Embattled Cathedral City mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s announcement that she would not seek reelection after 10 bitter winters as mayor has certainly set local social media alight. Reactions were predictable, ranging from my former Council colleague Greg Pettis’ tweet “ding dong” to handwringing comments from DeRosa sycophants whose social position in the community has largely been a function of their closeness to the incumbent.
Unplugging the Cult of Personality
One of the most interesting trends in the social media commentary about DeRosa’s announcement was the almost uniform derision and disdain expressed by commenters toward DeRosa’s efforts to craft a Stalinist departure narrative.
DeRosa has attempted to characterize her decision to leave office as being some kind of orchestrated transfer of power to a hand-picked successor. The facts suggest otherwise.
Over the last two years, DeRosa’s support has been evaporating like water on a hot Coachella Valley summer day. In 2012, in an election whose legitimacy remains in doubt, DeRosa came within 13 votes of being knocked off by retired emergency dispatch supervisor Chip Yarborough. Though DeRosa had to help of a hand-picked third person spoiler candidate and the corrupt intervention of the late, unneutral city clerk to get her over the top, the narrowness of the margin between her and Mr. Yarborough gave clear indication that the bloom was definitely off DeRosa in her relationship with this constituency.
Indeed, scuttlebutt has it that, after spending years building up a cult of personality and a political network ready to enforce her views and enable often sociopathic behavior (and who can forget her telling local restauranteur Mark Carnevale to go fuck himself?), DeRosa went a bridge too far in 2012 by attempting to run a combined candidate slate of herself, former police chief Stan Henry, and former councilmember Bud England.
The electorate rightly saw DeRosa’s slate as an arrogant, overreaching, unbelievably cynical effort to pack the city Council and to ensure her permanent control for the foreseeable future, and was having none of it. By attempting to shoot the moon, DeRosa ensured the defeat of Mr. England, the weakest and least effective of her troika, and thus lost any hope of controlling the Council majority.
Moreover, sources close to city hall tell me that DeRosa’s claim that she made some kind of undertaking to Mr. Henry that she would not run is a bit of an agreeable, face-saving falsehood. In fact, my sources tell me that DeRosa had every intention of seeking another term, but that when confronted by Mr. Henry (with whom she had had a fairly acrimonious falling out), she had to do the political math and what she discovered was enough to cause her to pull out.
For, in truth, the ground had shifted under DeRosa since the 2012 election, where she had treated her narrow, potentially illegitimate, 13 vote margin as some kind of mandate. Some of her strongest supporters, including Cathedral City’s auto dealers, had defected, as it were, to Mr. Henry’s camp. Even some of DeRosa’s most reliable sycophants had swung round to back the quondam police chief.
Faced with such circumstances, and knowing that in any straight up confrontation between herself and Stan Henry, she would not only lose, but be trounced, DeRosa had no choice but to try to fabricate the most agreeable, face-saving narrative for her departure that she and her supporters could fabricate.
Nonetheless, DeRosa’s reputation for serial untruths is such that her latest effort comes across not merely as risible, but as an insult to the intelligence of Cathedral City voters and residents. Equally risible is her assertion that she is not a “career politician.” After 16 winters on the Council, 10 of them in the center chair, Kathleen Joan DeRosa is the quintessence of a small town, small-vision, small-soul career politician.
During the ten bitter winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s mayoralty, Cathedral city has stagnated. Businesses have fled, new businesses which could have replaced those that departed have flirted with us, been gratuitously antagonized by a mayor who didn’t know when to keep her ill mannered, Brooklyn yap shut, and have gone elsewhere in the Valley where mayors and councils were more receptive to their overtures.
Mayor Henry, assuming he becomes mayor, will need, right off the bat, to try to repair the often toxic relationship that exists between City Hall and the business community. He will need to be more tactful and less confrontational than DeRosa, who once pridefully declared “I don’t build bridges; I burn them.”
And DeRosa’s reputation as a bridge burner certainly preceded her. So, too, has her reputation for laziness. As one major business after another pulled out of Cathedral City, DeRosa always declined to make the effort to encourage those businesses to stay. When Smart & Final announced its decision to pull out of Cathedral City nearly a decade ago, I asked DeRosa what plans she had to try to encourage Smart & Final, which had been our 55th largest source of sales tax increment, to remain. DeRosa looked at me with that nasty expression that she so often assumes and snapped at me that any effort to encourage Smart & Final to remain was “unrealistic.” In short, she didn’t want to undertake the effort or do the work. In fact, the only work DeRosa has been willing to do for this city has been that which could provide her with immediate credit and immediate political capital.
