting to move on from Rawls’ comments, he did not expressly ask for Rawls to be removed.
Jones could not be reached for comment Thursday.
“It’s a people problem, and I think we saw some of that [two nights ago],” Rawls said at the press conference. He described his removal from the council meeting as a civil rights violation but did not say if he plans to pursue legal action.
Pay for the city manager has become a point of contention for Rawls. While Ferrell-Benavides argued at Tuesday’s meeting that her pay is less than at her previous position, Rawls maintains that the city’s recent property reassessment, which could lead to higher taxes, makes this a less-than-ideal time to consider a pay increase for any high-ranking city employee.
Ferrell-Benavides was hired as city manager in 2023, with a pay of around $175,000. Based on the city’s transparency portal, which lists city employee compensation, her pay is currently $183,855.
“We need to sit down and talk about the brutal tax increases people are looking at,” Rawls said.
During a closed meeting last week, the council voted to give Jones the authority to negotiate a new contract with the city manager. While Rawls was not present at the meeting, Mei was. He explained his vote at Thursday’s press conference.
Mei acknowledged that it was his suggestion to leave contract negotiations with the mayor. He added that the ultimate decision lies with the council.
“Do all your negotiations, have your chit-chats, work it out,” Mei said. “But you must bring the contract to council for approval, yea or nay.”
Talking about Tuesday’s incident, Mei said he was shocked to see the forcible removal of an elected official.
“I cannot think of a more disturbing experience occurring in the history of Martinsville, maybe the commonwealth itself, and I have lived in Manhattan for a decade,” said Mei, who was elected to the council in November. “Aaron’s rights of speech under the First Amendment have been violated.”
Mei said that in the future, if an elected official were to be forcibly removed from a meeting, regardless of who it was, he would leave in solidarity.
Rawls and Mei said that the reputation of the city is important.
“I was holding my breath, pleading, begging God that people at the state level would not hear about this because it would ruin all those partnerships we built,” Rawls said. Disputes among the city’s leadership signal to outsiders that Martinsville is not the ideal place to conduct business. “We showed off a whole lot of ugly.”
Mei agreed.
“Social media and algorithms out there, they pick up this stuff,” Mei said. “If you Google ‘Martinsville’ or ‘Martinsville City Council,’ all of this stuff is showing up.”
Mei urged everyone to move past this incident. Both he and Rawls said they would continue working with the other council members.
“I have absolutely reached the end of my tether with this nonsense,” Mei said. “We have so much within our grasp, we just need to reach out and take it.”
