|
| Gardner should leave lobbying over development to others Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 1:33 PM PST One of the least successful, most tiring suffixes applied at the tail end of a public official's spiel is, "speaking as an individual." Elected officers - particularly in small communities like ours - simply can't shed their public official duds whenever the mood hits. Worse still is when a public official throws his lot in with another quasi-political organization. Unfortunately, that is what Cabrillo Unified School District board President Charlie Gardner has done. In addition to his school board duties, Gardner is also a director of something called Coastside Community First, which bills itself as "an educational nonprofit corporation." It is affiliated with a political action committee called Put Community First, which endorses candidates and provides political funding. How closely tied are the two organizations? Decide for yourself: Visit coastsidecommunityfirst.org and then point your browser to putcommunityfirst.com and try to tell the two apart. Lately Gardner has become the public face on the Coastside Community First's hard drive to tie the Beachwood judgment in with the nearby Pacific Ridge development and long-scuttled hopes for a bypass cutting behind the high school to connect highways 1 and 92. Negotiating a settlement with Beachwood developer Charles Keenan and configuring houses around a new highway on the hills north of downtown is certainly an option. But it ought not be proffered by a man sworn to uphold the best interests of students and taxpayers - particularly when district land is virtually surrounded on all sides by land in play in this mess. The Cabrillo district is, or at least should be, fully engaged in the Beachwood problem. The city has contributed $50,000 to an ongoing Community Schools initiative. Any shudder in the city's tax base that could ultimately come from the judgment could have dire consequences for cash-strapped local schools. And the district has already done substantial research on the Podesta property just to the west of the high school. (The Review has filed formal public records requests for an appraisal we believe the district commissioned on the property when considering where to place a new middle school.) While we believe Gardner is sincere when he says he thinks public officials ought to be more, and not less, engaged in community groups like Coastside Community First, we simply think he's wrong. The potential to drag CUSD into costly litigation and the obvious conflicts of interest are obvious. Elected officials like Gardner must remember their primary concern is the best interest of the people who put them in office, and sometimes that conflicts with their own grand plans for the Coastside. - Clay Lambert |