Summary: With the election barely a month away, we can begin to draw some conclusions about both local and national politics. Here in Cathedral City, the opposition to a local city charter, on the ballot as Measure HH, has begun to emerge from the shadows, and what we see calls the legitimacy of the whole opposition project into grave doubt. The public face of the opposition is city Council wannabe Sergio Espericueta, an increasingly obvious puppet/protegé of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, on whose watch, through 10 bitter winters, our city stagnated as DeRosa, our own little simulacrum of Donald Trump, used the mayoralty as an ego trip and as a vehicle to advance the interests of her employer. Measure HH is not perfect, but when we consider the nature of the opposition, the case in favor of a charter for Cathedral City becomes unanswerable.
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Organized opposition to a city charter for Cathedral City, which charter is on the November ballot as Measure HH, has begun to emerge from the shadows. Much of the public face of the opposition has been that of Council wannabe Sergio Espericueta, who was made opposition to the charter a centerpiece of his campaign.
Espericueta, a Dream Homes resident with little practical knowledge or experience of local government, has sought to frame himself as the outsider in the Council race. To do that, he has had to embrace a signature issue to separate him from the two incumbents seeking reelection. That issue, of course, is opposition to Measure HH. Yet, Espericueta has been at best an indifferent spokesman, either for himself or for opposition to a city charter. He has been a no-show at a number of candidate fora, but what is more significant is the increasingly obvious evidence that Espericueta is in fact acting as a stalking horse for former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, who, it is rumored, is trying to stage a political comeback in 2018. To do so, she is apparently attempting to assemble a coalition of diehard DeRosa loyalists and Donald Trump supporters to defeat the charter.
DeRosa, rumor has it, has been responsible for most of the content of Espericueta’s presence on social media. She apparently authors his Facebook page, a fact which can be ascertained through textual analysis of its pugnacious style. Given Espericueta’s limited command of the English language, it is ineluctable that he would have to outsource his social media to someone with a native-speaker proficiency therein.
Unfortunately, Espericueta, by outsourcing his social media to Kathleen DeRosa, has effectively sold his soul. Because when one makes a Faustian bargain of that nature, one relinquishes one’s integrity and one’s agency. It is thus no surprise that many in the community have come to regard Espericueta as little more than a stalking horse and a mouthpiece for DeRosa.
And what reasonable person in Cathedral City wants to see Kathleen Joan DeRosa, our own little simulacrum of Donald Trump, another grifter from her old neighborhood in Brooklyn, back in the center chair as mayor? Kathleen Joan DeRosa was mayor of Cathedral City for ten winters. Those winters were a time of stagnation in Cathedral city. DeRosa, whose disdain for the city and its Latino majority population was evident in her every public utterance and in her behavior, chose to administer the city in the interests of her employer, Southern California Edison. Moreover, because, as an Edison employee, she sat on the board of the Palm Desert Chamber of Commerce, her loyalties were always more to Palm Desert than they ever were to Cathedral City. As a result, we suffered stagnation much like that which the Soviet Union suffered during the years of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.
DeRosa, and her various Trump supporting cronies in this community, don’t want a city charter because the city charter does away with the direct election of a Mayor, and instead rotates the mayoralty annually among the Council the way it is done in other, better run, cities in this Valley. Indeed, recent history of Coachella Valley cities with directly elected mayors does not paint a pretty picture. Consider, for example, the ongoing scandal of former Mayor Steve Pougnet in Palm Springs. Then there is the ridiculous sniping in Desert Hot Springs among current Mayor Scott Matas, and former Mayors Adam Sanchez and DeRosa ally Yvonne Parks, which has been the subject of bemused commentary in our local Gannett newspaper and on social media. And the ten winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa, also the subject of bemused commentary in our local Gannett newspaper and on social media. The circumstantial case against direct election of mayors in this Valley is strong.
Nevertheless, DeRosa apparently imagines opposition to the charter to be a vehicle by which she can reenter local politics. She may find that a more difficult undertaking that she had thought. Polling indicates that current voting residents of Cathedral City are, all in all, satisfied with the current Mayor and Council. If they were not, incumbent Mayor Stan Henry would not be running unopposed for reelection.
Of course, it bears remembering that in early 2014, Henry, or his surrogates, put a poll in the field to gauge his electability. The results for DeRosa were not encouraging; as a matter of fact, the poll showed that in a straight up Henry/DeRosa confrontation, Henry would have trounced her. It was for that reason of course that DeRosa fabricated a “road to Damascus” experience in which, she claimed, God had told her that Stan should be her successor. By invoking the deity, DeRosa – or as some Latino residents of the city call her, Mentirosa, the liar- was able to fashion a face-saving climbdown from a position that had become untenable for her.
Indeed, if adopted, the charter will be Stan Henry’s legacy achievement. He can position himself as a Mayor who oversaw Cathedral City’s transition from a general law city subject to the whims and vagaries of the Legislature in Sacramento into a charter city with substantially greater autonomy and substantially greater freedom from Legislative inroads. But, if the charter fails, as DeRosa hopes it will, she hopes also to have an issue with which to belabor Stan Henry, and an issue on which she can attempt to stage a political comeback two years from now. Since it is emphatically not in Cathedral City’s interest to let Kathleen Joan DeRosa meddle in our politics anymore, and since it is also in Cathedral City’s interest to adopt a rotating mayoralty where no single Mayor has enough time in office to do the kind of damage that Kathleen Joan DeRosa was responsible for doing during her ten winters of incumbency, support for the charter is a no-brainer.
I will be supporting the charter, with all its faults and flaws. As the New York World expressed it in its memorably brief editorial endorsement of Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, “Theodore! With all my faults!” So too, will I be supporting the charter: yes on Measure HH! With all its faults. After having served on the Council for six years alongside the worst mayor in Cathedral city’s history, I don’t think it makes good sense to give her an issue to campaign on in 2018.
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