Let’s make like Charles Dickens — or Jacob Marley — and revisit Christmas past and see where it takes us.
It was around this time last year, December 2014, Mary Salas was settling into her role as mayor.
Because she ran and was elected in the middle of her third council term, Salas’s seat on the City Council needed a two-year place warmer.
Almost 50 people applied to be her replacement. Just that November Chula Vista residents had voted to have council members appoint replacements rather than incur the cost of special elections.
At the same time John McCann had won his bid to return to the City Council for a third term, defeating former Chula Vista Mayor Steve Padilla by two votes. Two.
The narrow margin meant a costly recount was launched by Padilla supporters.
With an empty seat and another precariously filled, the Chula Vista City Council on Christmas Day 2014 was mostly intact but unstable.
Christmas present
One year later the council is whole. But at what cost?
When the three wise council women and man had called for applications to review they were tasked with submitting their recommendations to proceed to interviews.
Their choices could have been public. Should have been public. But only one — John McCann — revealed who he wanted to advance to the next stage. The remaining council persons and the city attorney wanted their choices kept secret. They cited the deliberative process.
The reasoning didn’t sit well with open government advocates, including a member of the city’s ethics board, and they threatened a lawsuit.
The council capitulated but only after it had contentiously appointed an executive from the city’s largest contractor, Republic Services, responsible for providing the city’s trash collection. In January 2015 Steve Miesen was Chula Vista’s fifth council member.
But the lawsuits did not disappear. The issue isn’t who was appointed to council, the issue is how they were appointed. Transparency advocates say the entire process should have been in the open — including recommendations for final interviews. In not revealing in public who they chose to advance to interviews, council members allegedly violated the Brown Act.
Council could have avoided the legal action had they simply redone the entire appointment in public. But instead they’ve incurred tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees defending their actions and running out the clock until the time when contesting Miesen’s appointment is moot because his term on the council is up in 2016.
Christmas future
Most futures are not set in stone but this one is. By Christmas 2016 the Chula Vista City Council will have needlessly spent lots of money defending actions they could have avoided had they just been transparent and open from the beginning.
