Mayor Juan Perez |
A Wisconsin mayor has ordered a businesswoman who helped lead an unsuccessful recall against him last year to remove a link to the local police department from her business website.
Sheboygan City Attorney Steve McLean sent a cease-and-desist letter on behalf of Mayor Juan Perez to city resident Jeni Reisinger, owner of a website design business and a leader of the mayoral recall effort in September 2006, reported the Sheboygan Press.
"Maintenance of this link could be construed as having been authorized or endorsed by the city and/or its police department" and should be removed "until such time as the city were to authorize such a link," McLean wrote.
The Oct. 19 letter ordered Reisinger to remove the link from Sheboygan Spirit – originally published in 2006 under the name recallperez.com as part of the campaign. In a follow-up e-mail, dated Oct. 22, McLean clarified he had meant to reference her business website, Brat City Web Design, where Reisinger links to both the Sheboygan Police Department and Chamber of Commerce.
Reisinger still maintains recall-related material on her Sheboygan Spirit site, including forum postings critical of Perez.
Perez told the Sheboygan Press the city must be careful which websites link to it.
"People associate (Reisinger) with racism because of that website she designed during the recall when she had me holding a Mexican flag (with) 'Power to illegals?' captioned on it. They were calling me 'muchachito' and 'senor,' all these derogatory terms on that website, and she was the creator of that website," Perez said. "My concern was that people would have some concern over her linking to a city website."
The photograph Perez referenced had been digitally altered by the recall campaign.
The mayor, whose biography on the city's website says he minored in political science and has a law degree from the University of Wisconsin, said it was his impression the city must give its permission for others to link to the city's website.
"If she didn't need that, I believe attorney McLean would have told me that, and that would have been the end of it," Perez said.
"He said she wasn't authorized, he didn't say she needed permission," he added.
For her part, Reisinger believes the effort by Perez is "revenge" for the recall and, thus far, has ignored the demand by city officials.
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