WE NEED A TRULY COMMITTED COUNCILMEMBER IN CATHEDRAL CITY
Summary: Departing councilmember Sam Toles has managed to put his foot in it with his suggestion that the Council should appoint his mother, Carol Lang, to fill out the remaining few weeks of his unexpired term when he finally moves to New York to take up the job he was looking for while ostensibly serving this community. We have been disappointed by Toles; his commitment to this community was always thin at best; is repeated Facebook posts of his forum travel and his frequent absences from the Council left voters wondering if they got what they had been led to expect they would get in 2010 when Toles marketed himself as “the only choice” for voters. We Cathedral City voters have a right to expect that our Council members will be wholeheartedly committed to this community. We also expect that they will have far thicker skins than our two New Yorkers on the Council, Toles and lame-duck incumbent mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa. At all events, our next Council members should not have the personalities of a Sam Toles or a Kathleen DeRosa. We deserve a lot better than what we’ve had.
Departing councilmember Sam Toles’s suggestion that the city Council should appoint his mother, Carol Lang, to fill out a small fraction of his unexpired term prior to the November elections has really worked a nerve with me. That’s not how democracy is supposed to function. Because it displays a kind of unsurprising tone deafness, Toles’s pending resignation raises the issue of the extent to which Cathedral City voters should expect Toles’s successor to be more committed to this community than Toles ever was. Indeed, we may do more than expect it; we may demand it.
Let’s be blunt. Sam Toles has been a serious disappointment to this community, notwithstanding some of his more hyperventilating supporters. Voters have a right to expect that their elected representatives will make a commitment to the community that ought to preclude job hunting on the East Coast and taking a job 3000 miles away while attempting to hold on to a Council seat here in Cathedral City. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
Of course, we probably shouldn’t have been surprised that Toles would have left us while still serving on the Council. Facebook posts from the departing councilmember were full of references to European travel on behalf of his then full-time Los Angeles-based employer, and his frequent absences from the city and from Council meetings certainly raised eyebrows in the community to which he moved in 2008 before running a highly successful marketing campaign to get himself elected in 2010 as "the only choice" we feckless Cathedral City residents had to save ourselves. He managed to market himself to the electorate over concerns in some quarters that he was carpetbagging, which he was.
Questions about Toles’s commitment to the community arose not only from the frequency of his foreign travel, but also from statements by him during the 2012 election cycle that he was contemplating his “next political move.” There has been speculation that Toles had been eyeing a primary challenge to Coachella Mayor Eduardo Garcia, the presumptive successor to current 56th Assembly District member Victor Manuel Pérez. According to sources within the Coachella political community, Toles was either warned off or chose not to pursue a candidacy in a district in which he had no name recognition.
Voters have also been disappointed by the thinness of the councilmember’s skin. Toles has a reputation for not handling criticism well. When, after having heard from Toles a whole litany of rather Republican sounding rhetoric, I expressed passing doubts about Mr. Toles’s commitment to the Democratic Party to mutual acquaintances back in 2012, Toles delivered himself of a “Valley Voice” piece in our local Gannett newspaper that constituted 12 column inches of earsplitting “he hurt my feelings” snit, in which Toles suggested that anyone with an authentic commitment to Democratic values must necessarily be some kind of “extremist.” For me, and for others in the community, it was Toles’s “macaca” moment, a gross political gaffe not to be forgotten. Toles also cemented his reputation for being unable to handle criticism by resigning in another earsplitting snit from the Energy and Environment Committee of the Coachella Valley Association of Governments early in his term. Another “macaca” moment that left his elected peers wondering about his basic fitness for office .
As disappointed as we have been by George Samuel Toles’s performance, and by his reputation for self-righteous arrogance, we have an opportunity to elect a councilmember who will be far more committed to this community than Toles ever was. At the risk of sounding parochial, perhaps it is time we elected another native Californian to the Council. Buffalo native Toles seemed happy to spend a great deal of time looking for a job in New York City rather than performing the duties his Cathedral City, California electorate expected him to perform. Now, full disclosure, Toles edged me out in the 2010 Council election, and has managed since then to be a very sore winner, impugning both my integrity and my character, calling me a “sore loser” on more than one occasion.
In truth, I did not mind leaving the Council. At a certain point, being even a bit player in a real life “Game of Thrones” becomes tiresome. What I do mind is Toles’s apparent conviction that the Council seat is his property to dispose of as he sees fit. His suggestion that the Council should gift that seat to his mother, Carol Lang, was the last thing needed to bring my disappointment with his performance and his attitude to public expression.
Council seats are not the property of their occupants. The decision on who should fill a Council seat properly belongs to the electorate, and Toles’s suggestion that the Council should simply bestow “his” seat on a member of his family betrays not only a sense of arrogant entitlement, but also a fundamental lack of understanding of how democracy is supposed to work. We, the voters, not the Council and certainly not George Samuel Toles, are the owners; we are the deciders; we get to choose, not him.
And when we exercise our right of choice, let’s make sure we don’t elect someone who has been in the city all of 22 months before stepping up to try to exploit a political opportunity. Let’s make sure we elect someone whose commitment to California and to Cathedral City is absolute and undiluted by employment out of area or by a job search on the East Coast. Let’s make sure we don’t elect another Sam Toles. Let’s also make sure we don’t elect another crony of the outgoing Mayor. Our New Yorkers on the council have not served us well. Let’s make sure we elect somebody whose heart is here, whose home is here, whose work is here, and who is truly committed to representing this community in a spirit of humility and authentic service.
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