Weaver fires back at critics

CITY HALL — Councilman Dave Weaver, after facing two weeks of heavy criticism over his alleged references to Armenian smokers in a Pasadena Weekly article, fired back on Tuesday, calling his critics’ “ugly charges of ethnic insensitivity” unfounded and politically motivated.

Weaver read from a prepared statement at the beginning of the City Council meeting Tuesday after missing last week’s meeting to tend to what he said was a family medical emergency.

At that meeting, critics called for his resignation, expressed their outrage and called for the embattled councilman’s colleagues to censure him. A similar round of criticism returned during the public comment portion of the meeting on Tuesday, with residents and former election adversaries renewing calls for Weaver’s resignation.

“This statement was intended to encourage an anti-Armenian sentiment,” Chahe Keuroghelian, a former City Council candidate, told the dais long after Weaver had left to tend to his ill wife after reading his statement.

Over the past two weeks, the Armenian National Committee Glendale Chapter has issued three major e-mail action alerts urging its membership to protest Weaver’s alleged “ethnic stereotyping.”

The building controversy centered on a convoluted series of events, in which the Pasadena Weekly originally attributed the contentious remarks in the June 26 cover article to Mayor John Drayman, who was never interviewed by the magazine’s reporter.

After the publication corrected the attribution — in which Weaver was quoted as saying there would be “a lot of opposition from one segment of the population that loves to smoke” to a coming anti-smoking ordinance — the furor continued to build in the councilman’s absence.

Critics, many of them Armenian, also took issue with a part of the story in which the reporter attributed Weaver’s quote as “referring to the city’s substantial and politically influential Armenian community.”

Weaver on Tuesday categorically denied having said that in the interview, accusing the reporter, Carl Kozlowski, of possibly extrapolating information from interviews with other people or from using secondhand information.

“I never said that,” Weaver said. “I will not apologize for what I never said.”