The rest will be up to the people. Keep in mind, however, the people are the ones who got us here.
On Monday during a special Otay Water District Board meeting, four of the five elected representatives on the dais voted to censure he of the opinion and gaping mouth, Hector Gastelum.
For some time Gastelum has been sharing his opinions on social media. For years, actually. Just like millions of other people who do so every day.
Depending on who is reading them, some of those opinions are not popular. Some are ignorant. I’ve characterized some of them as small-minded and bigoted. But they are his and I have always appreciated his candor. It is nice to know who your enemies — real, imagined, intellectual or morally — are.
Gastelum has shared his points of view while he was a candidate, a failed candidate, an aide to an elected and, now, as an elected representative. And that is what has changed.
Whereas his comments denigrating Muslims, immigrants, and a variety of other people may have gone unnoticed or dismissed in his previous professional lives because he was an unknown personality (a nobody, in the parlance of pop culture and politics), these days he sits on a legislative body, representing a diverse constituency and administers the public’s business in water issues. So it is in that capacity that his four colleagues were compelled — and rightfully so — to publicly admonish and rebuke their freshman counterpart. Gastelum’s public comments are not a good look or a good representation of a public agency. And, as they have attracted protestors to public meetings and distracted from addressing water issues, they are a hindrance to good governance.
Directors Mitch Thompson and Tim Smith, who crafted the censure resolution, should be commended for proposing the action, as should their colleagues Mark Robak and Gary Croucher for supporting it. (Gastelum, as you would guess, did not share their opinion.) Arguably, that should be as far as they go.
Certainly a case could be made for removing him from committees and events in which he is a representative of the Otay Water District but consideration must be given to the representation of the people who live in his district.
Some opponents and detractors of Gastelum have expressed disappointment that his fellow board members could not boot him out of office. That is a fortunate inconvenience.
While the public is not served well by bigots it does not benefit at all from an elected body that can remove members simply because they do not like their opinions. Fortunately, that responsibility falls on the people who put electeds like Gastelum into office. Sometimes that comes in the form of costly recall elections. Democracy isn’t always pretty. And it ain’t always cheap.