Finally, DeRosa’s insult to thousands of Christians in Cathedral city should not go unforgotten. During the run-up to the 2012 election, DeRosa declared that she could not support marriage equality because she was “a Catholic.” Yet, no sooner had marriage equality become a reality again in California, then she officiated at a same-gender wedding ceremony for two of her supporters, held in the city Council chambers (!), after she had solicited some form of online “ordination,” thus apostasizing from the faith she so ostentatiously claimed to follow. For more discussion on DeRosa’s unbelievably cynical political and municipal apostasy, please follow this link: http://cathedralcityobserved.blogspot.com/2013/07/municipal-apostasy-kathleen-derosa.html. Even more offensive was DeRosa’s smarmy announcement on our local broadcast media that she believed Mr. Henry to be some kind of “sign from God” that she could lay down her ego driven political career. What hubris!
I Won’t have what She’s Having: Avoiding DeRosa’s Toxic Legacy
Of course, assuming that Stan Henry actually gets elected Mayor to succeed the career politician who claims to be voluntarily leaving that post after receiving some sort of sign from the Almighty, he will have a great deal of damage control in front of him.
His first challenge will be to convince Cathedral City residents that he is not merely a political clone of his predecessor, but that he can bring new vision and new direction to a city adrift. He will need to develop a very thick skin, and to understand that criticism from the constituency does not constitute an attack on his integrity or his manhood, and he will also need to learn not to impugn the integrity of those who exercise their First Amendment petition right of reasonable criticism. If he takes things personally, and if he attacks those who do not see eye to eye with him, he will very quickly begin to accumulate the same reservoir of ill will that DeRosa accumulated, and which ultimately will drive her from office.
Though Mr. Henry espouses both political and social conservatism, you will need to understand that three of his council colleagues are gay, and that roughly 40% of Cathedral City’s population are also LGBT and that more than half our residents are Latino, and Mr. Henry will need to do considerably better in outreach to our communidad latina than DeRosa, who despised and disdained Latinos, ever did. If Cathedral City’s substantial queer and Latino communities do not feel comfortable or accepted, the next mayoral election may not turn out quite to Mr. Henry’s liking or to that of councilmembers Vasquez, Pettis, and Toles. Stan needs to build bridges, not burn them.
Moreover, Mr. Henry will also need to delink himself from the city’s police department of which he was head for so many years. He will need to remember that Cathedral City is a municipal corporation with a Police Department, not a Police Department with a municipal corporation attached.
Stan will also need to reach out to our struggling business community. DeRosa was always happy to gratuitously cross swords with the business community. Whether it was Albertson’s in Mission Plaza, Smart & Final, Sam’s Club, Harbor Freight, or other potential business/development partners, DeRosa could always be counted upon to antagonize such partners and to scupper the deal. Thanks to her, the city wound up having to cough up nearly $1 million in fees and costs as a result of her insistence on initiating litigation with Tri-Millennium, one of our former development partners.
Moreover, DeRosa consistently put the interests of outside entities ahead of those the city. Cathedral City has fallen far behind other Valley cities in the realm of renewable energy because DeRosa was always far more interested in protecting her former employer, Southern California Edison, than she was in helping push a renewable energy agenda to help reduce Cathedral City’s Edison bills (to say nothing of this country’s dependence on foreign energy sources). Worse still, DeRosa, while mayor, served on the board of the Palm Desert Chamber Of Commerce, routinely putting Palm Desert’s interest ahead of those of Cathedral city.
If Stan Henry becomes mayor, he will need to put Cathedral City’s interest first and foremost, and to make a very public avowal that he will not put the interests of any other city or any private-sector employer ahead of those of Cathedral City.
Mr. Henry will also need to be transparent, accessible, and prepared to ditch Cathedral City’s existing culture of secrecy. On DeRosa’s watch, secrecy and stonewalling were the order of the day, and were abetted by the late and unlamented city clerk Patricia Hammers. Stan needs to be committed to openness and transparency.
I wish Stan luck. I’ve known him for many years, and at the risk of putting my gay card up for post-award review, I think he’s probably a straight up guy. As long as he makes a clean break with the DeRosa past, he may succeed, and I hope he does. Cathedral City deserves far better than the kind of sociopathic egotism DeRosa inflicted upon us. The catalog of her sins is lengthy; the legacy she leaves behind is toxic. We are, as it were, a ship in mid ocean with our decks on fire and ammunition in the hold. Stan Henry’s task, should he become mayor, will be to put out the fire before it reaches the ammunition.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City. He served two terms on the city Council, and makes no secret of his strong critique of the abysmal performance of the outgoing mayor. In the words of that outgoing incumbent, haters and supporters of the outgoing mayor who see fit to attack Mr. Marchand can go “fuck themselves.” This column is not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
