Summary: Last night, the Cathedral City city Council did the right thing and abandoned its butt dumb plan to appoint an at-large councilmember to fill out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Greg Pettis. The appointment plan, apparently cooked up by former mayor Kathleen DeRosa and her loyalists, and apparently inadvertently exposed by Mayor pro tem John Aguilar, envisioned the Council appointing former mayor Stan Henry, not a resident of the constituency, to fill out Mayor Pettis’s unexpired term. As word got out that this seemed to be a “done deal,” voters in the district 1 constituency in question and throughout the city rose up in righteous indignation. Last night, the Council felt the chill wind of Wintry Disapproval, and retreated from its butt dumb plan, opting instead to call a special election limited to candidates and voters in District 1.
Cathedral City, February 28, 2019 -- Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas once observed that “[i]n politics more than in anything else, the beginning of everything lies in moral indignation.” Last night, in abandoning its butt dumb plan to appoint an at-large member of the Council to represent District 1 and fill out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Greg Pettis, the Council bowed to the moral indignation and Wintry Disapproval of the residents of District 1 and of the larger electorate of Cathedral City. In doing so, the Council may just have saved its own bacon.
Most revolutions begin with small things. The Xinhai (Hsin-hai) Revolution, which led to the overthrow of China’s Qing Dynasty in 1911-1912 began with the inadvertent explosion of the package bomb in the Yangtze Valley City of Wuhan. The Arab Spring began with a small merchant immolating himself in the city of Tunis, and our own American Revolution, our protean national liberation struggle that has become the model for all which followed, began when a bunch of pissed off farmers at Lexington and Concord stood up to a landing party composed of Royal Marines. As John Parker, commanding the Minutemen on Lexington Green said, "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
The residents of District 1, like the Minutemen on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, three days after Easter, confronting a plan to impose upon them a councilmember from outside their own district, felt the moral indignation that is the heritage and birthright of every American whom any government proposes to tax without representation. The city Council’s butt dumb, apparently done deal to appoint Stan Henry to Greg Pettis’s seat would have left District 3 with double representation, while bereaving District 1 of any voice or representation whatsoever on the city Council for the next 20 months. The residents of District 1 weren’t having it.
As the situation developed, there emerged evidence to suggest that this was a plan that had been cooked up by former mayor Kathleen DeRosa and her political cronies. DeRosa, who for ten bitter winters served as the worst mayor in Cathedral City’s history, showing the same kind of Trumpian, Outer Boroughs, bridge-and-tunnel pettiness, vindictiveness, thin-skinnedness, and sheer nastiness as The Donald himself, mixed with an almost sexual desire for power and a political comeback, induced her cronies to start beating the drums for an appointment of Stan Henry to the Council. DeRosa, clever enough to know that her name in this community is still mud induced car salesman Andy Jessup to belabor the Council with a lengthy email extolling the ostensible virtues and qualifications of Mr. Henry.
The apparent target of one of these emails was Mayor pro tem John Aguilar, who first came to the Council as an appointed protégé of former Mayor Pettis. Mr. Aguilar apparently, either out of foolishness or deep fatigue (don’t you think he looks tired?) did not appreciate the dangerous position into which he was about to place himself, and emailed Mr. Henry with a series of missives which created an unmistakable and ultimately undeniable impression that Mr. Henry was a shoo-in, and that his appointment to the Council was an inevitability. What is more interesting is that Mr. Aguilar apparently sent these emails from his municipal email account, and that he attempted unsuccessfully to delete them after discovering that a Public Records Act request have been filed demanding their production.
That is in and of itself actionable criminal misconduct, and also demonstrates the existence of what in the criminal law is referred to as “a consciousness of guilt.” In plain, non-Vulcan English, that means that to all intents and purposes, Mr. Aguilar had not just dropped, but had hurled, a big malodorous turd into the municipal punch bowl. It was a foolish, ill-considered, and potentially criminal act. The email was itself a public record, and California law frowns with Wintry Disapproval on destruction or falsification of public records. Worse for Mr. Aguilar, it does not matter that the attempt is not successful. The crime is complete at the time the attempt is made. What Mr. Aguilar did was not just dumb, it was butt dumb.
