Phoenix’s top PR guy, David Ramirez, who’d been with the city for ten years after a prior life as an Arizona Republic reporter, is suddenly out, at least temporarily, according to this Scott Wong blog post on AZCentral.com:

The city of Phoenix’s chief spokesman, David J. Ramirez, has been removed from his role as acting public information director and placed on administrative leave, city officials confirmed today.

PHX 11 Station Manager Deborah Sedillo Dugan became the new interim director of the Public Information Office effective 5 p.m. Friday, according to an e-mail from Deputy City Manager David Krietor to department employees and the City Council.

Sedillo Dugan declined to explain why Ramirez was placed on paid leave, nor did she know how long he would be gone.

Whatever happens to Ramirez will work itself out in time, but PHXated would like to point out that at least two people aren’t doing him any favors.

The first is city manager Frank Fairbanks, who is quoted by Wong referring to unnamed “allegations” against Ramirez. This isn’t fair. If the city is going to allege that someone did something, it should say what it is.

If it isn’t, which is of course the correct thing to do, it should shut up.

But the second person not doing Ramirez any favors is … Ramirez himself, who said this:

“In my career, I have never touched anyone inappropriately. I don’t have any blemish on my evaluations in 13 years. I’ve never had a formal or informal complaint given to me about my professional conduct,” Ramirez said. “My exemplary record working for the city speaks for itself.”

Now we know what the allegations are—right?

Well maybe not. According to this post on the New Times site, Ramirez says “his quote shouldn’t be understood to imply that he’s touched someone inappropriately”:

He simply meant to tell Wong that he’s not being accused of touching, striking or doing anything like that to someone, he says.

“I just said I couldn’t talk about any aspect of the investigation,” he says. “I wanted to convey to him that I’ve always been professional.”

With all respect to the difficulties Ramirez is going through, his grasp of how to handle a potential personal scandal is, given his professional position, more than somewhat ironically under-developed.

p.s. The NT story also says this:

Ramirez says he let Wong know the quote was sort of out of context. He says Wong revised the azcentral.com blog post, but we saw no difference.

If what Ramirez says is true, the site is doing him a disservice by leaving the original blog post up. If it isn’t, Wong should explain the original context of the quote. Finally, there doesn’t seem to be an “official” story on the site yet.