Chula Vista City Council version 2015 beta operating strategy appears to me mimicking my own: keep expectations low so that you disappoint few and please many when you accidentally succeed.
Beginning in December the legislative body limped along with only four members after Mary Salas played council hopscotch, jumping from her council seat on the dais to the mayor’s chair (and adding a third name to her title so that now she’s referred to as Mayor Mary Casillas Salas).
The vacancy left an opportunity for each councilperson to suggest a replacement and by Jan. 8 a field of 44 applicants had been narrowed to eight candidates subject to a public interview.
As might be expected there were favorites who emerged and in the end Shirley Horton, Bill Hall and James Clark were nominated. None of them received the needed three votes to take their seat on the dais.
Where lesser and more determined people, or squirrels — guided by the act of being reasonable — might look for others to nominate, the undaunted four chose to nominate the same people who had just been rejected.
The civility and political correctness that characterizes most meetings succumbed to an icy tension after Casillas Salas reminded Councilwoman Pamela Bensoussan that she was the mayor and was the one to call for adjournment after Benoussan had made the suggestion of calling it a night.
Not wanting to adjourn Casillas Salas instead called for a short break, only to return a few minutes later and announce the night’s meeting would end and the matter would be taken up the following Tuesday.
As a child from a broken home I developed a good sense of when Mommy and Daddy were fighting. The cold war that night in the council made it seem as though my mom and dad were Pacific Island royalty enjoying a luau during their marital skirmishes.
On Tuesday the council returned with more names, most of them new, some of them old (Horton) and the continued stalemates, chastising and pleading that had characterized the council meeting just days before.
Casillas Salas came close to continuing the item to a third day, but Bensoussan nominated Steven Miesen — the same person she had rejected at the onset of the day’s meeting — for appointment to the council.
Perhaps it was the threat of another day of fruitless deliberations or a costly special election that prompted a change of heart.
Or maybe it was the way Bensoussan nominated Steven Miesen, an executive whose company has a significant contract with the city, that swayed councilman John McCann to join his three colleagues in approving Miesen’s appointment to the council. Whatever it was, the council had taken a long, occasionaly clumsy and terse path to settle for the man none of them initially believed was the best person for the job. That ought to make residents feel … something.
