North Sacramento City Council member agrees to investigation into residency

Sacramento City Council member Sean Loloee agreed on Friday to an independent investigation into claims that he does not live in the district he was elected to represent. Loloee’s compliance comes hours before his council colleagues were scheduled to vote on the investigation in an emergency meeting. 

Sitting in what appeared to be the living room of the Hagginwood home that he owns on Friday morning, Loloee said in a statement on Zoom with news media Friday morning that he would not be at the special meeting. 

“I say with full confidence that I live in the district that I proudly represent,” Loloee said to reporters, later refusing to answer questions. “My first job is to be a husband and father. I’m going to spend much needed time with my family just as I promised I would.”

The call for an investigation follows reporting from The Sacramento Bee that Loloee has lived in a million-dollar home in Granite Bay since he was sworn into office, instead of in District 2, a largely impoverished area he was elected to represent in 2020.

District 2 encompasses neighborhoods like North Sacramento, Del Paso Heights, Hagginwood, Robla and Woodlake. 

Earlier this week, Mayor Darrell Steinberg sent a letter to Loloee giving him two options: Agree to an independent investigation or have the City Council vote for the investigation. 

Loloee initially bucked the mayor’s request, saying “this decision is not solely up to the Mayor or me.”

A group calling itself the District 2 Coalition of Neighborhood Leaders also requested an independent investigation into Loloee’s residency claims. More than a dozen people signed the request, including the district’s active transportation commissioner, executive director of the Del Paso Boulevard Partnership, and leaders from multiple community neighborhood associations.

Mina Perez, a spokesperson for the group, told CapRadio earlier this week that once the investigation is over, her group wants to focus on making sure District 2 is better represented moving forward. 

“We’ve been targeted for way too long to be a bad neighborhood, a bad district, and underrepresented,” Perez said. “There’s a lot of us that live here that are good people. We’re making an effort to clean up our area and to have the same rights that everyone else has in good neighborhoods.”

City spokesperson Tim Swanson said in an email that “the City Attorney’s Office will begin work on this immediately” but that details of the investigation — including a possible timeline of when it will begin or end — have “yet to be determined.”