By engaging in such conduct, Mr. Aguilar not only exposed himself to potential investigation by District Attorney Mike Hestrin, he may also have exposed himself to a further investigation by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and possibly by the Legislature itself. At all events, Mr. Aguilar has exposed himself as a political lightweight with no sense of optics and no understanding of the often exquisitely complex compliance mandates under which public officials are supposed to govern themselves. At all events, Mr. Aguilar fatally tainted the whole appointment process.
When the Council met last night to determine whether to appoint someone, this blogger and a number of other individuals within the community, including Cindy Uken of the Uken Report, and Casey Dolan of Cactus Hugs, as well as local activists Simeon Den, his husband Peter Palladino, Lynne O’Neill, Alan Carvalho and his husband former councilmember Shelley Kaplan, and a number of other morally indignant residents, had sounded the alarm.
The general gist of our “polemic” was that the Council needed to abandon any appointment and call a special election, limited to voters and candidates in District 1. We packed the Council chamber. After nearly 2 hours of public comment, which hit the Council like a cast iron skillet upside its collective head, and with the Council looking stunned that the apparent “shoo-in Stan” plan was threatening to create an enormous political crisis that might subject each of them to a recall, and might subject the city to lawsuits whose defense would exceed in cost the maximum amount a special election could be expected to cost, councilmember Ray Gregory, who had already seen the light, offered a motion to call a special election for District 1 limited to electors and candidates from that district.
After several agonizing seconds, during which it appeared that the motion might die for want of a second, Mr. Aguilar, finally understanding that Mr. Gregory had thrown him a lifeline, seconded the motion, though not before chastising supporters of an election as “thugs” who had presumably cooked up their objections to his plan to shoo-in Stan Henry solely to hurt his feelings.
Now from my own experience as a former councilmember of eight years, I know that as a general rule when one seconds a motion, unless one seconds it “for the purposes of discussion,” using those so-called magic words, one has in effect committed to vote in favor of the motion. Either Mr. Aguilar lacked the experience to understand that, or he was truly seconding the motion and conveying an unmistakable tell that he intended to vote in favor. In the end, the Council saved its own bacon and voted 3-1 in favor of the motion.
Councilmember Ernesto Gutierrez, a nasty, Trumpian little piece of work, a small fingered vulgarian, known for his bush league behavior, his fealty to The Donald, his dislike of the queer nation, and his conviction that women should not enjoy reproductive choice, voted against the motion. Already, community activist sources are telling me that they are preparing to lodge recall paperwork against Mr. Gutierrez at the earliest legal moment, i.e., on the 91st day after Mr. Gutierrez was sworn into office (see, e.g., Elections Code § 11007).
The apparent theory of any recall against Ernesto Gutierrez will be that his “no” vote on calling a special election is 1) a violation of his Article XX constitutional oath of office, 2) a violation of democratic norms, and 3) evidence of his possible participation in a violation of, or conspiracy to violate, the Ralph M. Brown Act, which denounces private meetings by representative bodies.
Mr. Gutierrez and the rest of the Council need to be reminded that we do not work for them, but that they work for us. Last night may have represented a distinct and palpable change in the political power dynamics of Cathedral City. Activated residents are no longer prepared to tolerate the presence of the Council that ignores the manifest and evident will of the electorate. It is reasonably safe to infer that the three councilmembers who voted in favor of the special election had had the fear of God put into them that they might be the targets of a recall had they gone ahead and appointed Stan Henry to the Council. Mr. Gutierrez apparently has yet to learn that lesson.
At all events, however, the shift in the power dynamic on the Council, and between the Council and the community hopefully betokens the emergence of a Council that will be more responsive to its respective constituencies and to the community as a whole. We have come a long way from the 10 sour, dour, gray, Leonid Brezhnev-like winters when the city languished under the lackluster leadership of bridge-and-tunnel Kathleen DeRosa. We cannot afford to go back. Our future is progressive, and we must make it clear that we expect, nay, demand progressive representation on the city Council. Moreover, we must make it very clear to our elected representatives that they will pay a heavy political price for crossing us again. We’re prepared to be “thuggish” and to put an awful lot of hurt on the delicate feelings of city councilmembers who ignore their constituents and attempt to inflict upon them the horrors of taxation without representation. The revolution continues.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He served for eight years as a member of the Cathedral City city Council. The views contained herein are his own, though he has probable cause to believe that they are shared by a substantial number of voters throughout Cathedral City.
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